HELP - Stars and sky stuttering!

[Kinlar]

I've had this problem for years and I almost always run into it in a lengthy play-through, yet I still don't know what causes it, but I can assure you, it's not your graphics card or your INI settings or your sky texture.

 

I currently have two subsequent saves, one with the stuttering night sky and one without. There's absolutely no change in any settings between them, the timescale value is the same and absolutely no change in mods either. I just finished my business in Torvald's Cave and then went to Mzulft. I noticed the problem when I got out of Mzulft but then I realized the problem had already started as soon as I entered the place. There's about 10 minutes between these two saves and sometime in between Torvald's Cave and Mzulft entrance the stuttering started. I'm not saying that these two places have something to do with the problem, but it's very likely a bug caused by the game itself. Could also be a bugged script (either a vanilla script or from a mod) or too many of them, or a script or some FX attached to something it wasn't supposed to. Whatever it is, it's a bug.

Edited October 31, 2015 by Kinlar

[OlivierDoorenbos]

EPIC 2020 necro-post:

I have new information on this. The update rate of the night sky hemisphere rotation gradually slows down the longer you play skyrim on the same playthrough. It starts completely smooth, but after about 200 ingame days, the update rate gets perceptibly slower. By 500+ ingame days it has reduced from the original 60 fps to about 2 fps which is why the flicker / pulsing is so obvious.

 

The reason why most people never see this problem is because most people don't play a single character for more than 100 hours. But for the few of us who play a character for many hundreds of hours, its an annoying thing when looking at the night sky.

 

I don't know why this happens, but I speculate it has to do with some of the internal clocks in the game engine that persist with your save file having a limited number of significant figues - as time goes on and the decimal point shifts, we lose significant figures behind the decimal point resulting in larger discreet updates of the night sky.

 

There is no fix that I am aware of (other than starting a new game), however there are effective mitigations available - stay with vanilla textures, or chose night sky texture mods with low resolutions (1k for stars) or that have a less sharp smoother star texture - this will greatly reduce how noticeable the flicker is.

Edited July 17, 2020 by OlivierDoorenbos