Best way to load up Skyrim AE the fastest for modders endlessly restarting?

[anjenthedog]

7 hours ago, szmnozi said:

Ok, sorry but I'm in IT and having to wait 1-2 minutes IS a very long time (in IT)

I kinda wasn't joking with the "picosecond" comment. (or was, but not snidely) We've (collectively in the computer-intimate society we live in today) developed an immediacy issue, where a second takes a while, and a minute is an insufferable delay.

Every mod you add adds another bit of startup code, and subsequently increases the Skyrim environment's  load time, each adding more load time depending on what they provide and what they need to initialize. Some reuqire quite a bit, some very little. With all due respect, you should already know that (generally speaking)  from your own occupational demands.

Anyway, good luck. 

[szmnozi]

9 hours ago, IsharaMeradin said:

Okay, then since no one has given you an answer that you like.  Perhaps it is time to look into the game engine to see if you can figure out how to shorten the load time yourself.  After all, that is how mods are made.  See something you want different and make it if it hasn't been done already.

You're right, my Skyrim folder is about 15GB so if I get 32 GB of RAM I should be able to move this to a RAM Disk, MO2 does a virtual file system so that should be totally fine. I just have to move it back every time I restart a computer and not sleep it.

I'm wondering about the ENB though. Is it normal that it compiles the shaders for 16 seconds every time? It shouldn't be compiling anything at runtime except maybe if you change certain mods? But I have no idea what is up with that, or the 15 second blank screen that comes after that which is literally a blank screen with no spinner nor anything. That is also ENB doing that, the latest version.

So it's kind of ENB screwing this whole thing and I tried to search and the guy who makes ENB seemed to just shrug it off in on an ENB forum.

I'd also like to find a faster way to Alt-Tab in Windows out of Skyrim and back again. 

Anyway, I'll update this if I figure this out, thanks.

 

[AaronOfMpls]

I've never used ENB myself (always been fine with the default lighting), so I'm not familiar with its quirks. 

As for Alt-Tabbing, I always have the game paused (either in the Esc menu or the console) and the Steam Overlay open.  It avoids a few issues (like double mouse pointers) when tabbing back.

[szmnozi]

So if anyone's interested I managed to speed it up by a lot.

- First there must've been some problem with my ENB files because I did another install of Skyrim + ENB and suddenly the 15 seconds blank screen that ENB did is gone. So ENB had some serious problem loading, but didn't give any message.

- Second, SEE Engine Fixes to remove the mod warning, and Start on Save 2.6. Now it starts up entirely automatically. Apparently some other mod removed the Bethesda logo so I didn't need the Bethesda Logo Remover this time.

- Then I did a quick way to turn ENB on or off from my Taskbar in Windows, I wrote two Windows batch files to simply move d3d11.dll to a temporary folder and back, one is ENB-ON.BAT the other is ENB-OFF.BAT. These I put inside the game folder and all they have in the files is "move d3d11.dll TEMPFOLDER" for OFF and "move TEMPFOLDER\d3d11.dll ." (move to dot, move to parent folder denoted by period) for ON.

- Windows doesn't allow pinning batch files to the task bar, but actually it does, you just have to create a shortcut and then inside the shortcut properties you have to change the target by prefixing it with "cmd /c" and then it expands that for you to something like C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /c "C:\Skyrim\ENB-ON.bat", and you can then pin the shortcut to the taskbar. So now I have the ENB on and off pinned to the taskbar.

- Lastly I switch to windowed mode instead of full screen and then there is hardly any wait time when tabbing out of Skyrim to something else while keeping Skyrim running. With fullscreen there was a 5 second wait for me.

This reduced my load time to less than 20 seconds with ENB off and 40 seconds with ENB on.

I'll still try to reduce that, but it's so much better now.

 

Edited May 24 by szmnozi