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The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Mod Discussion and News [Creation Kit released]

Dmax3901

Member
So finally got the internet back, what's the best way to approach the official high res texture pack? Install it then install all the mods on top of that?
 
Tried ENB out. It looks nice and all but I sacrifice 60fps for 30-60 with all settings maxed. Kind of a bad trade off.

Which ENB are you using? It all depends on your settings, you can get an ENB profile that will actually IMPROVE your performance... also, the new ENB .105 is out which improves performance substantially, I'm trying to transplant my settings into that in order to get the performance bonus, however it's not quite right yet.

Edit - WOW, so many mods updated today!! To celebrate my excitement I'm going to put images with the captions and links today... how lucky are you all!

1rwkk0.png

Isilmeriel's LOTR Weapons - IMO the best custom weapons in the game, this guy is a GENIUS model / texture artist. I hope he keeps making stuff because his work is second to none. I've said it many times before, LORE friendly or not, I don't care these swords just look too damn good to pass up on - you can even use the Shards of Narsil (the blade broken by Sauron as a Dagger... SO cool). Does anyone disagree on this?


2eyk0p.png

The Arena - Oh, now I've been basically playing here in the Arena all day. So fun. It's HUGE, and it spawns enemies for you now. It's just the best way to fight enemies and I've had no problems now. It even works like a proper Roman Arena by spawning the enemies behind a gate and you have to pull a chain to let them out - it even has a dungeon area that holds the enemies in their cages waiting to fight before the show. It's the BEST, I was having too much fun that I forgot to stop and take screenshots, now that means a LOT for me (the shot above is from the page on the Nexus, it looks better if you're got upgraded graphics, that's the graphics with Vanilla Skyrim. F'n awesome. He's planning on putting in spectators that cheer, NPC's that you can place bets on certain aspects of the match (like if you will be able to kill enemies in a certain amount of time etc). I think this is almost my favorite mod.

3t3jnr.png

4nsx7u.png

Static Mesh Improvement Mod - this guy is a MACHINE, another great upgrade. Today he updated the shop sign meshes... all 44 of them. He says he's got OCD so he's going to fix up every single Mesh Fuck up there is in the game's graphics. I think I might suffer from OCD as well, whenever I get into something I always just get COMPLETELY obsessed with it. I also think I might be telepathic, or perhaps I'm just going insane.... :)P)

Weapons and Speed Overhaul (Includes Weapons and Armor Fixes and Weapons of the Third Era) - personally I think this is just about as essential as it can get. Pretty much just a balancing thing and combined 3 mods into one, I like that.

Forgotten Lore - A new Quest Chain mod for Mages

http://www.abload.de/img/59r5bg.png
MOAR Kontent - One of the best Weapon mods outs there... MASTER SWORD BABY! Basically every 'well known' weapon from every well known series ever. Keyblade, Sword of Omens, etc. Thing is, the BS non-lore friendly weapons are hidden away and can't be crafted, you have to find them, but it also ads a whole bunch of really cool craftable weapons aswell such as Pole-Arms, Shields and Katars. He's planning on adding apparently HUNDREDS of items... wholly cow what a mod.

Do people care about upgrading their character meshes? There are SO MANY of them out there that it can be difficult to know which ones to choose, and many of them really fuck with the vanilla armors and stuff, I've gone through them ALL and I know which ones work best, I can post them but they contain NSFW images in a lot of cases (especially in the case of some of the men body upgrades... YUK) do people want this? I don't know if they do or not... I'm expecting no, but not sure. PM me if you want them? I don't play my game with naked stuff (because I currently live with my parents) but pretty much all of the body mesh / skin upgrade mods have nudity in the links... so? Keep it to PM?... Yeah... PM me if you want them.
 

Branson

Member
Which ENB are you using? It all depends on your settings, you can get an ENB profile that will actually IMPROVE your performance... also, the new ENB .105 is out which improves performance substantially, I'm trying to transplant my settings into that in order to get the performance bonus, however it's not quite right yet.

Confidence Mans from the OP.
 

Karak

Member
Killable children screws your game up.

I got a random thieves guild quest asking me to rob a kid.

I also saw some giant kids drinking in bars.

Tried the enb mod but it was too cartoony for me.

Ya also had the same thing with killable children. While I luckily have Wars in Skyrim running with over 200 mods and its perfect. Much of this has to do with intelligently managing your load order. Its such a crap shoot right now.

