volnaiskra

Well, I'd feel pretty bummed if I got banned for this, considering my intention was only ever to enrich the Nexus by helping to provide a good mod....and considering it was 5 years ago :D Still, it makes me nervous. How do I delete a thread? I couldn't see an option for it.

OK, The mod is published!!! Before you get TOO excited, I've only made 2 out of 9 murals so far. But I'm going pretty well. Up until now (ie. since 2014) I had just the funeral processions and most of the bear mural done. That alone took me over 100 hours. I spent a few days this week on the mod again, and I got through the moth mural from start to finish, as well as finishing the bear mural off, and making significant improvements to everything I'd done before. I'm ironing out my workflow as I go, and I think that future murals will be (slightly) faster to do. Anyway, here it is! http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/79640/?

ok, I've officially started working on this mod again. I spent most of today on it in fact, and I'm getting back into the swing of it. I'll keep you posted. In other news, my game Spryke, which I've been working on for 3 years, is on kickstarter at the moment. I've put the same insane love of detail and immersion into it as I have into this mod. If you like arcade platformers, please check it out :)

That's great news! Well, I'm definitely encouraged to try and squeeze in some time for the mod. :)

My apologies for the very long silence. I've been crazy busy over the past couple of years working on my indie game. Unfortunately, as much as I loved working on this mod, I've had to shelve it for lack of time. I may get some time later this year to work on it again - or to at least release it with just a few murals completed. Is the Skyrim modding community still alive? The game's almost 5 years old now, and Fallout 4 is out. Do you think there would still be interest in this mod? (I've been so busy because of making my own game that I've had almost no time to play games, so I've kind of dropped out of the loop! :tongue: ).

That's an understatement. :D Though the way they open their games up to modders brings more attention to their errors and misjudgements than most other games get. For example, I never really thought about how mediocre Bethesda's sound design was until I tried Audio Overhaul 2.

You are of course totally right. But you might need to explain it to Bethesda :D http://snag.gy/k8lZO.jpg As you can see, Bethesda refers to them as murals, and so do several mods. So, I'm going with "murals", because people are probably more likely to search for that. :smile:

Totally. I feel like Fallout 3 was maybe a bit stronger in terms of this kind of immersive/incidental storytelling.

I had about a 100 Oblivion mods, but I don't remember OOO. What did it do? I take it you've already looked at overhauls like SkyRe?

Thanks for your kind words, people. They bring a smile to my face. :smile: I'm not sure about the model side of things. I've just been working from the .DDS texture files, which has been working fine. Though having said that, there are some oddities in the way the .DDS files are applied. Certain parts of the texture get stretched or distorted in-game. And other parts seem to get tiled strangely. The main imagery is fine, but some of the stuff in the fringes are affected. You can't really notice this in vanilla since everything's so blurry anyway, but with the higher resolution you do start noticing it. For example, some of the imagery on the fringes of the mural gets a bit more elongated than it should. Also, some of the 'blank' areas (ie. areas of the texture file that don't contain imagery, but just contain 'empty' stone texture) get elongated in weird spots. To combat this, I've decided to load in test textures that contain a precise grid on them, and then study those textures in-game to see just how and where exactly that grid gets distorted. Then, through trial and error, I should be able to compensate for the distortions by distorting my originals in the exact opposite way. Can anyone think of a better way to solve this problem?

Thanks! I appreciate it :)

