Yep. Mod Configuration Menu is what it’s all about! No more carrying around silly extraneous crap in inventory, or having to cast immersion-breaking “spells” to configure mods.
Odd question about mods: what is the reason that many mod sites require registration? I’ve seen it more and more as the years have progressed. Is it to avoid spiders from slowing down the network and using limited bandwidth, or is there some other goal as well?
When the dlc makes it to the PC I’ll have to give some of these a go. Especially the HUD turner offer.
godhugh
1644
If you don’t like DoF, just turn it off. It’s very simple. Open up enbseries.ini in the main Skyrim folder and change the following line:
EnableDepthOfField=true
to:
EnableDepthOfField=false
You can do that with any of the features of ENB, actually.
If you really like CoT (and you should, it’s amazing) then I would recommend picking up SkyRealism: ENB Evolved. It’s designed to work with CoT and stays very true to the color scheme of the vanilla game. Turn off the DoF like I showed you above and the performance hit is very small.
Pogo
1645
Yeah I’m aware of how to fix it, I’m just mentioning it as an annoyance that it’s defaulted to “On” by all of these people because they think it makes for a better experience.
Daagar
1646
I think it is more so they can make pretty screenshots :) DoF makes for some great stills. I’ve rarely found it usable for playability though.
It’s fantastic. I already have 3 mods that use it and should have 4 by the end of the day (Frostfall). Read your journal entries on the front page and was amazed at how you pretty much ended up with all the same mods I did. You had a couple I didn’t that I quickly added. I haven’t read too far back into this thread, but I’ll give a big thumbs up to Wearable Lanterns. It lets you clip a lantern to your belt so that you have your hands free to fight. Very cool and if you want to play hardcore it has the option to use oil that you can buy at any of the vendors.
Once Frostfall 2.0 gets released I think I have my master build for now. I haven’t gone crazy with texture mods, just grabbed the HD pack and then 4-5 mods to toss on top of that. Only thing left to to is muck around with ENB. I’ve never used it before so I think I’ll just grab the one COT recommends and call it a day.
With all the realism and balance mods the game is HARD, but a lot of fun. I love that if I see a river in a cold area I know that I can’t just swim across it. It really puts you into the game.
Oh one other mod that is simple, but great is Footprints. I don’t see any reason why everyone wouldn’t use it. It adds footprints for you and creatures into the snow. Simple, but awesome.
By the way, I’m working on writing up my full mod installation process, failures, and successes for a post here…y’know, once I’m satisfied.
One thing I will say, use Elys Memory test thingy as mentioned on the previous page. It’s a great way to test things.
Also, once you’re ready to check your performance after installing some mods that may drain it, there’s one spot I think that trumps all others in the land of Skyrim: there’s a road that runs WNW out of Riften (it’s the road that heads to Ivarstead, not the road that most directly heads to Windhelm). If the lake and Goldenglow Meadery are to your south as you go, that’s the right spot.
Anyway, I call that the road where frames go to die. Something about the way the game renders the aspen leaves (that fall which is a huge performance hit) makes that the single biggest performance chokepoint in the game. With ugrids set to 7, on my rig (i5 2500K overclocked, twin 670 GTX graphics cards with 2gb of VRAM on each) I still have spots along that road running west from Riften where I’ll dip into the low 40’s on framerate for just a second before it hops back up.
All I know is the with NMM this is soooooo easy compared to Oblivion. POOP took like forever to install and I can wack my install and redo it in an hour.
Pogo
1650
Yeah it’s beautiful in dungeons, but running through a forest or town you tend to get this back and forth blurring of foreground and background as you focus on nearby NPCs or the leaves of bushes and trees that you’re running through. It’s pretty obnoxious and has nothing to do with realism.
SkyUI 3 looks great.
Couple of caveats, though. They say they don’t support the Mod Organizer, but it seems to work if you unpack the BSA file. ALso, if you use a custom mapped gamepad (sacrilege, I know), you won’t be able to toggle in the barter/container menus if you have certain commands mapped to multiple key presses. See the readme.
Figured I’d install ENB and mess around with that while I wait for Frostfall to be released. OMG it’s driving me nuts. I can install the base ENB drivers and it runs fine. As soon as I add any custom one I get horrible black shadow issues everywhere. I’m about to give up as this is just f’n annoying.
Hmm, I just tried running the Nexus Mod Manager, which it updated, but when I launched the new version it just hung at the splash screen. I tried the three-finger salute to force quit the program and got some cryptic error message from Windows. When I tried to shutdown it told me that NMM was holding up shutdown so I told Windows to force quit out of it. Not much success there because the machine never shut down–had to hit the reset button and ran the System File Checker now–nothing amiss-- gong to try running Malware Bytes and see if it finds something. Am running MSE as my antivirus-- is that incompatible or something?
I have no idea. Do what everyone else does when something like this happens: try it again.
Got it working. Holy crap I don’t think my computer likes it. Even with messing with the settings mentioned in STEP it cuts my FPS in half. I think I’ll pass on this one for now.
A friend of mine on a machine with SLI’ed GTX 680, 16GB RAM and some variety of i7 CPU, says his thoroughly modded Skyrim install runs at 80+ FPS. Or at 50+ with FRAPS recording. Or at 35+ with ENB. Or at unplayable crap FPS when trying to record ENB.
… So yeah. ENB is pretty heavy. But while I have no first hand experience running Skyrim+ENB, I have tried to use it with TES2&3, and with GTA4. In my experience it cuts your FPS by at least 1/5th, pretty much regardless of your hardware. I’ve never found it worthwhile. I’ll much rather have a stable frame rate that matches the display I’m using.
Pogo
1657
Turn off SSAO and Depth of Field
Hey, what’s the best way to find out what graphical mods I’ve installed already? It’s been so long I can’t remember.
Daagar
1659
That’s the point where you reinstall fresh and re-mod :)
Pro tip: leave a copy of the mods you install in a folder somewhere. Then use the command line to generate a text file of the folder’s contents when you’re done modding.
