Rokreon Posted May 15, 2012 Share Posted May 15, 2012 What exactly are ENB mods? Im new to modding and do not understand all the acronyms used for modding. WIP,UNP, and others that i could use help understanding. As for ENB i understand they are a graphical improvement from what i can see on my own. If you wouldnt mind telling me which ones you use and why could also help me select one. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ResolveThatChord Posted May 15, 2012 Share Posted May 15, 2012 Well, WIP stands for Work in Progress. Proper English would have the acronym disclude the "I", but nobody cares. UNP, HGEC, and CHSBHC refer to specific body mesh repacement mods. If a modder makes a custom set of clothes for a non-vanilla body mesh, it's common courtesy to let players know which body it's compatible with. I think ENB refers to a graphics enhancement mod. Like with body mods, if you make a mod that depends on a popular existing mod that has similar but non-compatible competitors, you need to let players know which one it's made for. For example, a SKSE requires the Skyrim script extender to work. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LargeStyle Posted May 15, 2012 Share Posted May 15, 2012 (edited) Hi Rokreon, ENB (or its full proper name ENBseries) is a relatively simple mod which applies a lot of pre and post processing visual effects to the game. In reality it does more than it sounds because ENB also controls light values, as in sunlight strength, shadow strength, direct sky strength to name but a few. The results can often be truely stunning visuals hence why this mod is popular. It is also relatively easy to configue and reconfigure to your personal tastes as ENB can be changed by editing a few files' values. There are also certain ENB files configurations which add extra static Depth of Field (DOF) and dynamic DOF effects, colour correction, "movie" grain filter, vignette effect. If you delve even further into the ENB files there are regular saturation values, tone mapping, and all kinds of other stuff! The mod itself is basically a few files which you place into Skyrims MAIN folder (not Skyrims DATA folder) and that's it. That said, there are 2 ways ENB is applied to Skyrim. The earlier versions of ENB (up to v1.02 I believe) are wrapper versions, and v1.03 onwards are injector based (which simply requires the ENBinjector.exe manually started before launching the game). There is a significant performance hit to Skyrim when running ENB though. For me it approx halves the frame rate. The injector version is supposed to be less taxing on your computer / GPU over the wrapper version, but I've experimented with this and if there's a difference then it's extremely sublte. The general performance impact on Skyrim with ENB get slightly worse the higher the resolution you run the game at too. ENB also has an SSAO option (ambient occlusion) which at low resolutions isn't a major fps hit, but gets significantly worse again the higher the resolution. ENB is argueably the most visually impressive mod out there, but I get the impression a lot of people disregard this mod as their computers can't run it very well, or they're just not willing to comprimise performance in any way. That said, the later versions of ENB (1.05, 1.06, and 1.08) are a lot more performance friendly, but they have a lot of their graphical functions cut out, so I personally didn't have much interest in this. I have just seen a new ENB v0.111 that might also be worth a look, but I have tested it just yet. As for existing / recommended ENB mods... ENBseries official website (download links for Skyrim): http://enbdev.com/download_mod_tesskyrim.htm Superb ENB-RL by Superl3-sung9533 and Alakan: http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=11318 Sharpshooters Extreme Graphics Vision ENB - good performance by Sharpshooter8: http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=15105 Confidence-Man ENB by Confidence Man: http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=5253 ...these are the top 3 ENB set on Nexus based on download amounts. Obviously you can search through them all yourself using Nexus' Files option at the top of the main webpage. Click Files, then search by Categories, then look under Visual and Graphics. I then sort the results by download amounts to find the most popular. The best ENB mod in my opinion is my very own one, but I've not released it yet as I'm experimenting with other Skyrim mods at the moment! Please bear in mind the "main" file that activates ENB - the .DLL file is no longer allowed to be hosted directly on Nexus anymore at the ENB creators (Boris) request. Some ENB mod sets still have this file present, but some you will need to go onto the official ENB website (linked above) and you'll have to find the required .DLL file relative to that particular ENB version the author of the ENB preset has based their mod on. Hope that all helps. As you may've noticed I'm a major ENB enthusiast, and have thoroughly enjoyed ENB seriers in not only Skyrim, but also in my GTA 4 days. Good luck and enjoy it! Edited May 15, 2012 by LargeStyle Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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