h0rsel0ver

Pretty much as the titles says. I find a lot of conflicting and unsourced information, and playing with memory settings and multi-core settings seems to have broken my game (just finished a fresh setup and switched over to wyrebash). Is there an official/well-documented guide to what all different settings do? I already know about http://itcprosolutions.com/skyrimguides/tweak_guide.htm and http://www.creationkit.com/INI_Settings_Papyrus , but overall my understanding is pretty incomplete and I don't want to get another 10 hours into a save to find the game a bloated unreliable mess.

Bumping this, I could really use some insight. Further gameplay leads me to believe that the entirety of my SkyrimPrefs.ini is being ignored by the game. Is there a way that can happen? Edit: I can confirm that the game is ignoring my SkyrimPrefs.ini. I think it's conflicting with a Skyrim.ini setting, but I'm not seeing it. Resolved it seems doubling all the shadowmaps up to 8192 gives me much better shadows. There are still some crappy shadows being cast by brushes, but characters and objects are casting fairly crisp shadows now.

RESOLVED - see second post. The .ini files I linked are functional, and will work on any quad-core CPU that has been unparked. 2GB+ VRAM highly recommended. Skyrim.ini SkyrimPrefs.ini So at some point last December, I followed this guide, and felt that the shadow tweaks were perfect. Coming back to and modding the game after a hiatus, I find my shadows look like this: http://imageshack.us/a/img189/752/2013060900002.jpg All my shadows appear to be functioning at default "Ultra" settings. Also, (what I think are) the specular maps are loading at a low resolution, like on that slush Below are my .ini files Relevant SkyrimPrefs.ini shadow settings: [Display] bDeferredShadows=1 bDrawLandShadows=1 bDrawShadows=1 bTreesReceiveShadows=1 bShadowMaskZPrepass=1 fInteriorShadowDistance=3000.0000 fShadowBiasScale=0.1500 fShadowDistance=8000.0000 fShadowLODStartFade=4000.0000 iShadowMaskQuarter=4 iShadowMapResolution=4096 iShadowMapResolutionPrimary=4096 iShadowMapResolutionSecondary=4096 iShadowMode=4 iShadowSplitCount=2 iBlurDeferredShadowMask=3(If you wonder why my shadow resolutions are so high, it's because I have a MSI R7950 3GB twin frozr; latest beta drivers, 55-60fps at 1440x900. These settings, and higher settings, have worked fine in the past) Full files: Skyrim.ini SkyrimPrefs.ini My mod list (out of load order; load order has been optimized with boss, mods have been cleaned with TES5edit. Some folder names are present, I just made a .txt of the directory in cmd) No post-injection shaders. SKSE is used. Here is the same location with no mods active on a new character (different weather/time of day): http://img203.imageshack.us/img203/3747/2013060900009.jpg I've followed a lot of guides in the past on .ini tweaking, and I feel that it should work. However, it seems that these settings are being overridden somehow. If anyone has experience with fixing shadows or .ini settings in general, and recognizes the issue, please let me know, I would be grateful. Thanks for your time.

I've seen NPCs getting water from a water source before - My guess is that you didn't give her a routine, so that when you left her, she found her way to the nearest task in the sandbox set, and will just continue to do so because she'd not scheduled to do anything else.

I brawled with the racist guy from the scripted sequence at the beginning of windhelm and won. Afterwards he acted like we were best friends (I was an argonian). I killed him after night fell, and got caught by guards. I paid off my bounty (40 gold) and slept at the inn. I left the next morning, and on the bridge north of windhelm, a courier runs up to me and tells me he's got a delivery for me. It's an inheritance, from the racist guy, for 100 gold (minus 10 for the hold tax of course). Apparently beating him up made him like me so much, he put me in his will.

I wish more people could be self-critical in this way. A lot of people tend to absorb their opinions from others, rather than forming them. In absorbing a point of view, a majority succumb to popular appeal, and in the case of steam, I see a lot of people lumping it in with the general "always online" criticism. This isn't to say that steam is objectively good, but that a belief should be supported with fact rather than feeling. Digital distribution isn't going away, it's growing bigger. While there are intrinsic flaws with most digital content models, the benefits trump physical media in most ways. In the case of "Always Online" issues, steam's offline mode is an immediate solution, well explained in the thread and elsewhere. Compared to services like EA's origin, which are increasingly shoehorned into physical media, steam is straightforward and consumer oriented, and generally a hassle-free experience. As with most technical innovations, it's too late to reverse the trend towards digital marketplaces and any effort spent complaining about the general state of things (like a game requiring secondary software) is wasted. Focus concerns and criticisms towards the service providers and make sure that these services continue to prioritize the individual, or we will have the worst of both physical and digital media services in the future.

