AlexanderWilliamWard

Hi there folks! I like playing as mage characters on Skyrim. So, it has always irked me that whilst ranged and melee based characters could fight continuously relying on only their skill-set, as a mage character you are fairly obliged at one point or another to start swinging a sword or run away whilst your magicka recharges. So I tried to redress the balance by tweaking the various magical tree perks a bit. Essentially I've made it so that the various core perks - novice, apprentice, adept, expert and master - allow you to cast spells of that level with no magicka cost. I also raised the level requirements of the core perks, so that rather than the standard 0, 25, 50, 75 100 distribution, the core perks require levels of 20, 40, 60, 80 and 100 respectively, as well as tweaking the level requirements of other perks in the magical trees to reflect the change of the core levels. I've play-tested this a fair bit and I feel it's a balanced way to make pure mage characters viable in combat - even at level 30 having unlocked adept destruction spells for free casting I'm hardly invulnerable. However, there's still one refinement I'm trying to figure out how to implement. I want magicka to have a similar role to stamina - in that I wan't to make dual casting a power attack of sorts. Not only to add a balanced restriction into magical combat, but also to make my mod as fully integrated with the vanilla system of items, potions and attributes as possible. Now I don't mean simple two handed casting - rather I mean the enhanced dual casting available after obtaining the necessary perk. The problem is that whilst altering the core perks to remove magicka cost was blessedly simple, I actually have no idea how to implement a magicka cost for dual-cast spells. So can anyone offer any advice?

For what it's worth, I have actually read of lots of cases where people using the HD texture pack have had problems with the game crashing to desktop. I assume that's what you mean when you talk about re-textures? Either way it's probably worth disabling the textures completely and trying a vanilla run of Skyrim. Also if some of your PC fans are running faster you should probably try to find out which ones - might be an indication of a driver issue, might be overheating. Try downloading GPU-Z and RealTemp from techpowerup.com. They're free programs that can monitor your CPU and GPU loads and temperatures and record it to file, and GPU-Z can even record the speed of your GPU fan. Just run both of these and have them record their output to files whilst you play through Skyrim until it crashes. Then have a look at the log files and see either of the processors is either overheating or becoming overloaded.

I'll post this here because I think my problem is similar enough, and I don't really want to spam up the forum with near identical problems. I used to play Skyrim (fairly) perfectly on my laptop when it was first released, the only real downside being terrible graphics performance (usually averaging about 15fps). So after enduring 60 hours or so of game play in November I decided to put Skyrim aside until I could build a proper gaming PC. Well 3 weeks ago now I did just that, and I'll use this opportunity to lay down my system specs: Asrock P67 Pro3 SE Motherboard Intel i5 2500K 3.30GHz CPU Radeon 6950 HD 2GB GPU 2x4GB 1600MHz DDR3 RAM 650W Single Rail PSU So all in all, a computer that should have no problem running Skyrim. Which it mostly doesn't - runs on ultra settings at a smooth 60fps. The only problem is something I think a lot of people have experienced but there doesn't seem to be much answer to - random Crashes To Desktop (CTD). I've done a fair bit of research into the issue, but one of the major obstacles I've been encountering is that most reports on this problem and it's potential solutions tend to be from around November - before updates for the game started to be released. As I'm running version 1.27.0.4, these old threads are seldom helpful. Still I've read as much as I can and tried a few of the fixes I could find: - Re-installing Skyrim - Verifying integrity of steam cache (interestingly this sometimes fails - not after every crash nor with any notable regularity. But even after steam has re-downloaded the files it deems necessary the problems simply continue). - Re-installing Steam - Re-installing/Removing Mods (I'm only using one at the moment anyway). - Playing on reduced graphics settings (there is no difference in either performance nor crash rate at minimum, maximum or anything else in between). - Re-installing graphics drivers (I'm running ATI catalyst drivers version 12.1 - the latest version). - Setting the default system sound quality to some value or other (not really sure how this was supposed to help.) I also read a little bit about the LAA fix/mod but apparently that capability has been patched into the .exe now anyway. At any rate none of these fixes has any impact what so ever. I am also certain that my system is not overheating as I have plenty of cooling and using GPUZ has confirmed that my GPU temperature never rises above 70 degrees Celsius during gameplay, idling at around 40 during normal operation. At this point it is probably worth recording what I have noticed about the crashes just through my observations. On my system the crashes tend to start sooner if my computer has already been on for an hour or more (I never usually run it for more than 6 hours continuously). If I launch into Skyrim having just started my computer up it might take 2 hours for the crashes to begin whereas when I've been performing other tasks with my computer beforehand the crashes can start in as little as 40 minutes of gameplay. Once the crashes have started however, the cycle is always the same. From the initial crash (if I choose to continue to play and not just give up and shut down for the day) the crashes increase in frequency until I get about 30 seconds of gameplay between crashes which is when I find something else to do (like writing this post). The only thing which can postpone the crashes is a system restart, or to totally reset the cycle I have to turn the computer off and leave it for an hour or so. Leaving the computer on and using it to perform other functions does postpone the crashes, but not very much. It may or may not be worth noting that I have been having some other games have issues with my graphics drivers, although I consider this problem to be fundamentally separate to the problem I am having with Skyrim, due to the starkly different nature of the crashes. The games which experience this other crash (Minecraft and Metro:2033) will hang for a few seconds, which is followed by my screen resetting through black, and returning to a white screen with the game sounds continuing to play. At this point I have to open the task manager to return to the desktop (or else sit staring at a blank white screen for all eternity) at which point the game becomes unresponsive and has to be terminated. It is during the transition to the desktop that a taskbar bubble notifies me the "The AMD Catalyst driver has stopped responding and recovered". Now I believe this shows that this issue is completely separate to the issue I am having with Skyrim, although I thought it was better to mention it on the off chance that it is not. I know it's a hefty wall of text, but I don't think this is a problem to be solved easily (although I would far rather be proved an idiot if it means I can play Skryim uninterrupted again).