Lord Garon

Just create the directory tree and drop your textures in.

Embarrassingly long times. "...modding the s*** out of the game..." takes some planning and preparation. Gopher makes some great modding vids. The S.T.E.P. crew has a lot of good advice on heavily modding Skyrim.

You're welcome, glad its working. :thumbsup:

Turn v-sync back on. Havok cannot handle large frame rates, usually from being indoors.

Do you have a skeleton and/or mods that use HDT physics? I dont know what HDT are but I do use X32 skeleton. Many mods use it I think because many mods wants to overwrite my skeleton but I have no idea wich one I should leave. The real or the ones with the mods? Okay, was just checking on something. Mods which muck with skeletons might take a little back-and-forth reading of mod pages to make sure you maintain compatibility. Usually, an added mod needs whatever its adding. Just ask in the mod's forum (AFTER reading the mod DESCRIPTION page) and you'll probably get a quick answer to compatibility questions.

Do you have a skeleton and/or mods that use HDT physics?

Read the fine print on the disc case: you MUST have Steam to run Skyrim, disc or not. No legal version of Skyrim will run without Steam authorization, unless you have a very old release which wasn't patched. In that case, you will have the problems you describe. If its a new disc, just register it on Steam and you'll get an auto-update to the latest version. If its used (registered to another Steam account), well, you might be stuck.

Interesting problem, but I'm sure its more frustrating for you. DISCLAIMER: I have exactly ZERO experience with Win 8/8.1 SKSE makes some logs in the My Documents\My Games\Skyrim\SKSE folder. You might bail out of the ILS and then go look at those logs to see if SKSE is complaining about something and/or see what is loading during the ILS. The logs may be Greek, but SKSE makes errors pretty obvious. How do you run the game? Is it from Mod Organizer, or an SKSE shortcut, or something else? Permission issues can cause weird problems; have you set "Run as Administrator" on skse_loader.exe and tesv.exe, ie, right-click->Compatibility->tick "Run as Administrator"->Okay. I'm not aware of a "New File" variable anywhere. Let us know if running the related exe files as Administrator changes your symptoms. You might even run chkdsk on the volume containing My Documents (Documents in Win8, I guess) and see if it complains about the filesystem at all. Worst case, a Verify Game Cache from Steam can fix game file issues.

Those are insane values and are doing nothing to "help" your game. In fact, you're trying to allocate 1.8GB of memory for Papyrus stack frames, NOT Skyrim addressable memory. This is an OLD and BROKEN tweak. Not saying its the cause of your current issue, but its certainly not helping anything. I would put the [Papyrus] block in skyrim.ini back to vanilla. Here's a description of the [Papyrus] ini values. If you feel the settings MUST be tweaked, just double the defaults.

It's a completely subjective question. Is programming worth it? Is mowing your lawn worth it? Is a double hot fudge sundae worth it? Depends upon the reward you get from doing it, versus whatever downside you perceive. It cannot be answered by someone else. I'm a card carrying geek gamer; I like both game play and the technical side of gaming. Modding, both creating and using, is win-win for me. Hell, just getting Skyrim, or most Bethesda games, to play how I want them to, or just to run well with other mods, is a geek gamer exercise. There's only one way to find out if "modding" is "worth it" to you; do it and find out.

If camaro's list doesn't fix it, try disabling GEForce Experience as well.

Its probably a V-sync issue; my machine will hit several hundred FPS with v-sync disabled, just depends on what you're looking at, ie, being indoors or just staring at the ground. Frame rate is also used for game timing in Skyrim, its never a good idea to disable v-sync. If you're using an ENB or ENBoost, I recommend reading over this.

*rubbing crystal ball* The future is dim... and moves in strange patterns. I see a great plot unfolding, but pitfalls await at every turn. A Great Evil lurks nearby, straining to move closer and devour all things. A shining light keeps it at bay, but the Evil looks always for weakness and inattention. The light is strong, but needs constant care and feeding. Now the vision grows dark, I can see no more. From a statistical viewpoint, I consider a highly modded Skyrim game to be a stochastic process; you simply cannot analyze and account for every single variable. You might try some stress testing (just Google for Skyrim Stress Test) before starting your game to see if you get any quick failures which might point to an easily fixable problem. What type texture optimizations did you do? I am in the minority, but consider reduced texture resolutions a game engine, not GPU, performance and reliability enhancement. I use DDSOpt to reduce most textures to 1k. If you're using an ENB, however, I suspect graphical quality to be important to you and lower resolutions not an option. If a stress test fails early on, try it again with Launcher texture quality settings at a low value; that will cause Skyrim to use smaller (mip maps) textures. Smaller textures resolved a problem for me that nothing else seemed to impact. Besides mods, your choices in-game will affect things in Skyrim; that's one reason different players have different experiences with similar mod loads. You seem to have done most reasonable preps; its in the hands of the Divines now. Go for it; you can't let a potential problem slow you down. EDIT: I use STEP Core and have a lot of the mods you do. My game(s) are very reliable, but I avoid reproccers like the plague, though many seem to use them without issue. Not meant to start a flame war, just a personal preference.