Also love this. Removes that shit blur during the killcam
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=11757&searchtext=
 

Karak

Member
So I've been having a few crashing issues since the 1.4 update. Sometimes the game will hang indefinitely at a loading screen, other times it will suddenly CTD with no error message during gameplay or combat. Not sure if it's something the update introduced or if some of my mods aren't playing nice...

Can anyone tell me if any of these mods conflict with one another in any meaningful way? Or if I should change the load order?

S66Ya.png
tlPhs.png


All of the mods I've installed through Steam are minor. I guess I have a couple mods I installed way back outside of NMM but they were all pretty insignificant as well (Night sky and time on loading screen off the top of my head)

Also, has anyone tried the More Dynamic Shadows mod? It seems to make the lighting a bit too crazy and prone to wig out for my tastes.

Well 1.4 did induce crashing to CTD for many people and fixed many other peoples problems. That's the issue with patchss sadly. However looking at your load order I can see that you also have a good deal of enhancements that are going to bloat your used vm. What's the GFX onboard memoryspace for your card?

Killable Children is an issue. Dynamic weather CAN be an issue when run with Arrowstick of all things, especially if that also induces a high decal count during gameplay. More dynamic shadows isn't worth it right now for the issues it can cause.

WIS needs to be BEFORE any of its optional mods. A must or you will get crashes.

Here is the thing though. No one can promise you what will or will not run. No one. You may hear "this works fine" with this or that. But the fact is no one has any clue right now, it just works for whomever posts at that particular time. Including me:)

Case in point the issues with particular mods where major things occur when an autosave can happen. 1 person can play for 6 months and never have the poor timing of having the game autosave while it is running a recovery cycle to fix NPC pathing. Someone else can have it save the moment it is doing it and the NPC is literally missing from the world on their very first autosave.

If you get a chance to mod a bit you will find out these issues...FAST.
I would say to take a note or two about what you were doing exactly when it crashed and post again. Might be easier to offer assistance.

EDIT:
From WAR In SKYRIM page

REPORTED INCOMPATIBLE MODS

- Killable Children (MUST load after WiS for this mod to work!!!!) - I would remove this just because.

Crash to Desktop in WIS-(CTD). Firstly make sure you are using the latest version of Skyrim that already has the large access tweak for RAM. If you do not have the latest Skyrim patch, then please do not complain to us.
 
I tried for SO long to get Wars in Skyrim to work... so long, literally 2 weeks but it just conflicts with other mods and is a dead end.

Get Deadly Combat instead.
 

Piano

Banned
Well 1.4 did induce crashing to CTD for many people and fixed many other peoples problems. That's the issue with patchss sadly. However looking at your load order I can see that you also have a good deal of enhancements that are going to bloat your used vm. What's the GFX onboard memoryspace for your card?

Killable Children is an issue. Dynamic weather CAN be an issue when run with Arrowstick of all things, especially if that also induces a high decal count during gameplay. More dynamic shadows isn't worth it right now for the issues it can cause.

WIS needs to be BEFORE any of its optional mods. A must or you will get crashes.

Here is the thing though. No one can promise you what will or will not run. No one. You may hear "this works fine" with this or that. But the fact is no one has any clue right now, it just works for whomever posts at that particular time. Including me:)

Case in point the issues with particular mods where major things occur when an autosave can happen. 1 person can play for 6 months and never have the poor timing of having the game autosave while it is running a recovery cycle to fix NPC pathing. Someone else can have it save the moment it is doing it and the NPC is literally missing from the world on their very first autosave.

If you get a chance to mod a bit you will find out these issues...FAST.
I would say to take a note or two about what you were doing exactly when it crashed and post again. Might be easier to offer assistance.

EDIT:
From WAR In SKYRIM page

REPORTED INCOMPATIBLE MODS

- Killable Children (MUST load after WiS for this mod to work!!!!) - I would remove this just because.

Crash to Desktop in WIS-(CTD). Firstly make sure you are using the latest version of Skyrim that already has the large access tweak for RAM. If you do not have the latest Skyrim patch, then please do not complain to us.

Thanks for the info, I'll sort through all of it tomorrow. I'm running at GTX460 1GB alongside a Phenom IIX4 955BE and 4GB of DDR3.

I tried for SO long to get Wars in Skyrim to work... so long, literally 2 weeks but it just conflicts with other mods and is a dead end.

Get Deadly Combat instead.

Well, I'm primarily interested in WiS for filling out Skyrim's really empty world with increased spawns, not the combat improvements.

Also, does the static mesh improvement mod linked above put any additional strain on the GPU or CPU?
 
Thanks for the info, I'll sort through all of it tomorrow. I'm running at GTX460 1GB alongside a Phenom IIX4 955BE and 4GB of DDR3.

