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.

Do you mean it doesn't let you load the save? That's odd. Normally it gives you the warning but you can still choose to ignore it and load the save.

Your best bet is to turn ALL the effects off in enbseries.ini, then load up the game. Hopefully, there won't be much of a performance hit yet. Now, hit shift+enter while in game, and turn on effects in the enbseries section one by one, to see which ones contribute to the framerate loss the most. The most likely culprits will be depth of field and SSAO. It may be that you just need to turn off one or two effects to get a decent framerate. You can also try setting various "quality" settings to low or medium (the difference compared to high is often negligible) Also, make sure Vsync is turned off in the game settings and in your nvidia control panel. It should be turned on in the ENB ini files only. And doublecheck that you aren't using temporal antialiasing in the enblocal.ini Also, are you using the wrapper or injector version of ENB, and what's ENB the version number? The wrapper version gives better performance.

It's not your specs. A slow laptop might result in the game to chug slowly when ENB is installed, but it shouldn't result in entire effects being missing. It sounds to me like ENB isn't installed properly. It could also be something else conflicting with ENB. The most likely candidate is antialiasing: ENB isn't compatible with MSAA antialiasing (a.k.a. 'real' antialiasing). So, you need to make sure that your skyrimprefs.ini has: iWaterMultiSamples=0 iMultiSample=0 (But feel free to keep bFXAAEnabled=1) You also need to make sure the settings for skyrim in your nvidia control panel don't force any antialiasing: nvidia control panel>Manage 3D settings>Program Settings tab>Skyrim> and make sure that : Antialiasing - mode = Application Controlled Antialiasing - Transparency = off Vertical Sync = use the 3d application setting (that final one will make sure your driver doesn't try to force vsync, because vsync should be set in the ENB ini settings instead) Finally, are you using any other Skyrim plugin/hack that uses a file such as d3d9.dll, such as the 3Dvision Helixmod, SweetFX, or post process injector?

Can you explain what seems wrong to you about the door texture? It looks fine to me. Maybe post a before and after.

Have you looked in NMM's options screen to see which folders it saves mods in? There should be 2 or 3 relevant folders

The biggest factor in how much VRAM a texture takes up is the compression type, not the resolution. I just did some tests, and a 16384 x 16384 file is 1.4GB when saved in 8.8.8.8 format, but only 174MB when saved in DXT1 format. Textures saved in DXT remain compressed in VRAM according to this page. So, after some more testing, it seems that textures up to 16k do indeed work. I don't know why I got the purple texture before. Maybe I just got unlucky with a corrupted DDS file. I successfully got the following variants to display in-game: 8192 x 8192 DXT1 (43mb) 8192 x 8192 DXT3 (87mb) 8192 x 8192 8.8.8.8 (350mb) 16384 x 16384 DXT1 (174mb) 16384 x 8192 DXT5 (174mb) The only files that didn't work (infinite loading screen....or at least it seemed to be - I force closed the process after a minute or two) were: 16384 x 8192 8.8.8.8 (600MB) 16384 x 16384 8.8.8.8 (1.4GB) (I also tried making a 32k x 32k file, but I got a "cannot save - out of memory error" in Photoshop, even though I have 32GB of RAM - ouch!) So it seems like filesize is the mitigating factor here. As for the purple texture I got initially, and which spurred me to create this thread, I guess it was an unlucky corrupted file, or maybe user error.

I'm wondering what the exact limit is for a DDS file in Skyrim's engine. 4096 x 4096 files obviously work, since many mods use them successfully. I've resized a certain vanilla DDS from 1024 x 512 to 8192 x 4096. When I saved it in 8.8.8.8 format, it didn't work, but instead produced a purple texture. But when I saved it in the much smaller DXT1 format, it did work. That leads me to suspect that the limit is based on filesize, and not resolution. Does anyone know the exact limit? Or is it perhaps tied to the settings of the particular mesh? Or is the limit calculated cumulatively, in conjunction with all other textures currently in memory? I should mention that I tested the DDS mentioned above in a small indoor location, and I don't believe I was anywhere near the 3.1GB limit. My GPU has 6GB of vram. I should also mention that yes, yes, I know that textures above 4k are in most cases pointless (I would argue that even most 4k textures are pointless), but let's leave that discussion out of it please. Besides, there are a few situations in the game where certain objects are so big that their textures are stretched to many times the size of the monitor when your character is up close, and even 4K textures get somewhat stretched in these cases.

Why only d3d9.dll and enbhost.exe? In the copy of the ENB zip file that I have, the Wrapper folder contains about 16 files and 2 folders. I think you should copy all of those into your Skyrim game folder too. Then, install Viridian and let it overwrite whatever it wants to overwrite.

You have left out the most important point: Do you or do you not still have two simultaneous copies of the game currently installed?

Just curious...how does Skyrim know if the clock the CPU is running at is an Overclock?? IF you have a 100% Stable OC, Skyrim could give a crap. I have had MY OC running for 3 years, and Skyrim loves it. I-7 2600K (Stock 3.4 ) running @ 4.8 on AIR. Do you ever have anything positive to say? I didn't say anything about the CPU. I have experienced problems with overclocking my GPUs (Titan SLI with a custom vbios) and Skyrim. Just the other day, I tried a mild overclock which immediately caused water to render improperly (massively ugly glitching) in whiterun. I also experienced similar problems two years ago with a different card (gtx 680 with factory vbios) - overclocks that would work for every other game I threw at it would cause Skyrim to crash. You answered your own question: "If you are running a 100% STABLE OVERCLOCK". What do we do to ascertain whether something is 100% stable? We run a variety of intensive programs for extended periods of time to see if they crash or produce errors. Ideally, these programs should be a blend of synthetics (eg. prime95, aida64) and real-world programs, because different programs stress the hardware in different ways. Skyrim is a real world program, and like every other program, it will obviously have a breaking point in terms of the overclocking you can get away with. In your case, that breaking point might be 5.0 Ghz, while on a different chip with a different mobo and different OS environment, it will be some other frequency. Like you, I have never had problems with Skyrim and an overclocked CPU either. But that is completely beside the point. You and I are only two people, and our experiences don't mean s***, because everyone's computer setup is different.