Loot will sort anything you give it, and do a pretty good job. Its probably the least "worrisome" utility. TES5Edit works with the standard directories and install locations; it has no problems that I'm aware of. Utilities added as mods, like Bodyslide, also work fine because they are switched with the Skyrim game folder. The only downside is that each setup has its own copy of these utilities; a little wasteful of disk space, but not a problem. There is another layer to all this which I've purposely left out; switching the Data directory (mods only) instead of the Skyrim game folder. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader. Windows, itself, does this kind of folder re-direction all the time. Its not a new or novel idea, just takes a little planning to make work. I started doing this in Oblivion, so I've just got an "idea" of what I want before I start and I'm aware of some problems because I've already had them happen to me. I'm also "stuck" in doing things the way I've done them before; there's certainly improvements to be made to this spider-web approach. One such improvement, I have to keep saying, is MO profiles. Another is different user accounts for different characters. And on and on. Don't get "stuck" in my little world; MAKE your machine do what you want it to in the way you feel most comfortable with. There's ALWAYS a better way to do it. Just, when you find it, let us know so we can do it, too.

In general, you're right. You actually don't NEED to switch Loot, it will simply sort what it sees each time it runs. I run into problems mainly because I pack loose file mods into bsa's, then add an empty esp to load them. Loot looks at what the plugins change, then checks a Masterlist for exceptions when sorting. Many of my esp's are "empty", which doesn't give Loot a lot to work with, and they have names I give them so they're not in any Masterlist. Many loose file only mods are replacers and need to be installed in a particular order. If you pack them, then they have to be in a particular load order, which neither Loot nor BOSS gets correct 100% of the time. I have different Loot metadata in each of my setups because each setup has different mod loads. You could do it in a single metadata change, but I initially wanted Loot, and all utilities, to "see" a normal game when they run. I sorta stuck with that idea. Normal people won't have most of these issues. :blush:

Just an update to my previous observations... I built my little Pentium "Skyrim machine" with the intention of upgrading later on to better support other games. The prices on 3rd gen i5's finally fell to within my miserly constraints. I found an i5-3470S at a close-out sale for just over 100 USD. Its a low power i5 and runs at 2.9 GHz vs the 3.0 GHz of my G2030, but it fits the bill for what I wanted (quad-core). I can't really measure the difference in Skyrim between it and the G2030; essentially, they are identical performers in Skyrim. I think the basic i5 is a little more efficient per-core, but the slightly lower clock speed of the S model offsets any performance gain over the G2030 in Skyrim. Just an FYI. Not so with other games, Crysis in particular. That game essentially doubled in performance and others (BF) have shown a major improvement in FPS and responsiveness. I'm still GPU limited for most games, but working on that problem now. Someday, I might actually get a "real" budget gaming rig working. :dance:

I don't actually "auto-update" for fear of breaking something, I just try to keep up with things. I do have original copies of all my current mods cause I usually rearrange, clean, patch, and pack them before a permanent game install. I'll break something fairly often, so the copies are mandatory for me. Thanks for the input.

Moving the Loot install location to the Skyrim game directory won't help. Loot's "memory" is in the %LOCALAPPDATA%\Loot\Skyrim folder. Remembering that %LOCALAPPDATA%\Skyrim is one of the three main Skyrim locations that we switch when we change setups, what I did was: 1. Copied the %LOCALAPPDATA%\Loot\Skyrim folder to each of the %LOCALAPPDATA%\SETUPN folders. That gives us a %LOCALAPPDATA%\SETUPN\Skyrim folder to hold Loot state info (Loot's memory). 2. Deleted the original %LOCALAPPDATA%\Loot\Skyrim folder and replaced it with a directory symlink (mklink /d) to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Skyrim\Skyrim. Now Loot runs from its original install location and the Loot "memory" folder just follows the active setup. If you just want to do the copy/rename process on two game setups, you can just copy-rename one additional Skyrim folder: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Loot\Skyrim. I'm assuming you are familiar with environment variables. You can find the actual PATHNAMES (for the mklink commands) by opening a command prompt (cmd.exe) and typing in: echo %LOCALAPPDATA% On my machine (Win7 Home Premium 64bit), it expands to: C:\Users\Gary\AppData\Local Your machine may give different results, but all recent versions of Windows have a similar location where local application profile information is kept.