Well, I'm primarily interested in WiS for filling out Skyrim's really empty world with increased spawns, not the combat improvements.

Also, does the static mesh improvement mod linked above put any additional strain on the GPU or CPU?

It does, but no way NEAR as much as textures, the triangle numbers are kept really low to try and keep the processing down for the 5 year old consoles, polygons aren't something that usually is a big problem for current PCS so give it a try and if it slows you down, just remove it... it's really worth it IMO.
 

Dmax3901

Member
I updated few mods today and no Nexus Mod Manager crashes shortly after I start it up :/

Any ideas?

EDIT: Actually incredibly frustrating. I've reinstalled it several times, crashes every time.
 

Karak

Member
Well, I'm primarily interested in WiS for filling out Skyrim's really empty world with increased spawns, not the combat improvements.

Ya WIS is great, as close to a full feeling new way of playing Skyrim as I have seen so far and since people get it working fine...well then its basically the same thing as any other mod, installer beware:) Got to keep on top of things when it comes to Bethesda games and their mods. Its never an easy thing.

Good luck!
 

IoCaster

Gold Member
Here's my screens for today... sorry for so many, but I couldn't pick and choose when I think they look this good.

If anything, I've got to work on the black levels during a bright day, but you can't be expected for there to be too much black when it's very bright out so there's that.

Here we go:

Lots'O'Pics

That's certainly a unique look for the game. I kind of like it, but some of the textures look low-res to me. In any case, please continue doing what you've been doing because I enjoy your comments, screens and links.

For my part, I've pretty much settled on the look of my game and I stick relatively close to the original.



 

spirity

Member
That's certainly a unique look for the game. I kind of like it, but some of the textures look low-res to me. In any case, please continue doing what you've been doing because I enjoy your comments, screens and links.

For my part, I've pretty much settled on the look of my game and I stick relatively close to the original.


But but but Skyrim is DULL and GREY!!!
 

Karak

Member
That's certainly a unique look for the game. I kind of like it, but some of the textures look low-res to me. In any case, please continue doing what you've been doing because I enjoy your comments, screens and links.

For my part, I've pretty much settled on the look of my game and I stick relatively close to the original.




Holy ballz.

Sir hands down that is amazing and by far the best pics I have seen. I love it!
 
Check out Project Frenzy guys... this in ambitious project to say the least....

Hardcore Skyrim - creates Hunger / Thirst Needs so that you must rest, drink and eat in order to survive. I haven't tried it out yet, but I think I'm going to... give food a purpose. This replicates the survival needs of New Vegas / FO3

untitled-18pyml.png

Tyrael Armor (From Diablo) - This Armor looks fkn sick, a much better 'evil' armor than the Daedric IMO, however if you're a purist it's not for you :) The disadvantage is that it's not modular yet, but the modular version is coming. Guy is a talented artist!

MOAR KONTENT was updated again, I seriously suggest that peeps at least check the weapons out... ;)

Here's my screens from yesterday - unfortunately I spent most of the day just having fun after tuning my ENB settings because I think i've got it just about right now and the new version of the Arena is just so damn good that I was playing that for such a long time.

I hope you might all agree that things are really starting to 'come into their own'. I unfortunately didn't get a big opportunity to take a lot of various shots in different places in order to get a good scope of things. I have also been really working hard to tuning my mod setup and everything in preparation for the possibility of releasing a 'package' if need be.

 

IoCaster

Gold Member
Really don't like the yellow tree. Doesn't fit at all.

I sort of agree. I'm not sure which mod is responsible, but I'll hunt it down and modify it. I'm trying to keep the overall aesthetic close to vanilla with a bit more polish.
 
So, guys I have no idea about the CK (I'm watching video tutorials etc..) but has anyone figured out a way to introduce custom music yet? I'm itching to add some exploation/battle music to the game.
 

Karak

Member
So, guys I have no idea about the CK (I'm watching video tutorials etc..) but has anyone figured out a way to introduce custom music yet? I'm itching to add some exploation/battle music to the game.

Sure you can do that without the CK.
If you just want exploration and so forth, you just need to download the codec that allows you to change it to the xma(or whatever its called) music format Skyrim uses. I found a link in the nexus forums. If you can't find it PM me and I will zip it up and send it to you.

Then you simply take whatever mp3 you have change it to the format(command line code that's easy) and add it into the proper music folder, "town, exploration, battle" and name it accordingly "battle01, battle02"

It is fairly easy. I made almost all my own music for the game and got it in in a couple minutes.

