gurugeorge

Just a PSA that this issue still exists, and the quick and dirty fix of making the screen windowed and really tiny just before the chat with solas finishes worked for me - tiny screen goes white for a few seconds, then it's all back to normal. (I'm on Nvidia GTX760)

I came across this post while searching for info about precisely this problem. I'm playing SSE again, and I'd been playing your bog standard fort with bandits, I was walking by a wall and I was startled to hear what sounded like a bandit talking right next to me. Then I realized of course he must be behind the wall, in the building. Then I thought, "God that such a classic Skyrim horror, I wonder if there's a mod for that?" But I couldn't find one anywhere. Then I searched and searched, and there seems to be precious little info, except what you've said here. How confident are you that the game doesn't understand walls in terms of sound propagation? If you're sure, then do you think some sort of kludge or workaround might be possible? (Thought, off the top of my head - could you reduce the volume/add a lowpass filter or something, or play with the "Mute When Submerged" function, depending on how far the AI reckoned it would have to go to get to you, or something like that?) (I recall the Witcher 3 did propagation and attenuation very well - conversations in other rooms are properly quieter and slightly muffled. But I suppose Skyrim is quite an old game now - we tend to forget that because graphically it can keep up very well with mods.)

Don't have things half with MO half with NMM, it's a nightmare because it's difficult to trace whether your problem is some old mess you've made by having files overwrite each other in the past with NMM, or something you're doing now by having things the wrong order (or with the wrong mods) in MO. Honestly, uninstall, reinstall, start off with MO (once you get used to MO, NMM feels like the stone age), reinstall mods one by one (I'd recommend religiously following S.T.E.P. when you reinstall - it results in a nice enhanced vanilla game, and the "Core" setup is a good basis to work from to add your own mods and tweak things to your heart's content). Almost the only mod that can't be installed from MO is SKSE, everything else pretty much can be done from within MO (including running BOSS, Wrye, FNIS, etc.) With MO you can have profiles, so you can get up a stable gamey game Profile and use other Profiles for messing about with other things. (So, as a basis, have a Vanilla Profile, a Vanilla with DLC Profile, STEP Core Profile, STEP Enhanced Profile. These should be enough to get started with and ensure you will be able to trace problems easily. Works like a charm. There are still occasional baffling crashes when you're tweaking things, but you invariably find that it's something you previously changed that you overlooked (like an .esp you manually un-ticked but forgotten you had done so). The great thing about using MO is that when something goes wrong you KNOW it's something that's fixable and recoverable, because the basic game data is unchanged (unlike the horrific mess that can result with manual installation or NMM), so you know it's just an incompatibility somewhere between the load order of files in the MO/mod folder as they are loading into the game (either that, or there's a genuine incompatibility between the mods, which can be tested). Plus you can always instantly return to your vanilla profile to check a mod by itself. PLUS, even if you completely mess up one profile, it's just a click of a button to return to being able to play the game normally in another profile. Good practice with MO is also to have a few vanilla savegames that you can download from Nexus (where people have played the game purely vanilla up to a certain level). Very useful for checking and re-checking things and not having to start right from the intro, etc. One of the biggest problems with Beth games for me has always been that they are so tweakable you keep going back to the beginning, getting bored with that starting content and ditching the game unfinished. With save game profiles, you can start much later int he game and skip the content you already know till you're sick of it (e.g. someone made a vanilla savegame for just after High Hrothgar, very handy).

Thought I'd necro this as it's still an interesting topic for some players. I recently came across this webpage where the guy had a project of scaling up Cyrodiil in Oblivion. No idea whether that project is still going or not, but I think it's the sort of thing that would be required. "Realism" is a great thing in games. My game is chock full of the "realism" mods like hunger, thirst, and I've slowed the time scale down a lot, etc., etc. It makes for a sense of deep immersion, where you feel you're actually "there", and that in itself (taken along with modding the game for "realism" in combat, etc., so your character really is quite weak to start with, and the world very dangerous) makes for a special type of roleplaying gameplay all its own. But you don't necessarily want 1:1 realism, any more than you necessarily want to be able to walk and run at a "normal" human pace. What you want (or what I prefer) is something that's somewhat compressed in space and time and power-level (e.g. stamina), so you're somewhat heroic, more heroic than you are in real life. You just want it to be not as time-space--ability-compressed as an action game, which is virtually what Bethesda have turned the Elder Scrolls game into. Not that that makes for a bad game, it's still a fun game of its kind, but it's drifted a bit too far from the old skool CRPG feel for my taste. And sense of scale is a part of that. I think Morrowind had a pretty decent sense of scale about it, certainly better than Oblivion and much, much better than Skyrim, which feels miniscule, like you take a couple of steps and you're in another town. It's almost comical, tbqh. So the upshot is, I think both Oblivion and Skyrim would benefit greatly from having the same amount of content that they have, but just STRETCHED OUT A BIT, to the level of Morrowind. Here's a Morrowind mod where the modders are trying to recreate Cyrodiil to the scale of Morrowind, where they say Cyrodiil in Oblivion is 1.5 to Morrowind's 2.0. I should think the compression of Skyrim relative to Cyrodiil is probably a bit more, so twice the size would be about right, to fit in with Morrowind. Just stretching the damn thing out a bit would work wonders, I think. And if the first guy above's algorithms could be made to work for this project, and then buildings and things resized to normal scale (and the slightly stretched-out cities filled with some "dummy" buildings perhaps), that would probably do the trick.