This is incredibly useful thanks for the tip!

This is an infamous exploit. It does work, and can grow exponentially fast. The trick is to move from town to town buying jewels, precious metal (gold and silver), and soul gems while you go - the gold you make selling the enchanted jewelry is more than enough to reimburse you. Also, if you don't know about it, google the fortify restoration potion exploit. It makes your fortify smith and fortify alchemy gear more powerful, allowing you to create better fortify enchanting and restoration potions, allowing you to make better fortify alchemy gear, allowing you to make better potions allowing you to - you get the idea. This will make a Master level file with enhanced monster leveling mods stupid-easy and can sap the fun out of the game; cheating with the console is faster.

There are a lot of different paths to take when you're designing a game, and a developer's personal philosophies affect their perception of the work they do. Concepts like "gameplay" and "challenge" become subjective terms relative to a group or individual's vision for a game. I'd like to talk about (and peaceably debate) different design philosophies using Skyrim as a kind of topical touchstone, as I feel it combines a wide variety of design elements, and the quality of their implementation varies as much. I'll start the topic off with my interpretation. I came to this concept while trying to analyze "questing" in various RPGs, and progression based gameplay in general. I wanted to find a common ground or unifying principal. Key and Door philosophy: Essentially, any task can be broken down into several simple components; prominent ones being journey, obstacle, and goal. For all intents and purposes, both the journey and the goal are aesthetic; they merely define the terms of the experience - they give it flavor and style, and their qualities are dictated by the game's world and law. So, the meat of any quest is the obstacle itself. The obstacle is the challenge, the meter-stick you measure up to; "I defeated x with y. Before x>y, and I could not win. Now that I have won, y>x!". When I attempted to break down the concept of an "obstacle", I derived two components: the Key and the Door. These are principles, and their meaning is rarely literal. The Door is the nature of the obstacle, and the Key is the method by which you overcome it. An example: "Hero must retrieve item a for their king. Item a is guarded by villain b, who is weak to c. Hero uses a weapon imbued with c on villain b, and acquires a. You can see that the villain is the Door, and the magical weapon is the Key that opens it. So far, every quest or challenge I've thought of conforms to this pattern. Sometimes the Keys and Doors are well disguised in dialogue trees or are artfully chained into distracting narratives. Sometimes they are literal keys and doors. In rare and delightful occasions they draw from outside of the game, like a puzzle that must be solved externally (in the players mind) - here you have a superposition of Keys and Doors: the puzzle is a Door, the player's mind is the Key; to manually solve the puzzle while or after it's solved mentally, the player must unlock many little Doors (eg: hitting switches in the right order). So, if you've burdened yourself with my thoughts this far, you might be thinking: "What the does this have to do with Skyrim, you boring autist!". Well, I was reading the Those "What have I done?" moments thread in spoilers, and noticed a theme of discontent about the linearity of options in quests and enemy areas, a common criticism of the game. If you're turning the same Key in the same Door over and over again, it doesn't matter how beautiful the journey is, and often, the goal is something incredibly dull; either a MacGuffin for some jerk, or a poorly enchanted piece of gear rarely worth resale. How do you solve this problem of tedium? You make it hard for the player to notice the underlying mechanics of questing. When Skyrim gets it right, it's engrossing; with great visuals and writing. When it's wrong, it's another boring fetch quest killing samey enemies in samey places. I think a good quest would have multiple Keys and Doors. The more ways you can solve a problem the more interesting the problem becomes, and it can even raise the difficulty. You define a difficulty rating system based on the leveling mechanics and skill rolls, and you assign quests a difficulty rating. Then you adjust the difficulty of different Doors according to the theme of the quest. Lets take an infiltration mission for instance - Thematically it's a stealthy mission, so the primary Door (a lockpick challenge) is leveled to your character. If you've been focusing on stealth tree skills, it's an average challenge. Now you devise several alternate Doors: a hidden path you need to use speechcraft or dumb luck to find, a key you can only retrieve with telekinesis, and direct combat to a lever that opens a gate. These secondary Doors begin to deviate from theme, and so they are leveled higher. I feel this kind of design breathes life into quest and goes a long way to disguising the repetition inherent in Key and Lock design. It also makes most or all of the world accessible to a character by providing them with different methods of solving. Good writing would give most if not all characters a different reason to perform the quest as well. I want to read your examples of good and bad quests in Skyrim, criticism on my theory, alternate design philosophies and theories, alternate solutions to the problem of tedium, and whatever else you feel is on topic For taking the time to read my thread I award you a Steel War Hammer of Embers (I just know you'll find a use for it)