(BEGIN Wall-o-Text Six) For OCD types like me, utilities are the boon, and bane, of modding Skyrim. They do indispensable things, but do them in their own ways and that's usually not how I want (need) them done. Consider Loot. An undeniable boon to the modding community; its a mandatory modding utility. But it doesn't, by itself, keep track of multiple game setups. Its nice to have the old Loot report on-hand and its more-than-nice to have individual setup metadata (custom load order sorting information) available. So, back to the symlinks. Loot keeps it state info in an AppData folder (NOT in two places as I previously mentioned; the report.html file I glommed onto originally was pointed out to me to be just a template) %LOCALAPPDATA%\Loot\Skyrim. I simply linked that to a sub-folder of the %LOCALAPPDATA%\Skyrim folder, ie, %LOCALAPPDATA%\Skyrim\Skyrim. Now Loot switches automatically when I do a setup switch. TES5Edit - Yay! The most useful modding tool does not need to remember much; it just scans for needed data each time you run it and it simply does its thing. TES5Edit recognizes the symlinked spider web as a normal game and works within the current setup framework. The things it creates (patched or new plugins and needed backups) are created/saved within current setup locations. Mod Managers - Ultimately, I've decided that I don't know enough about other mod managers to discuss them in this context. I use BASH, for many reasons. One of those reasons is the bash.ini configuration file; you can tell BASH where to put things and, conversely, the default ini file tells me a lot about what BASH is doing. I keep mods and mod info in a sub-folder of SteamApps\common\Skyrim; they switch when the SETUP switches. <rant> Most programs try to hide implementation details from the user; an epic disservice to users originally promoted by Microsoft. Microsoft, et al, wants to "let" users do things, by way of their costly programs, rather than encourage users to program their own ultimately configurable machine; a programmable computer. Three decades, a whole generation, into the personal computing revolution and the majority of users know less about computing now than they did when the revolution started. The digital revolution was squashed, much to the detriment of mankind in general. Whoops, I'm ranting. Sorry, it's a pet peeve of mine. </rant> Just a few hints, and I'm done. 7-Zip can be a major modding tool. For instance, the S.T.E.P. project has a set of core mods which really improve the look and feel of Skyrim. Dozens of core mods. Instead of having dozens (and dozens) of individual core mod archives, I 7-Zip them up. You can add and delete mods from an archive, only archive certain files or folders, and do all sorts of stuff to make mod ARCHIVE management easier. Besides STEP, I have a set of "difficulty" mods I 7-Zip up. And a set of optimized textures I keep 7-zipped up. All mod managers recognize a zip file, if not 7z and other formats as well. Creating a new game SETUP can be as easy as simply extracting a TES5Edit cleaned vanilla+DLC game 7z backup archive. EVERYONE has a vanilla install backup/archive, which makes this easy. Loose files. Interesting NPC's, one of my favorite mods, has over 40,000 loose files. Many mod authors seem to "force" their changes upon players by packaging their data as loose files. I have no idea why. To be quite frank, loose data files defeat the intent of Skyrim load order and cause more problems than they solve. There are NO loose files in a vanilla game. Bethesda uses bsa files for a reason. Besides mod load order issues, we now have a gazillion issues with mod INSTALL order. If several mods use loose files and they happen to change the same mesh or texture, load order has NO effect on which loose file is used. Its the INSTALLATION order, the order in which the mod archives were extracted, which determines loose file priority. IF all mod data files were provided as bsa files, there would be NO install order issues. Load order would determine it all. And, instead of deleting and re-installing mods in the correct installation order, you would simply change the load order of a plugin (esp or esm) to resolve data conflicts. I have no loose files in my "packed" games. I pack ALL loose files in mods into a bsa file using Archive.exe before I install them. If there is no mod plugin, I just copy and rename a HighResTexturePack esp (they're "empty") to the bsa name in order to load it. And, you can put many loose file only mods into one bsa using one plugin to load them, even an existing plugin. If you want some HD textures to override everything else, pack em in a bsa and load it last. Packing loose files into a bsa might be seen as more difficult than re-installing loose file mods in the correct order. Might be true. Until you add or change your mods. Note that Skyrim has an issue with large (>2GB) bsa files. I had to split the Interesting NPC voice files into two bsa's to fix some missing voice issues. No problemo. There is, simply, no good reason to have loose files in a Skyrim mod setup. IMHO, of course. Scripts. Making batch files (or cscript/wscript, hta, Powershell, Python, PERL, Lua, Ruby, etc, etc, etc, scripts) is a great way to learn your computer, save time, reduce typing mistakes, and customize your computer. Geeks, nerds, and system administrators use scripts for many things. There's a reason for that. Give it a shot; you may find that you don't NEED a multi-profile capable mod manager or utility program to do things for you. (END Wall-o-Text SIX)

If there's an added d3d9.dll in the Skyrim directory, try moving it somewhere else or just rename (d3d9.dll.disable) it to stop it being loaded when Skyrim runs. If added dll's which mimic system dll's don't pass on function calls correctly, they can cause issues. Some fire effects are working, some aren't. If you have any lighting or special effects mods, especially fire or particle effects, try disabling them and see if things come back.