If you get really heavily into modding, switching out mods, trying various combinations, Mod Organizer is the choice of champions. You can integrate any executable like BOSS or TES5edit smoothly with it. Basically it enables you to play around with any number of mod combinations ("profiles") independently of each other (as if they were virtual separate installs of Skyrim). So you can have a SkyRe game, and a Requiem game, and a game using mixed mods, and an "eyecandy" game, or whatever, all separate and not interfering with each other (although you have to be a bit careful with mods that only come in NMM form, it's always better to do manual/loose files installs where possible with MO).

Great responses, I've tried nearly all the mods listed above and they work well, in various combinations. Top tip: if you're going to be trying out lots of different mods, use Mod Organizer rather than NMM. MO allows you to have an unlimited amount of "profiles", which are like virtual installs, so you can have a "vanilla" profile (to build new profiles from), a "realism" profile, an "eyecandy" profile, etc., etc., all separate. It means you can basically try out mods till your heart's content on the side, without touching or screwing up your main ongoing gameplay selection. Seriously, if you're into modding, it's a must-have. I've found the overhaul mod Requiem, in combination with Alternate Start plus Classic Classes, to be really very good for realism in terms of making the world harsh and unforgiving, very old skool in feel, and it goes well with Imps Needs, which is insanely complex (but can be simplified to taste), but you need a separate camping mod for it. Realistic Needs and Diseases is great for non-overhaul setups though, and includes its own camping, and has lots of compatibility patches. Also, Frostfall (or Hypothermia) is essential to any realism setup in a cold, harsh land.

Question answered. I'd just add, though, that the various ENB DOF effects look absolutely fantastic in first person because they work like a camera (so what your cursor is targeted on is in focus, everything else in front and behind out of focus, so it's very movie-like). But none of them are very good in third person, as your cursor is generally naturally aimed more at the ground, so the background is almost permanently blurred. Also DOF looks crappy on horseback as there's no independent control of the cursor on horseback, so again, your character is in focus, the background perma-blurred. Just something to be aware of if you play in third person a lot. There is a program (ENBSSAODoFtoggler) that allows you to easiliy switch DOF on and off on the fly though, which somewhat gets around that.

It's really largely a matter of taste, as some have said. It's not an issue of breast size, since UNP has the UNPB variation which is just as pneumatic as CBBE, and CBBE has slim sizes too, plus there's Bodyslide for both now. It's even getting to the state where it's not even an issue of armors anymore - UNP/UNPB conversions are coming thick and fast and there is both a lore-friendly replacer and several skimpy ones. So it's really a question of what you prefer, and the specific costs and benefits of both bodies (and also what you prefer in the beast races, I guess). Generally, UNP looks great, realistic and highly detailed from the front and back, but has two problems - the arch in the back is too pronounced from the side (the back looks almost broken), and only one face mod (All in One) doesn't give a neck seam (Coverwomen, Bella, and several others, all give neck seams, although the Coverwomen UNP gives less than the others, apart from All in One). CBBE also looks great, but overall is a bit more "plasticky" looking, less hyper-realistic than UNP, plus it has really weird stretching of the abdomen under the breasts when the character's torso turns. UNP has a bit of that too, but it seems less pronounced and weird-looking. I applaud the moves towards NPC variety as some people have mentioned up the thread. There's no reason why players with powerful PCs can't have a much greater variety of NPC body types in their game, and have their character unique, and that's probably the way ahead (also to avoid the jarring "sexy old lady" syndrome :) ). That would also be a way of utilizing some of the other body type variants (i.e. the chubby, or less Barbie-like variants, including Vanilla, which actually is pretty good in itself). (Note: Both CBBE and UNP/B have jiggly physics mod variants (called "CHSBC/BBP" and "BBP"), and jiggly armors to match (though a bit less for UNP/B). The jiggly mod to look out for is TBBP, which has an astounding - almost hypnotic :) - level of realism and really raises the bar where that kind of thing is concerned. The only problem with TBBP is that there's almost zero clothing/armor for it at this time, I think only 2 conversions and no replacers yet.)