If anyone knows offhand, how is procedural lod loading affected by world size? I've been under the impression that world size would be irrelevant if you're only loading a small portion of it at once. I'm sure I'm missing something here

This is a good point; I was under the mistaken impression that the deal covered the first three releases. I can find the article that stated that, but I can't source it, and every other piece of information contradicts it (stating only the first two). I still stand by my sentiment though - people quick to call out "[pc entitlement!]" ignore the fact that many pc gamers just want an equal level of service, not anything special or extra I found this article while searching around, and it goes into more depth about the subject. "The recent announcement of Skyrim’s Dawnguard expansion came with a bit of a drawback for a little over 40% of it’s users [...]" I think 40+% is a pretty big market chunk to designate as a secondary and tertiary (in the case of the ps3) priority.

I bought morrowind on steam recently just so I could play it with all the available mods, and plan to do the same with oblivon. Those titles are NOT still selling on xbox. PC vs Console markets are very different, if only because of the performance and modding flexibility of PC games

They do still have the agreement with microsoft. This isn't about a "greater good", it's the fact that they're disingenuous about their priorities - they claim that the release delay is for quality assurance ("... each platform takes time and attention."), when in reality it's just a necessity of their contract. That's a bad way to treat a portion of your consumer base, and it's dishonest public relations. As far as the "[pc gamer entitlement]" rhetoric, the general impression I come away with is that Bethesda thinks it's too big to fail - they're willing to disenfranchise a portion of their fans in the pursuit of profit. I understand that not everyone can be pleased when it comes to gameplay, but it would have been pretty easy to please people in terms of accessibility. Exclusivity on the xbox doesn't increase Bethesda's overall sales, it just improves their relationship with microsoft. I'm reminded of the adage "PC gaming is dying". If you release games according to that assumption, you will have no reason to prioritize the PC market. In turn the PC market gets slower and shoddier releases. It's a cyclical self-feeding process that serves to atrophy a potential market, and I would call that bad business. In conclusion - Personally, I don't feel betrayed, my feelings aren't hurt; because Bethesda is an impersonal entity that is not targeting me as an individual. I feel excluded and marginalized because I'm a member of an off-center demographic, and as an observer I think that cheesy closed door content deals are harmful to corporate-consumer relations.

It seems pretty clear that Bethesda wants to develop for the xbox now. I think it's a shame really, because I hate console gaming and it's effect on pc games. It feels bad to play a game developed on a pc from a series of pc games that is essentially a console-to-pc port (molasses slow UI and dumbed down fetch quests). The fact that the console version is getting expansion priority is just accentuating this feeling. I can't say I feel betrayed, as Bethesda is a company and it's just sniffing out money, but I feel let down - being directly shown that I'm no longer in the target market. What I'm getting out of this is that Bethesda cares more about profit than it's pc audience. That's fine, but I think that they should strive to keep their pc audience happy and intact. Their 1 month exclusivity deal with microsoft is slowly breeding resentment, and I find it generally tacky and distasteful. This is worsened by the way they ham it up with hollow platitudes about "[making sure it works properly]" as if waiting will benefit us in any clear way. I really like Dawngaurd, but as an experience it was ruined by the buggy lackluster mess of a follower Seranwrap, who's plastic personality began to stretch thin and tear at the edges, while her poor voice acting and glitched dialogue did NOT stay fresh. They had a month to fix that (at least the repeated passive dialogue bugs). It's not that I think they're lying when they say they'll try to use the month productively, but when they claim that the month+ wait exist for the purpose of QA, while their MS deal is clearly documented, I think they're being extremely dishonest

Oh wow, thanks!