How I fixed my ENB issues.

[VelocityPolaris]

I feel kinda dumb right now, because the solution turned out to be only slightly more complicated than "have you tried turning it off and back on again." Figured I'd post it on the off chance that someone both makes the exact same mistake, and comes across this.

 

When I was first starting my New Vegas playthrough, I wanted it to be heavily modded, of course, to hide the fact that it's an old, unstable game that tended to be pretty ugly, even when it came out. While texture mods can make individual objects more detailed, only the enhanced shaders of an ENB (I'm told it stands for Easy Now, Boris) can really change the look and feel of the world. But no matter how well I followed the instructions, I could never get the ENB to work without game-crippling issues, so I ended up doing the whole playthrough without 'em. The glitches mostly consisted of grasses, objects, and most of all, bodies of water being completely visible through the suddenly-transparent rocky soil of the Mojave. Not only was it annoying, but it was disorienting, since it was hard to judge distance or where solid objects were.

 

ENB instruction manuals will usually say some variant of the following. First, you go to Fallout3/NewVegas on the ENBdev website, download that stuff, extract the files into a folder using an extractor, then drop them into your Fallout: New Vegas files folder. Second, you download the actual ENB mod that you want, extract and drop again. Third, you open your New Vegas launcher and disable three visual settings - turn off anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, and water displacement, and you should be good to go. Now, obviously I wasn't, despite following these instructions, and I just found out the really stupid and simple reason why. I was using Mod Organizer 2 to handle the mods and launch the game. When running the game from mod organizer, changing the vanilla launcher settings doesn't affect the game at all. There's a selection thingy near the top right of mod organizer, though, where I can select to start the fallout: new vegas launcher instead of NVSE. I used that launcher to change the ENB graphics settings, then exited out and started the game through mod organizer & NVSE as always. So yep, fixed it, no problems at all, feel kinda dumb right now.

Edited February 11, 2019 by VelocityPolaris

[Stargazer09]

Thanks for sharing, I'm glad that you got it fixed. However I have a question - some mods require NVSE to work properly, and if I'm not mistaken launching the game via the default launcher will cause some mods not to work. So how do you reconcile the two? They seem mutually exclusive to me.

[VelocityPolaris]

Thanks for sharing, I'm glad that you got it fixed. However I have a question - some mods require NVSE to work properly, and if I'm not mistaken launching the game via the default launcher will cause some mods not to work. So how do you reconcile the two? They seem mutually exclusive to me.

 

Sorry, mixed up my wording in the original post.

 

The answer is that you don't launch the game via the default launcher. You start the default launcher from mod organizer, use it to change the graphics settings, then you exit said launcher and run it from NVSE.

 

I'll go back and edit the previous post so it's less misleading on that front.

Edited February 11, 2019 by VelocityPolaris