HELP just started adding mods

[BIgjguitar]

I guess im very lucky that my saved game is working great. was nice to play for a while tonight :dance:

 

How can you tell the good mods from the crap ones? I was filtering by endorsements at first.

I figured if it had a lot of endorsements it should be good.

[ripple]

I guess im very lucky that my saved game is working great. was nice to play for a while tonight :dance:

 

How can you tell the good mods from the crap ones? I was filtering by endorsements at first.

I figured if it had a lot of endorsements it should be good.

 

1) any mod that doesn't have a proper description (e.g. "Mystery Cave! Don't want to spoil anything just download and check out the Mystery Cave and be surprised!"), you should skip :thumbsup: A responsible modder will be transparent about what their mod does, what it edits, so users will be able to get a sense of whether the mod will be compatible or not with the other mods they are using before they fire up the esp in TES5Edit.

 

2) user comments. Not always accurate, and CTD or bug reports are often just improper installation or mistakes on behalf of users. But pay attention to how the modder responds to comments. If they are consistently hostile to even constructive criticism or are constantly in denial of recurrent reports of the same bugs, skip (although modders for 'popular mods' where they field an endless tirade of 'ur mod made my game CTD help plz!' deserve significant leeway because everyone's patience has limits, and sometimes the 'recurrent reports' can be a common issue that the modder has already addressed or explained).

 

3) mods that have not been updated for ages -and- where the modder has not responded to bug reports for the longest time, skip.

 

4) I personally treat my load order like a temple (and I don't mean one of Dibella's...). I check every esp in TES5Edit so I can see exactly what it does before I install the associated textures/mesh/scripts. I compress textures using the 'Texture Optimizer', and sometimes I open up meshes in NifSkope to check them out (because a long time ago, in another Bethesda gamebryo game, I experienced consistent CTDs from a faulty mesh and it took me a long time to find out which one).

 

5) I make my own (modular) compatibility patches where I check out (almost) every single conflict in my load order and, if they are not covered by a Bashed Patch, merge them where possible or otherwise decide, on an individual basis, which record should override others.

 

zMy Sorting and Weight Adjustiments.esp
zMy ArmourEdits.esp
zMy Merchant Modifications.esp
zMy Level List Edits.esp
zMy Wildlife Edits.esp
zMy Character Settings Edits.esp
zMy NPC Edits.esp
zMy NPC Compatibility Patch.esp
zMy Weapons Compatibility Patch.esp
zMy Race Compatibility Patch.esp
zMy Effects Compatibility Patch.esp
zMy Armour Compatibility Patch.esp
zMy Perks Compatibility Patch.esp
zMy Lighting Patch.esp
Bashed Patch, 0.esp

 

'ReProccer' may one day make my compatibility patches redundant, but that day hasn't arrived yet. What was it that bben's signature say? "We often spend as much or more time maintaining our mod load orders as playing the game"? Yup :)

 

Sometimes it's not the mods, but a limitation of the game engine. Every mod that adds more spawns and spawn points to the worldspace will make worldspace travel more unstable depending on what they edit and how much they edit. SkyTest, Warzones, etc. This is why the vanilla game suffers from a 'depopulation problem' where entire cities have the total population of a small pub and vanilla spawns in the worldspace are limited to 2's and 3's. Anything greater than that and the game engine will start to show its age, and Bethesda doesn't want that. I keep my 'location changes' mods mostly to those that only affect interior cells.

Edited January 11, 2013 by ripple

[gamefever]

Ripple

That's rock solid advice have a Kudo's

[BIgjguitar]

Awesome. I did pick Civl War mod last night and tried it out was fun, then I turned it up a notch and CTD.... lol so I turned it back and then just back one more step and BOYA! DIE IMPERIAL PIGDOG!!!!! *AHEM*

I also tried my first mod and failed misably. All I wanted to do was change Lydias hair and it didnt work, but I also learned that not deleting the files that were supposed to change her hair made me CTD, after a few minutes ingame.

I also noticed that when I went to edit a face of someone elses MOD, it only showed the skyrim Icon and not the face in the editor, is this some sort of Creater Protection on the MOD?

 

In my Skyrim dream MOD world, I want to make a DOTA Skyrim mod :devil:

Edited January 12, 2013 by BIgjguitar

[gamefever]

Bigjguitar

 

I don't have any experience with the Skyrim construction Set right now, that's a whole other bag of worms. But there's a ton of Lydia replacers, she's probably the most commonly replaced character in Skyim. Heck I think there's one that makes her look like Angelena Joelee.

