Wow, awesome. Thanks godhugh! Will report back!
Holy christ Godhugh, that’s a massive mod list. Like 5-6 times the amount I use.
Cause some of the mod makers being too high on themselves. A super secret 7z sounds good to me.
In other news; ENB has had an update.
http://www.enbdev.com/download_mod_tesskyrim.html
A question:
How do I know that nVidia Inspector has actually–you know–made the changes I told it to do to Skyrim? It doesn’t seem to do anything, I don’t think. Right now I have it in a folder on my desktop and I open it, open the profile for Skyrim, make some changes, save the changes…and then what? That’s it?
Also, one thing I just do not get about Neovalen is his insistence on using the Unreal Cinema ENB. I am suspect of any ENB pack that decides that it’s a cool thing to put fake letterbox widescreen bars at the top and bottom of my display. That’s just an incredibly dumb thing to do.
godhugh
1925
What are you trying to with nVidia Inspector? All your AA/AF/SSAO settings should be setup in ENB and not Inspector, otherwise some ENB features won’t work correctly.
Agreed about Unreal Cinema, I’m not a big fan. I use Project ENB - Realistic version and I updated it to the latest ENB version on my own. No letterbox or sepia nonsense in that one.
Heh, just basically trying to make sure AA/AF/SSAO are off so that the ENB cand do it. ;) Seems to be working.
My own mod setup continues apace, although I’m probably going to have some questions over the next day or so about your mod order, GH. I basically used just a part of Neovalen’s secondary setup. I liked that he uses that optimized SRO alongside the hi-res texture DLC and doesn’t use the other two big texture thingies. I think that’s a smart way to go.
I don’t like Unreal Cinema at all, obviously. (I mean, let’s get real here. Who exactly does the creator of Unreal Cinema think is using an ENB mod for Skyrim? Take that set of people and now tell me how many people in that set do not own a widescreen monitor. Now tell me why people with widescreen monitors want fake letterbox bars added to the screen?) I also don’t like that he leaves out CoT, which I love. I think I’d like to try out Realistic Water Two…but somehow the RND compatibility patches for it have vanished, so I think I’ll go back to WATER.
Wondering if anyone has an opinion on the big NPC mod that adds new voice work (some of it sounds great, wondering if it all is of that quality) and NPC interactions and quests.
Interesting NPCs? The voice acting is sufficiently skilled. In some ways it’s better than the vanilla game, since they don’t reuse the same half dozen voice actors for everything. Most of the quests are of the “go here and meet a guy” breadcrumbs so you can find said interesting NPCs. There are a few real quests though, and they’re not bad.
I really love Fjona’s song (particularly the idle version, rather than the performed version. The idle version is haunting).
godhugh
1928
It’s included in the main download for RW2, which is much, much better than WATER. It’s actually a different version of the Realistic Water 2 ESP file so you won’t see a specific compatibility patch for RND in your load order. Just make sure you choose that option when installing RW2 in Mod Organizer.
Wondering if anyone has an opinion on the big NPC mod that adds new voice work (some of it sounds great, wondering if it all is of that quality) and NPC interactions and quests.
I’m not a fan. It has some interesting characters but I hate how you’ll talk to a random guy in a bar and end up getting a 20 minute dissertation on their life story which ends with them swearing loyalty to you for life. Also, the voice work is incredibly uneven. And the children, my god, the children. They’re teeeeeeerrrrrriiiiiiibbbbbllllleeeee.
The solution there is to stop asking them for their life story. Unless you have OCD there’s no need to root through every dialog branch.
I call the mod “Shut the fuck up already NPCs.” Makes me rage when you go to talk to one and you have to go through FIVE PAGES of dialog before you can even get a word in edge-wise. Pisses me off so much, I want to kill them. But you usually can’t, because most of the fuckers are flagged as required!
I hate that mod.
So I went up to this chick in a bar, and every time I asked her a question she answered it. I asked her question after question and she kept responding! It’s like she thought I wanted a response, when all I wanted was to ask twenty or thirty prying questions in peace. It was AWFUL. ;)
But seriously, there are times when I think “OK, that’s enough of that” when talking to a character from Interesting NPCs. So, I exit the dialog menu and stop talking to them. Sometimes I’ll ask them a couple more questions next time I see them if I found them interesting, but if I found whatever they were saying boring I won’t. Treating it like something you’re obligated to slog through is going to be tedious, but there’s no reason to use the mod in that fashion.