So far I haven't found any restrictions on how many tracks a folder can have and it will cycle them correctly.
 
Sure you can do that without the CK.
If you just want exploration and so forth, you just need to download the codec that allows you to change it to the xma(or whatever its called) music format Skyrim uses. I found a link in the nexus forums. If you can't find it PM me and I will zip it up and send it to you.

Then you simply take whatever mp3 you have change it to the format(command line code that's easy) and add it into the proper music folder, "town, exploration, battle" and name it accordingly "battle01, battle02"

It is fairly easy. I made almost all my own music for the game and got it in in a couple minutes.

So far I haven't found any restrictions on how many tracks a folder can have and it will cycle them correctly.

That's great, I thought you could only replace current game music and not add new ones, if it's that easy I'll be a happy camper.
Thanks.
 

Karak

Member
That's great, I thought you could only replace current game music and not add new ones, if it's that easy I'll be a happy camper.
Thanks.

Yep it is. But again if you can't find the codec program(where I ran into issues), just PM me. Other than that its easy as pie! No need to even open the CK. For some reason the original thought was that you had a hard limit to the files it would play from a folder. But simply renamed them the next number in line battle01, battle 02. Seems to work. I will go back and check tonight for you to make sure I didn't adjust anything else or that I am not mistaken. Actually it just dawned on me. No this for sure works because I have the originals and my own right in the same folder and I heard my own music last night while playing.

a bit of data with some modifications since this post from another website

It's all in xwm format, so you'll need to convert your music to that. Once you've downloaded xWMAencoder, place the .wav file you want to convert in the xWMAencode folder. Rename it to something simple (like 1.wav). Now go to the Windows start menu and type CMD in the search box to open the command shell. Navigate to the xWMAencode folder (for example cd desktop\xwmaencode) and type 'xwmaencode 1.wav 1.xwm' without the quotation marks. That will convert the wav files to xwm. Now you need to know what music files you want to replace. Create a folder such as Combat and place the encoded xwm file in it. Rename it to whatever music file format is needed (in this case mus_combat_01.xwm). The game will now play this music.
 

Karak

Member
Are there any mods that improve that combat significantly?

Other than changing statistics and formulas within the combat engine and stuff. Nothing great that I have seen so far.
Deadly Combat does some of that.

The new mod that adds kicks and punches(sorry can't remember the name) seemed pretty cool and actually looked good but I haven't used it.
But nothing awe inspiring yet.

I used Killmove +, killmove First person view, and noblur killmove. As well as some decapitation mods. But nothing more than that.
 
Other than changing statistics and formulas within the combat engine and stuff. Nothing great that I have seen so far.
Deadly Combat does some of that.

The new mod that adds kicks and punches(sorry can't remember the name) seemed pretty cool and actually looked good but I haven't used it.
But nothing awe inspiring yet.

I used Killmove +, killmove First person view, and noblur killmove. As well as some decapitation mods. But nothing more than that.

Yeah, the martial arts combat mod is cool, but it really doesn't ad anything but animations... it doesn't fundamentally change the combat in ANY way which is particularly annoying.

I know what you mean though, you want the combat to be more like the Witcher 2 or Dark Souls / Demon Souls right? I think that formula is the general formula that should be the base line for all medieval games from now on.

Deadly Combat is the one that improves combat the most IMO, you have to block in order to survive, and you can't just keep hammering away at the enemy because they block you almost all the time, if they have a shield.

Since installing Deadly Combat I have been enjoying Combat a lot more. If you try to take on more than 3 guys at once you're fucked unless you use some serious fancy techniques - that said I'm playing with 4x Master Difficulty here so I generally die after 3 or 4 hits anyway... so 3 guys are particularly hard (especially if there is someone standing at the back with a bow. I almost exclusively have to play sword + shield because nothing else works.

Confident Man's natural ENB looks so good.

This game is just beautiful

That's what I used to use, and thanks to Confident Man, I was able to get my settings to the place I wanted yesterday :)

It really does look incredible doesn't it :)
 

Karak

Member
Yeah, the martial arts combat mod is cool, but it really doesn't ad anything but animations... it doesn't fundamentally change the combat in ANY way which is particularly annoying.

I know what you mean though, you want the combat to be more like the Witcher 2 or Dark Souls / Demon Souls right? I think that formula is the general formula that should be the base line for all medieval games from now on.

Deadly Combat is the one that improves combat the most IMO, you have to block in order to survive, and you can't just keep hammering away at the enemy because they block you almost all the time, if they have a shield.
Ya never did the martial arts one though the kick looked cool:) But I haven't sought any out yet.

