JudgmentJay

Time will tell. Plenty of people use SweetFX in games that are VAC protected with no bans, but who knows. It very well could get you banned in Dark Souls 2. I'm going to continue using GeDoSaTo. If they ban for that/SweetFX/ENB, I think there will be enough of a public outcry that they will reverse the decision. Similar situations have happened in the past.

This video has nothing to do with mods. It is regarding the fact that people who have been VAC-banned in other games cannot log into Dark Souls 2's server. It's unintentional and Bamco is working on it. So far, noone has been banned for using SweetFX/ENB/GeDoSaTo/etc in Dark Souls 2. We won't know if using these mods is bannable for another week or two since VAC bans are often delayed ~2 weeks.

Hello, I'm working on a difficulty overhaul mod for my personal use, and I've run into a bit of an issue. I wanted to add/remove perks from most NPCs in the game, and I did so through the NPC templates. However, now that I'm testing it in-game, I see that none of the individual actors have the changed perks. Is there some additional step I need to perform in the CK in order for the template changes to filter down to individual actors? I spent a considerable amount of time on this so help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

This seems to be working great for me. Been using it for about 10 hours and haven't crashed once. Before installing I was crashing about every 2-3 hours. No issues at all... I still get random predators and the such.

Doesn't the latest version of RCRN have interior weather sounds?

The only problems with SLI that I know of are no HDR (Which I don't care for anyway) and a bug that causes the water in your wake to flicker when you swim in third person view. I play in first person so I also don't care about this. I've also read that the scaling is bad, which I definitely believe. As for weather in CoT vs RCRN, I have no doubt that CoT's weather systems are more extravagant and varied since that mod actually adds new weather systems. RCRN just adds effects to the existing ones to make them a bit more varied and realistic. I also really like CoT's clouds. One day I want to sit down and see if I can't get them to work with RCRN. Anyway, if you're happy with Project ENB + CoT and you're happy with your framerate, then there's no reason to go to RCRN.

Heh, sure... I use this PC for everything. Work (web design/development), home theater, and obviously gaming. Building PCs and watercooling loops is a hobby of mine as well, so I tend to go all out when it's time for a new one.

Again, RCRN adds absolutely 0 blurring. If you had blur then you installed it incorrectly. Here is what RCRN should look like (my screenshots): http://www.forgottenaspects.com/iorek/01_rcrn.jpg http://www.forgottenaspects.com/iorek/02_rcrn.jpg http://www.forgottenaspects.com/iorek/03_rcrn.jpg As you can see, there is absolutely no blurring. Everything is crisp and clean and appropriately vibrant. You are right in that RCRN doesn't add a ton to the "feel" of the game. It simply lifts the fog present in vanilla, improves vibrancy a bit, and depending on the preset, greatly increases shadow/darkness depth. Of course it also has more advanced features such as the dynamic interiors that change brightness depending on weather conditions, volumetric fog, and improved weather systems, but I won't get into that. And here's Project ENB (taken from Project ENB's nexus page): http://static.skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/images/20781-3-1350507666.jpg http://static.skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/images/20781-1-1350507859.jpg http://static.skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/images/20781-1-1342712729.jpg While these screenshots look nice (especially the interior shot), they contain heavy bloom, and as a result the image is very clearly softened. There is also a loss of texture detail (Whiterun ground texture in the first image). This is what a majority of ENB profiles look like when I install them. You can minimize the effect by reducing the bloom strength, but the profiles are built around having a certain level of bloom and if you alter them you will get darker-looking image. I know how to install ENBs, and I've spent 10+ hours tweaking them in an attempt to get something I'm content with. Thus far Quietcool is my favorite because it adds little to no bloom, thus the resulting picture is crisp and clean if not a touch too vibrant. You use the word realistic and surreal in the same sentence to describe the same thing. Real life doesn't look like a painting or some high fantasy movie. ENBs very much remind me of the movie Legend. It has a very bloomy haze over the picture that looks very surreal. While pretty to look at, it's far from realistic. RCRN provides a much more realistic picture than most if not all ENBs. Also, I've also done extensive controlled FPS testing with a dozen+ ENB profiles, and I can say with 100% certainty that my FPS hit for a full-featured profile is ~50%. I think it's safe to say that my PC is more powerful than most (specs in signature), and with a clean Skyrim install, ultra graphical preset, 1600p, max graphical .ini settings, FOV=80, Texture Pack Combiner (max resolution, almost all optionals), USKP, and a handful of other texture mods I go from 130 FPS to 67 with Project ENB using all its bells and whistles. With no features enabled it's 115. That's a 12% FPS loss from simply having ENB installed while using none of its features. Similar numbers were found across all ENBs I tested. SSAO and DoF were by far the biggest FPS hogs, typically resulting in a ~20 FPS loss each. These numbers also reflect what the author of SkyRealism ENB states on his ENB page found here. Everyone I've spoken with regarding ENB performance has also reported similar numbers. It's possible that the performance hit is less if your base settings and/or resolution is lower, but those are the numbers I see. With the same settings + RCRN I go from 130 to 126 FPS. Finally, RCRN is customizable beyond the provided GUI. Its configuration files are not as extensive as ENB's, but there is plenty to tinker with behind the scenes. ALL THAT SAID, I'm not bashing ENB in the slightest. It does exactly what it intends to do. It gives Skyrim a facelift. A new appearance. It is, as you say, a visual overhaul. It has a ton of great features like god rays which I very much love. But I personally prefer realism over eye candy. Many don't. Many people want their game to look like Legend. As I said, it's entirely subjective. The point of my first post wasn't to bash other lighting mods, it was mainly to stress to you that your experience with RCRN may not have been working as intended.