Except we are trained by the game to exhaust every dialogue to unlock new quests. When I start my new playthrough, I am going to make a lite version with subpar contents removed. I still think it is a feat that the mod creator managed to get so much shoved in.
godhugh
1933
Exactly. I want to get the quest or complete a quest. In doing so, I’d rather not hear about their hard childhood as a small lizard in the swamps of Blackmarsh and the Khajit who tormented him all the way across the border to Skyrim (while the voice actors cat knocks a lamp over in the background).
I’m obviously over-exaggerating a bit and there is some good stuff in that mod but, IMO, there’s just way too much mediocre stuff as well. Especially if I have to sit through an almost 2gb download to get it.
Quaro
1934
All seems inconsequential next to the benefits. I will never spend 1000 hours tweaking and balancing Skyrim just right and I am one of the most hardcore modding PC gamer people I know. A one click package would get 100x increase in the people trying Skyrim mods.
Jason who tried to build an installer on this forum, even with all those tools he built it still took hours to get everything downloaded and working and the second the web site updated it broke. He only had to do so much work because he had to build an installer in such a way that it pulled down all the files from the web, and he went to every author and got permission, etc. etc.
It just seems absolute insane to me that every mod author is so opposed to people packaging up their work and (gasp!) maybe just sticking with outdated versions cause it wall works together.
I’m not a fan of the attitude of a number of mod authors in that regard. Without some sort of mandatory gpl-ish license requirement for skyrim mods, you end up some pretty ridiculous drama from mod authors, or even understandable situations where someone is just tired of maintaining whatever, but no one can take it over without their explicit permission (which they’re no longer around to give).
godhugh
1936
But it’s not that simple. What works well together on my machine almost certainly work well together on your machine, especially if it’s any kind of extensive mod list (and if it’s not, why do you need a compilation?). Mod authors don’t want to deal with a large group of users who know nothing about the individual mods they’re using, how to install them, or how they work because the user just went out, downloaded a comp, hit install and never bothered to read any details. Then, when something inevitably breaks they’ll go crying to either the comp author or all of the involved mod authors bitching about how their mod broke their game.
I’m sorry, and I don’t mean this to sound elitist, but if you’re not willing to invest some time to learn how mods work and how to get them to play nicely together (or, at the VERY least, go download the latest version on your own) then you probably shouldn’t be trying to install extensive mod lists. Those folks should stick with a few simple graphic upgrades, new quests, new armors, etc (ie: mods that have very few conflicts).
The personal trial and error component is huge. So many of the tweaks you see people suggesting have to be flat out wrong, but for whatever reason (well, whatever reason is mostly a lot of Skyrim errors boiling down to race conditions, so anything that changes the timing of actions slightly can have a huge impact) on their setup it gets past this or that issue.
Add on to that the number of vanilla issues people will lay at the feat of seemingly random mods and I can see not wanting to deal with any of that. I very often see “your mod is causing script X to log errors in Papyrus” when it’s just a broken vanilla script, and the user is only just now noticing it and blaming some random mod author. The Unofficial Patches are at least cutting down on some of that by cleaning up broken vanilla issues. The logs are getting pretty clean these days.
You can put up all the disclaimers in the world and no one will read them. It’s hard to read more than a few pages of the Deadly Dragons mod thread without someone complaining about not absorbing dragon souls, for example, when the USKP basically has a “hey, dipshit, your load order is wrong” section about that, and the fact that dragon soul absorption isn’t entirely reliable unmodded either…
Quaro
1938
If there wre 100x more people playing a mod, there would 100x the complaints sure. That’s inevitable.
I will never spend 200 hours digging into Skyrim mods like some people will, even though I know from seeing it on a friend’s computer who had it all setup, it can be amazing. Even if I spend the time I will probably find out it’s horribly unbalanced 20 hours into the game and have to redo something. But a community managed distribution by experts, like a linux distribution, has none of these problems.
The current state is probably as far as a volunteer based system could bring us. I hope Bethesda would wise up and follow Valve’s model of for-profit user generated contents. And it is not like people are not making money off mods already. The pageviews Nexus gets are already enough to pay the salaries of its crew.
I was getting the not so unusual crashes around the Windhelm stables/bridge/farms region, because that area is just a damned mess.
Anyway, at one point futzing around with it I snapped a save that wouldn’t load. That’s not the weird part. The weird part is I got it to load by using TerrainManager settings that were MORE resource intensive than what I was running when it wouldn’t load.
Oh Skyrim, you so crazy…
The cherry on top was coming back out of Windhelm a little later, a dragon spawned in. Yeah, that’s just not happening. Dragon spawns over the Windhelm bridge are like distilled crash essence. I tried to fight it a couple times there, but eventually just gave up and fast traveled out of the city interior so the spawn would catch me where I went, rather than over the crashiest spot in the game ;)