As for combat actually I think the poster I responded to wanted that more of those things than I do.
I am not really looking for any sweeping change to the combat so far. I am not sure what I want from the combat but currently I am doing ok with it. Once I added the killmove changes I really have been pretty damn happy. I am usually pretty flexible on those things.

I guess I would like a couple things like a hot button to keep an enemy in view (Dragon fighting because a pain for me at times due to my mods) fighting 2 dragons or 1 flying over the top of you can get disorientating.
 

Dmax3901

Member
I hate to be 'that guy', but I'm seriously stuck here.

Nexus Mod Manager won't open. I've deleted every mod that I downloaded shortly prior to the problems starting, I've reinstalled it, is there anything I can do short of deleting all the mods and starting over?
 

IoCaster

Gold Member
I'm guessing it's due to a saturated graphics filter or something?

Looks more natural in that shot.

It looks like it was two normals (same name, different size on the same texture file) conflicting that seemed to be at fault. I've gotten so used to mixing different textures from a variety of mods that it was bound to happen.

Hm, guys Steam is downloading something for Skyrim, was there any patch/fix intended to be released? Maybe is an official HD texture pack fix?

There might have been a CK update. I couldn't start it up earlier and assumed it was updating or something.

Anyway, here are a few more screens I took today...











I've started touring Skyrim with a squad of 'Glamazons':

 
I hate to be 'that guy', but I'm seriously stuck here.

Nexus Mod Manager won't open. I've deleted every mod that I downloaded shortly prior to the problems starting, I've reinstalled it, is there anything I can do short of deleting all the mods and starting over?

I'd love to help but I don't use NMM so I'm going to have to defer to someone else sorry dude :/

Does Skyrim itself work?
 

Dmax3901

Member
It's all good, I bit the bullet and removed all the mods and started from scratch. Has taken a while but I'm getting back to where I was. Thanks anyway.
 

Karak

Member
People were looking for a Wars in Skyrim Replacer???

OH MY!!!

FYI if your trying this one. If you have duel GPU's you may be ok because it basically just throws NPC's everywhere, unlike Skyrim wars. It brought my system to its knees and many times just had guys flying into the air because of all the collision issues with Skyrim's engine(giant smash into the air issue) and many of the NPC's are still labeled as whatever faction they are in the normal game. So if you kill one you get a bounty, companion kills one and you get a bounty. Within about 20 minutes I owed like 90,000 in bounty. They have a lot of cleaning up to do. Mileage may vary of course but its harsh for basically just throwing NPC's into the world and CTD's in Whiterun and Thalmar Fort and one other town that they are working on fixing right now. I will 100% keep an eye on it but had to uninstall after a couple solid days of trying to work around it. I got a ton of money in the game but not enough to pay that bounty:) It's going to rock when they clean it up!

If anyone can live with that stuff at the very least use Possessive corpses- http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=4528 so you don't get savegame bloat from NPC death which is built into Skyrim. This mod will cause a good deal of that to be negated. It won't go away as Skyrim itself is the culprit and any massive NPC battle will bloat it. But it will fix it a bit.

When I tested it I was running:
i920 at 4.2ghz
570gtx
8 gigs ram

Skyboost test extreme(new one today) may work to get to playable res if your running other mods and have high res but its got an issue with sound creation right now they are trying to fix. Setting the boost to extreme gets maybe 9FPS more but turns off all sound and reducing shadow draw distance by 1000 in the settings.

Also a suggestion from their comments list
"Within SKYRIMS'S GAME SETTINGS, I recommend REDUCING your DRAW DISTANCE, notably for NPCS.
While you're at it, bring down your ITEM and OBJECT draw distances.
Also drop the resolution by 1/3rd and you can get better FPS of course."
 

Karak

Member
It's all good, I bit the bullet and removed all the mods and started from scratch. Has taken a while but I'm getting back to where I was. Thanks anyway.

Do you use organizer? With the virtual file system you should never have to reinstall anything and you can rollback with 1 button press(clicking the last working save). That's what I am using and haven't ever had to reinstall mods and I have well over 200+. Its been such a life saver. I don't know what I would do without it! It also works with Boss and almost everything else. They are currently working on WB access as well.
 

JunkieJZ

Neo Member
Well I tracked it down...


Did you get these colors with ENB or FXAA injectors?

Getting more to the point, I guess... I'm looking to add some color to my game very similar to yours it seems, without all the other 'fluff' stuff: Sharpening, DoF, FXAA, etc. What would be the best way to do so?
 
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