You must have done something very wrong with your RCRN install. RCRN makes big changes to the overall lighting and colors in the game. With the pure preset nighttime and dungeons are extremely dark and shadows create some amazing contrast. Just look at the screenshots on the mod page. Also, there is no depth of field with RCRN, nor does the bloom add any blurring like most ENB profiles, so the blurring you spoke of is impossible. The black aura around people you speak of sounds like SSAO, which is a feature of ENB, not RCRN. My guess is that you had some files leftover from an ENB install conflicting with RCRN. I've tried dozens of ENBs trying to find one I liked, and the only one I found that matched the overall quality of RCRN was Quietcool + Climates of Tamriel; however, even that looked mediocre in certain conditions. ENB is also a massive performance hit. As much as 50-60% FPS loss with all the bells and whistles. RCRN is ~5fps. Of course the downside is you don't get the fancy processing effects that come with ENB. SSAO (which has more bugs in addition to the black aura), god rays, improved shadow quality, and depth of field to name a few. Personally the only ones I care about are god rays and improved shadows. Fortunately you can pair RCRN with a vanilla-like ENB and disable all the features except the ones you want. God rays and improved shadows should only be a ~10% FPS loss. RCRN is also fully customizable just like ENB and you can tweak the brightness, vibrancy, etc to your heart's content. In the end it's all subjective. Judging from the sheer number of terrible-looking ENBs and their endorsements, people love an over-bloomed, ultra-saturated, and needlessly-blurry Skyrim.

I was hoping this would happen, but I didn't think it would! Can't wait to see what people do with this game.

Sent you a PM.

Thanks for the reply Ghogiel. Unfortunately 'Has Vertex Colors' was already set to No. I tried setting it to Yes and making sure all the colors were white, but unfortunately that didn't change the gradient. Is it possible that there's some setting I have wrong on the texture itself? I'm using the Photoshop plugin and using DXT1 RGB 4 bpp no alpha and default settings when saving out as a .dds. When I do the 2D Preview there is no gradient though so I don't think that's an issue... EDIT: Maybe there's something else going on in the main menu? Another overlay mesh or something? How would I check that? The Creation Kit? EDIT 2: Just opened the mesh in Creation Kit and I get this: http://www.forgottenaspects.com/iorek/errors.jpg That's the corner where the gradient starts. I'm guessing this is the cause?

Hello all, I'll preface by saying I'm a complete noob when it comes to any sort of modeling, etc. Basically I'm trying to change the Skyrim menu background. There are a number of mods on the Nexus that do this, but they're all designed for 16:9 monitors (1920x1080 in particular) so I wanted to try my hand at editing the mesh for my screen (2560x1600). It seems that all the mods are using the Skyrim battle map for a mesh and then just attaching the .dds wallpaper. I was surprised at this since the battle map is not flat and has distortion/glossy lighting around the edges. I flattened the image in NifSkope, making it look much better; however, I noticed that there's a yellow-ish gradient across the background when I put it up. It's most visible on a white background, so take a look: http://www.forgottenaspects.com/iorek/gradient.png I'm assuming this is attached to the mesh somehow? I spent a number of hours researching/messing around in NifSkope but had no luck. Hopefully someone can fill me in on how I can get rid of this. Thanks!

Also interested to see people's thoughts on this! It's pretty annoying.

I have a Dell U3011, which is calibrated in the factory (comes with the calibration report as well). Of course it's not as good as if an ISF professional came out and calibrated it, but I'd say it's ~90% of the way to perfect. That said, a lot of ENBs and other lighting mods are meant to be realistically dark. If you're in a cave with no light sources, it should literally be pitch black. That's realism. I use RCRN classic, and while it's slightly less dark than RCRN Pure, I absolutely have to use a torch in caves/dungeons when there are no light sources.