Here's a preview of my latest mod. I'll be working on this over the next few months, so constructive feedback is appreciated. If you'd like to be notified when it's complete, you can follow my facebook page. Overview When I played Skyrim back in 2011, I remember fighting through a Nordic ruin, and coming across my first Nordic mural. It seemed to depict strange gods and beasts, and speak of a world long forgotten. With breathless anticipation, I walked up to examine it, to let its story and lore soak into me. I still remember the feeling of disappointment I felt when I realised just how horribly low-res the mural was. It wasn't just ugly, it was damn near indecipherable. When I came back to Skyrim in 2014, I was delighted to learn just how many mods had been made since those early days. Every conceivable element of Skyrim had been improved and beautified. Well, almost every element. Those murals were still pretty much as bad as ever. Sure, a few people had modded them, but those mods did little more than apply a sharpen filter, re-export the normal maps, and/or do some higher-resolution outline work over the originals. The major texture overhauls like Skyrim HD didn't even touch them. You can't really blame the modding community for this. The problem was that the vanilla murals are just so low res that they don't really give you anything to work with. To do a decent job, you'd have to scrap them and completely redo everything from scratch. And this would be a very loooooooong process. No one would be stupid or crazy enough to do that. Until now. http://snag.gy/rQTN9.jpg Wait..... 8192 x 4096 - are you crazy?! Believe it or not, even this seemingly preposterous resolution is actually slightly smaller than ideal! The thing is, the in-game Nordic murals are huge. If you play in first-person and walk right up to one, you'll only see a small fraction of the mural. In other words, the mural becomes several times larger than your screen. If you're playing at 1920x1080, that means that the whole mural is now, say, 5k-6k pixels wide. This problem is compounded by another problem: the various mural elements share space with each other. So, for example, the file that contains the women carrying a queen (shown above) also contains three men carrying a king to the women's left, and a large blank area to their right. So, while the file is already a paltry 512x512, the group of women is only 150px wide! And yet they practically fill the screen if you walk right up to the mural. So yeah, you can see why things get as crazy blurry as they do. So, even at 8192 x 4096, the women get slightly enlarged (and hence blurred) when right up close. But of course this is minor, and they still look great. And of course, when I release the mod, I will create a lower-res version for people too. http://snag.gy/QOagj.jpg OK, but whose system could run something like this? Actually, the VRAM usage is surprisingly modest. Many people will be able to run even the high-res version. I have VRAM issues on my PC (CTD if I have too many texture mods), and so I normally refuse to use 4K textures. I use 2K textures and even 1K textures where possible. But I have zero problems running these 8k mural textures, and most other systems will be fine too. This is for two main reasons: 1. I've been smart and selective in how I compress and export the various files. The filesizes aren't particularly huge. 2. The murals are all in small interior locations with few objects being loaded into memory. The stress on your memory in these dungeons is nothing compared to being outside. If you're successfully using texture packs outside, then you'll probably be able to use the highest-quality version of my mod without any problems Like I said, I don't even use 4K textures normally. But my feeling is that if you're going to splurge your VRAM on any texture, then it should probably be the mural textures: they're large, they're interesting and lore-rich, you'll naturally want to examine them up close, and they're indoors where your VRAM is usually underutilised. http://snag.gy/cGLvC.jpg How are you making them? I'm redoing every mural from scratch, element by element. I'm creating everything in Photoshop on my wacom, with multiple layers of overlayed texture. I'm staying as lore-friendly and close to the originals as I can (but Bethesda didn't make it easy on me - the originals are so low-res you can sometimes barely bloody tell what's on them!). To increase the final visual quality, my source files are even larger than the output versions. For example, the source of the file pictured above (the bear god Stuhn) is 7000 x 7000. The PSD file is over 3.5GB, and I regularly hit 95% RAM usage on my 32GB RAM system when working on the mod in Photoshop! I'm using multiple visual references as I work, to keep things accurate and lore-friendly. So far, I've already referenced scientific illustrations of bear skulls, photographs of Viking decorative woodwork and sculpture, and a Rembrandt portrait- to name just a few! http://snag.gy/kpWLh.jpg When will it be ready? A few months still. I've already sunk a good hundred or so hours into it, and I'm not even a third of the way through. But I'm highly motivated, and it will definitely get done. It will take time though, that's all, as it's a side project I make in my spare time. To keep track of my progress and be notified of when it's done, keep your eye on this thread, or follow my facebook page. Until then, please let me know what you think, and if you have feedback on what I've done so far. :smile:

Could it be a HDD issue? I've often had regular freezes in the past with open world games as the game struggles to load textures and other things in time. Skyrim is one of the first open world games where I haven't had any freezes at all, and I've been putting that down to the fact that I've got it installed on an SSD (separate to my windows drive which is also an SSD). Have you guys defragged recently?

ok, well if you claim that the copy is legit then I guess we can't get in trouble for helping you, so all's well. Out of curiosity, could you link that guide? (I googled but couldn't find it). Steam is generally considered to be pretty ironclad as far as DRM systems go, so I'm curious how you've managed to circumvent it. As a side note, I doubt that disabling Steam would be worth it. When using NMM and SKSE, you can (read: must) launch the game without using the Steam launcher. Steam is more or less invisible during the whole experience, apart from having Steam running in the background. So, disabling Steam wouldn't give you much advantage, but would introduce the possibility of problems, not to mention put you in the disadvantage of having to fart around with manually patching the game etc. It's possible (I'm not saying it's probable, but it might be possible) that whatever workarounds you've employed to get rid of Steam are causing the game to run in an unoptimised way. Are you able to test the game with Steam to see if it makes any difference? Anyway, it would be good to know what your system stats are around the time you freeze. That would help in knowing whether the problem is vram, ram, gpu, etc. Skyrim Performance Monitor will help get accurate info in that regard.

OP has already tried that (read the original post) I personally don't think the laptop is solely to blame. I think the OP is right to suspect that there's something else going on.