Gyrotica

ENBoost and its offspring seem to have largely put the texture/memory monsters to bed. It seems to me that the next (and perhaps, final?) major enemy of heavily modded games is the difficulty introduced by heavy scripting. Is it theoretically possible to work something similar to ENBoost with scripting? As I understand it (and that is admittedly little), ENBoost works by offloading some of the textures to enbhost.exe. Would it, in theory, be possible to do something similar with scripts, whether through SKSE or something else entirely? Merely curious, as I do not have the chops to do such a thing even if it were possible. This message is being cross-posted from the STEP forums.

Hello! I come from the STEP <Skyrim Total Enhancement Project> forums. A couple months ago we did a detailed investigation into reports that Skyrim falls apart when it starts to use at or around 3.1 gigs of RAM, and what might contribute to that. After seeing some recent discussions on the Nexus forums, we figured that we hadn't adequately publicized those results, which are the following: Skyrim will crash at or around a reported 3.1 gigabytes of RAM usage, which is fairly widely known.Skyrim mirrors its active textures in memory, and since it is a 32-bit application with a 4GB memory limit, this constrains the total size of modded textures that are viably usable.The exact VRAM:RAM ratio is not known, but one metric reported was a texture pack taking up ~500MB VRAM would consume approximately 430MB physical RAM.The memory usage figures reported by Task Manager and Skyrim monitoring tools represents the "working set" RAM assigned to the Skyrim program. This is only a partial figure for the total amount of memory in use by Skyrim, and cannot be relied upon as an indicator of true memory usage, which cannot easily be determined. As the load of modded textures drives the memory use to the 4GB limit, the partial Working Set figure tends to report somewhere around 3.1GB, but this varies, and can only be used as a rough indicator.At this time, we have been unable to find any memory management solutions that can reliably mitigate this, and it is unlikely that any could be developed.When contacted, Bethesda indicated they had no intention of addressing the issue, which they described as a fundamental problem of 32-bit applications (though it is not necessarily clear if they were aware that we were inquiring about the mirroring issue rather than RAM overall).We present this information with the hope that modders/mod authors will keep these limitations in mind when using/creating mods, especially texture-heavy ones. Those mods that take up less space will likely get more exposure, given that most modders will be using a heavily-modded game. Without Skyrim's source code it is almost certain that neither the 3.1 gigabyte stability issue nor the RAM mirroring issues will ever be fixed.

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Hello, all! Long time reader, first time poster, etc. etc. So I went a little crazy with mods. Maybe a lot crazy. Did the STEP thing, then went above and beyond with an some additional gameplay mods. Much to my astonishment, it appeared to work beautifully; nothing even broke the scripting for the intro sequence! Unfortunately, I discovered that Something had been done to break animal spawns during Companion radiant quests (specifically, Animal Extermination). I attempted to uninstall mods that might be messing with it to no avail (checked by starting clean save, etc.) so I'll probably have to go for a clean install on the next go around. I was wondering if anybody could pinpoint a particular mod combination from those I cite below that are known to not play well together in the fashion I describe above. I mean, this is totally mea culpa; it is simply a case of me go too far. Two possibly-related facts before I give you the list: 1.) I could not obtain the quest through the Companions themselves due to another bug in which, having completed Proving Honor, I could not get the dialogue option to take on the Radiant Quest work. Instead, I console-commanded that the quest be so, at which point I followed the quest to its vacuous conclusion. 2.) I received a Radiant bandit quest where the bandits likewise did not spawn. So, without further ado, are any of these mods blood-enemies with Radiant spawning: Skyrim Scaling Stopper Monster Mod v8 (with Monster Mod Lore-Friendlier Replacer) Warzones! (In Skyrim 1.6) I figured that somewhere in here was the main culprit, since they're big scripting/levelling deals. Most of the other mods have to do with music, animations, textures, smithing, spells and other deals that shouldn't prevent the targets of quests from spawning. I didn't install any mods with additional quests, and the only one that modifies any quests is the Parrthurnax fix. So, I would be immeasurably appreciative if anybody has any thoughts on this matter. Thanks, folks!