As far as I know, the Arena is up. Just wondering how your rigs are doing. I read a dev article about hardware and my current GPU scrapes the bottom of the barrel. I'm thinking of going up to the next-to-the-bottom video card level with a GTX 760. I'm interested in hearing how the Arena plays and with what hardware. TIA, any input welcome.

@bben, I know its not NMM, that's why I qualified my comment with, "Nexus ... naming conventions". Its no BIG deal, really. I'm used to setting aside time now-and-then to check mod updates. I just want it all, and I want it right now. :cool: But, with 1.83 zillion mods, any help is welcome. I've forgotten what frustrated me last time, so I'll stick NMM back in and take the update "hints". Thanks for the info.

^^ Okay, thanks for the offer. I've had problems with the NMM "Update" facility before. I really should say that I've had problems with the Nexus mod page naming conventions, which NMM follows. The displayed "Mod Names" are really (as I understand it) a Nexus "container" name and do not correspond to any actual mod files. Mod authors can set up their naming system any way they desire. But even a "hint" that there is a possible mod update available would help.

(BEGIN Another Wall-o-Text Five) One more WoT, then I'll talk about utilities and end this. This is a capture of the Skyrim\Data folder (symlinked SETUP2) and what the system "sees" when I run Skyrim on this SETUP: http://static-2.nexusmods.com/15/images/110/1545930-1414520703.png Just want to point out a couple things here. I'm reverting SETUP2 to vanilla+DLC for a new mod load and ENB. The right-hand pane shows the contents of the Data folder; almost every file in there is a symlink of one type or another. All the "real" files are located in the CommonDataFiles folder. ALL the vanilla and DLC bsa files are standard soft links (mklink with no options). I have never had a problem with a soft link and a bsa file. I actually have some bsa files (optimized textures and 3DNPC bsa's) in a RAMDISK and on a USB 3.0 flash drive in order to even out disk I/O queues with my OLD, SLOW hard drives. I can't say the same about esm and esp files; soft linking some esm's causes Skyrim to CTD during loading on my machine. A hard link (mklink /h), however, does not crash. There's subtle differences between hard and soft links (apparently) which may cause issues depending on how Win7 is told to access the files. I guess the most common file access method (a system call thing) has no problem with soft links, but some file access methods specifically requested by an application will fail on soft links. All the esm files in the Data folder are hard links. A hard link is indistinguishable from a normal file entry. That's why I have those [Whatever].esm.is.a.hardlink files; they remind me whether I've linked an esm or not. The hard link file size is also mis-leading; they don't take up that amount of space, its just a report on the size of the original file. You can have multiple hard links to the same file, but the storage requirement for the file itself doesn't increase. Unfortunately, you can only hard link to a file on the same volume; they don't span drives. All those links point to original (TES5Edit cleaned esm's) files in the CommonDataFiles directory and all SETUPs use the same "core" data files. The same for mods and exe/dll files which I install in all, or many, SETUPs. It significantly reduces drive storage requirements with this many game setups. Sometimes, though, my symlink spider web confuses even me, especially the hard links if I don't remember they are hard links. You really can't see it here, but all my disk volumes are created relatively small (64-256 GB). That lets me quickly check volumes for errors and repair them, do fast defrags, have small backups, and things like that. My whole Skyrim install is larger than my biggest drive volume; I have symlinked Skyrim, and Oblivion, stuff ALL OVER THE PLACE. I should just rename my computer "Tamriel". Point is, symlinking requires some sort of PLAN and some sort of way to maintain your spider web. Scripts (batch files) are your friend. If I have to do something twice, I'll try to script it so the third time is easier. If you put comments in your scripts, you can document what you are doing. Just a hard-learned lesson I thought I'd mention. (END Wall-o-Text Five)

I'm certain that works; I just use BASH and am unfamiliar with NMM. However, NMM has a GREAT feature that I am dying to use and that is it's ability to automatically recognize mod updates on the Nexus. I update mods manually now and its a mega-PITA with six games worth of mods (read that: I rarely update mods). If I installed NMM (again), would you be willing to answer some NMM questions? I am a noob NMM user.