 

Civil War is an intense mod, I wouldn't put too much more on your mod list while running with that.

[BIgjguitar]

:wallbash: Well s***... Things were going great until I got the dreaded black face bug. Tried as I might I couldnt fix it. After trying several set ups with the full intent of getting back to my saved games I had to start all over again.

But this time I was ready thanks to the help in this post. I also bought Dawbguard addod. All I did was revert back to your list and I purposely left out some mods that I thought I could live without. Des Mons, I can live without that. And some of the armor sets as well. I only loaded one mod at a time and kept using a clean saved game to look at its effects, and try and fix any problems that arose.

For some damn reason Apachii hair give me the black face dont know why, I think its because I chose to have CBBE big booty load the CBBE Faces...Even after loading their so called patch for this problem it wouldnt go away.

In the end I solved the problem by using Dibellas npcs overhaul. The only problem is I still get NPCs with no color in their hair but small price to pay i guess. I now have Civil war mod and everything runs great. I also fixed my load problems I had with SKYui and Skse is finally loaded right. There are errors that BASH says I should fix.

Im kinda wondering since I really dont know much about cleaning, other then the simple clean explained in the txt file for TES5, if I should do anything at all since the game is running smoothly with no crashes. I guess I could save my games again and see if TES5 will fix stuff the simple way. I had thought I read for civil war that I was not to do a clean fix. anyway heres the master list and ive been playing my main since yesterday with no crashes even when entering random civil war zones!

Loading mod list:

(0 -> 0) Skyrim.esm

(1 -> 1) Update.esm

(2 -> 2) Dawnguard.esm

(3 -> 3) ApachiiHair.esm

(4 -> 4) ApachiiHairFemales.esm

(5 -> 5) SPIKE.esm

(6 -> 6) WARZONES - Civil Unrest.esm

(7 -> 7) NPCs of Dibella - Resources.esm

(8 -> 9) Improved Combat Sounds v2.2.esp

(9 -> 10) Fantasy Music Overhaul Redone.esp

(10 -> 12) SkyUI.esp

(11 -> 13) iHUD.esp

(12 -> 15) hothtrooper44_ArmorCompilation.esp

(13 -> 17) ImmersiveArmorsNPCs.esp

(14 -> I8) Better Dynamic Snow.esp

(15 -> 18) Guard Dialogue Overhaul.esp

(16 -> 19) Immersive Weapons.esp

(17 -> 20) dD - Enhanced Blood Main.esp

(18 -> 21) TemptressVixen.esp

(19 -> 22) UFO - Ultimate Follower Overhaul.esp

(20 -> 14) Dynasty Armor.esp

(21 -> 23) TTS - Lydia.esp

(22 -> 24) NPCs of Dibella - Females.esp

(23 -> 25) CazyMale.esp

(24 -> 16) TeraArmors-CBBEByNausicaa.esp

(25 -> 11) StaticMeshImprovementMod.esp

FYI, after reverting to our setup a that you posted, this is how NNM set up the load order.

Edited January 13, 2013 by BIgjguitar

[Deleted1308005User]

Warzones seems to cause CTD's, freezing, and such nowadays.

 

ONLY bug with it is that it's outdated.

I think it could be fixed by simply loading it into CK, and saving.

(However, I've got no idea how to de-esmify it, and then re-esmify again.)

 

tes5edit could probably do that, at least there's options for it.

But I don't know if De-esmifying would break it. Could someone verify?

[gamefever]

It should not break it, it's actually something I did quite frequently for Fallout 3.

 

I often would turn files into Masters becuase the common logic was that made the game more stable with a heavy load order.

 

There are some other problems with Warzones.

-I dare say it puts too many mobs in for the engine

-By comparison ASIS defualt only plugs in like mybe 3 too 7 more mobs at random using a script...Warzones puts like 50 in a zone.

 

-With even just 1024 textures for skin, weapons, and armors your putting a lot more strain on your hardisk when it fetches texture files for your Graphics Processor.

-Fixing that requires you make changes to your INI and allow papyrus a greater amount of read/write resources but that only helps with scripts that Warzones uses and not textures.

-I've no idea how you'd get your Game to be allowed more read/write beyond that.

-The 4 GB pluggin is now applied on the game by Bethsada.

-That allows the game engine to use your RAM for the game engine which is way faster than hard disk read/write

-Which means that it's most likely textures holding you back.

-Too fix texture problem you'd need a faster hard disk.

 

So recap

-It's likely your Hard Disk limitations

-Harddisk fetches textures and hand feeds GPU

-Hardisk also handles Papyrus

-Your RAM handles Game Engine

-Game Engine and Papyrus are actually 2 seperate things. They even use 2 seperate hardware components.