My dream mod is pretty simple... the mod would emulate uGrids set to ~13+ for textures/meshes only. I don't care about objects/NPCs/whatever inside those grids, only the textures and meshes. I find LOD transitions/texture pop-in really immersion-breaking.

+1 for this. Now that I think about it it's pretty crazy that this doesn't already exist.

Well, I did what I said I was going to and split the raid up and did a fresh install of Win7, keeping the OS and Steam on separate physical drives. No luck. I tried several different Rapid Storage Technology Enterprise drivers as well. Rebuilt the raid with the largest stripe size I could (128k), but again, no luck. I also eliminated the possibility that it could be my SLI bridge or one of my graphic cards in particular as I tested them each individually. So basically I don't think this is correctable. It has to be something out of my hands like the graphic card driver or the RSTe driver or just a limitation in the Skyrim engine that's revealing itself in my current configuration of hardware. Oh well. I appreciate the help wysiwyg. Kudos to you!

On the ride down from Ivarstead I got 788kb/s read and 21kb/s write average. There are a number of spikes over 2mb. Also, one to ~7.5mb and one to 47.5mb. That's for my raid as a whole, not TESV specifically. EDIT: Just verified that those spikes are coming from TESV.

Yeah, AO was disabled, and closing down EVGA Precision did not help.

Yeah, my FPS dips to 50 when I get the stutter, then hops right back up to 60. It's a ~1/8-1/4 second freeze. I use EVGA Precision X, but I don't have any OSD running. I do monitor the temperatures of all 3 cards and the vram usage of one though. I did try playing with Precision closed, but it didn't make a difference. I'll give it another try. I don't believe that I did. I'll check when I get home in a couple hours. I don't think I have AO enabled though. I am using 304.79. I've also tried 304.48 and 301.42.

1. I'm using RCRN, but the stuttering happens with 0 mods. 2. Using RCRN, so I'll keep using AA. The stutter occurs with AA completely off as well. 3. My fade distance is indeed halved. 4. I've tried limiting FPS to 58. 5. I did not increase my uGrids. 6. I did use the texture optimizer. 7. As stated in my original post, I enabled logging on a fresh install and new character, and while there were 0 warnings/errors, stuttering persisted. I noticed that if I'm in first person view on foot the stuttering does not occur, even while sprinting. 3rd person on foot still has stuttering but it's very greatly reduced. I think it's the increased viewing area of 3rd person + the horse speed that's causing the stuttering. Like I'm moving through the cells too quickly or something.

Hello everyone, I'll get right to the point: My Skyrim stutters when distant land/trees/etc load in while in heavily-wooded areas. The area I use for a benchmark is the path leading N/NE down the river from Ivarstead. If I sprint down this path on a horse I get some pretty hefty stuttering every time new assets load into view. Again, this does not occur in non-forest areas. For mods, I followed the STEP guide, so I have a significant number of high-resolution textures. I did however pick and choose which ones to install in order to keep my VRAM usage under 2GB. One additional mod I've installed which pertains to this issue is Skyrim Distance Overhaul, which greatly increases the number of LOD objects. I've also done the z-fighting tweak, which in turn increases draw distance for LOD objects/trees. I run at 2560x1600, 2x MSAA, 2x SSTrAA, and 8x AF (via nVidia control panel). I have all launcher settings maxed with the exception of sky reflection and Item fade (set to 8 ). My specs: Rampage IV Extreme i7 3930k @ 4.7ghz 16gb 1600mhz DDR3 8-8-8-24 3 GTX680 2GB Tri-SLI 2 240GB Intel 520 SSDs in raid0 (64k stripe size) I've done quite a bit of research online, and here's what I've tried/ruled out: 1. Not a VRAM issue. VRAM tops out at about 1850 on the previously mentioned benchmark. 2. Not a CPU stress issue. Usage hovers around 30-40%. 3. Not a save game bloat/script error issue. This occurs on a fresh install and a new game. Papyrus logging shows no errors/warnings. 4. Not a mod issue. This happens with or without mods. 5. I've tried disabling SLI and running on a single card. 6. I've tried disabling vsync and also FPS limiting. 7. I've tried running in Steam's offline mode and disabling the overlay. 8. I've tried several different nVidia drivers (clean installs). 9. I've tried enabling PCI-e 3.0 via the nVidia patch (I thought this was going to fix it for sure... thought I was running into bandwidth limitations). I'll be honest, the problem mostly goes away when I disable the z-fighting tweak; however, I *shouldn't* have to do this. I'll do it if I absolutely must, but my PC is a monster. It's capable of running this. The only thing I can think of at the moment that I haven't ruled out is that it's HDD-related. Maybe I'm running into throughput limitations or perhaps my stripe size is too small, but I was thinking that if I broke the raid up, formatted the drives, and did a fresh Windows install on one drive and used the other for Steam/games it might fix the issue. Thoughts/input/solutions I could try would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for reading!