 

Your fix might ultimately have to be.

-Use 512 Textures base consul packaged textures.

-Reduce or use no scipted mods.

 

Your Graphics Processor

-Is capped by the speed of your Hard disks fetching power.

-Your GPU is only responsible for processing pretty pictures on your screen.

-Your processor can actually do more to the pictures on your screen with adjustments in it's panel.

-example if your Hard Disk is the bottle neck your GPU is still putting pretty pictures on the screen but slowly.

-Example continued you notice when you lower resulotion that it doesn't give you very much more FPS

-Example continued this would be the case when your GPU is that much better than your Hard Disk.

 

You can fix up your HardDisk Limitations doing the following.

-Have a smaller Skyrim Install

-Think of it like this your whole skyrim folder, your hardisk has to search through the whole folder.

How BIG is that folder, 2 Gigs?, 10 GIGS?, 50 GIGs? I've had as much as 30 GIGs?

 

-All those extra files floating in there that you don't need can add up fast and slow down how fast the Hard Disk can find the textures it needs to feed the GPU.

-This is a reason for why Texture Optimizer deletes jpegs, .BMPs, and basically any file that's not a DDS from your Textures Folder.

-The Hard Disk has to sort through those to grab the files it wants!

 

-Even a stupid Readme or fancy accrobat how to guide sitting in your game folder can slow down performance.

 

TES5edit

-It's nice But

-It wants to store backups of all your ESP's in your skyrim\data folder

-Now all those .ESP.Backups have to be sorted through by the computer just to find the right ones.

-Skyrim\DATA is not the best place to store BACKUPS!

 

Textures Continued

-This is not a good place to store unused texture data

-Say you've got an ESP unchecked that normally tells the game pull data from textures\armor or whatever

-The extra bloat still slows your Hard Disk down when pulling the right textures.

 

Haveing unused scripts in your data\scripts can do the same thing to Papyrus

 

Another fix

-Making sure you use checkdisk, defrag

-The computer will tend to reorder the files for faster fetching

 

3rd Party gaming cleanup programs

-pretty popular becuase they tend to reorder the files on the disk and put them in places to be fetched faster.

 

Think of your hard disk like a Library

-ever go to the library and find that a book is out of place?

-How much did that slow you down?

-Using a defrag puts all the books back into the right places.

-Using a program made for gameing is like having a Book Rep come into a Bookstore and saying hey these are the popular books they go here becuase they move more books that way.

Edited January 13, 2013 by gamefever

[BIgjguitar]

Currently my skyrim folder is 13.7gig. :psyduck:

I will spend some time cleaning out some files and trying to fix some as well. I did set WZ:civil to the lowest spawn settings, 1 spawn Low, 1 creature with an 8% random and things are going great so far.

Ill post any finding from runing TES5 clean up and see how that goes!

[gamefever]

@ BijGitar

 

 

Get this program, Optimizer Textures by AdPipino

 

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/12801

 

This is not a mod!

This is an awesome little program that cleans up and recompreses texture files.

 

Most people refer to the "Black face bug"

-It's not really a bug

-It's an indictor that your running into problems with textures.

-There's a lot of different reasons it could be.

 

Reasons it could be.

-.DDS texures can be compressed a number of different ways

-The game can acctually read quite a few different compressions

-Some compressions are way faster than others.

-To top it off there's MIP MAPS which help speed up how quickly the game can process textures

 

Reasons continued

-Textures made by fans.

-Sometimes in their haste

-They didn't use a good DXT compression for the game

-They may have not put MIP MAPS on their texture

-They may have packaged the file as a 4096 by 2096. Skyrim prefers textures to be SQUARE

--->Skyrim doesn't like RECTANGULAR textures

-Sometimes they forget to package an ALPHA texture

 

Also by far and large

-Their textures are huge in file size.

-Like grass is normally like 1K bytes now is 10 megs of file space!!!

 

Optimizer

-Can fix up mistakes

-Resize textures

-Put Mipmaps there

-Put in an Alpha

-Choice a better DXT compression

 

Back to Black Face bug

-You could just exit Skyrim

-And reload inside a Tavern

-You'll get your normal face back

-You ran into a Texture problem...

-sometimes rather than slowing down the Hardisk just doesn't send the proper texture and you get Black Face Bug.

-It might not be the fualt of CBBE texture modder or even APACHI

-It won't hurt to apply an Optimizer either

-You might not ever see that happen again using this fix.

Edited January 13, 2013 by gamefever