The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Mod Thread

Elycion wrote:
duckilama wrote:

That kid that keeps repeating "Another lackey come to lick my father's boots. Great." Needs silencing. I'd love a targetable command to just shut him up. Call it the Duct Tape mod.

I'd be totally behind a mod that flat out let me kill off that particular NPC, having listened to that obnoxious voice clip so many times. I have no problems with doing this, because at no point do I ever associate an irritating digital artifact with a real child. :)

That can be arranged.
If anyone wants to send the jocular whelp off to another dimension, you can drop the console with ~, click on the little scamp, and type disable and hit enter.

Elycion wrote:
duckilama wrote:

That kid that keeps repeating "Another lackey come to lick my father's boots. Great." Needs silencing. I'd love a targetable command to just shut him up. Call it the Duct Tape mod.

I'd be totally behind a mod that flat out let me kill off that particular NPC, having listened to that obnoxious voice clip so many times. I have no problems with doing this, because at no point do I ever associate an irritating digital artifact with a real child. :)

Although I too really wanted bad things to happen to that kid, he is necessary for a side quest.

Ok, that little kid's audio/speech file is in
\Steam\steamapps\common\skyrim\Data\Skyrim - Voices.bsa

The file (extracted with the Fallout Mod Manager's BSA browser) is da08_da08hellos_000b1231_1.fuz
Fuz is proprietary, it seems, and combines Lip Sync data at the beginning of the file (after some stuff that includes what appears to be an offset to the RIFF header) and an xWMA file, which is part of Microsoft's XNA/xAudio something or other.

If you delete everything in the .fuz file with a hex editor up to where the string "RIFF" begins, you get a playable-in-Windows-Media-Player xwma file.

I don't know how I accidentally picked exactly the file I needed by random, but I have an xWMA file I can post for someone if they want to hear that annoying brat over and over.
(Edit: I found a place to plop the file, but I'm not sure linking it is kosher. Mostly, I want to remove all or most of the audio data from it, then pack it back up in the BSA, then make Skyrim use that instead of the normal one. )

i38warhawk wrote:

I'm going to post this here instead of the main thread to see if anyone has any ideas. I figure most of you guys are more technical so I might have better luck.

I'm having some performance issues and I can't seem to pin down the culprit. Inside a dungeon (caves, insides of keeps) I'm getting around 120+ FPS. Outside in the world I'm getting about 28 average with some drops into the low 20's. I think the drops might be due to loading new chunks of the world, but I can't confirm. Inside of the towns and cities I get around 25 FPS with drops into the teens. Combat has almost no affect on the FPS. So I've been doing a lot of tweaking, but nothing seems to fix the issues. Monitoring my video card I noticed that inside the dungeons it was under around 75% load. Inside the cities and outside of town the highest I ever noticed the load going to was 33%. CPU never goes above 80%, and I almost always have around 800 MB's of RAM open and ready to be used.

So I've turned off shadows (which are apparently handled by the CPU) completely to see how they impact performance, and didn't notice much of a difference, maybe 1-2 FPS on average. Turned off AA and AS (from 4x,2x), with no real gains. I did the 4GB unlock for RAM, but there is no way to tell if that did anything. I doesn't feel like it did anything and my RAM usage hasn't change. Found an ini tweak that fixed some peoples issues and supposedly increased memory utilization, but it didn't seem like much.

All my drivers are up to date and I'm wondering if it's an issue specific to my video card. My system should be able to handle the game on at least high with (4x,4x), but it's chugging with everything turned down. I know the specs are ancient for some of you guys. Wondering if anyone with a similar setup is having any of the same issues.

Specs:
q6600 OC'd to 3.0 Ghz (maybe a bottleneck?)
ATI HD 6950 2 GB
4 GB RAM

I have a Q6600 too, and have experienced similar problems. From what I can tell, which Tweakguides.com backs up, the game is quite CPU limited - I also think it only uses 2 cores, which means the Q6600 is less than ideal. I think draw distance might be the big thing here - give changes to that and report back. The Tweak Guide will probably have more specific info.

Second and third images are the same. Think you meant to get the View Distance in there.

garion333 wrote:

Second and third images are the same. Think you meant to get the View Distance in there. ;)

Poop, you are correct sir. Damn copy - paste...

Rectified, for great justice.

Don't know if this helps:

Had the same issues with my E7200 running at 3.0 Ghz. Did some overclocking, and at 3.6 Ghz there's a world of difference. Outdoors I get a medium of 45 FPS, indoors 50-60, easy. Here's my Skyrim configuration:

IMAGE(https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-TcC0Ga-8bm4/Tsr3Jt55WVI/AAAAAAAAAhI/mQs8uyxTDvw/s1178/skyrim%252520conf.jpg)

AA is handled via the Catalyst Control Center. Going with 4 x Adaptive Multisample AA (so it makes trees really purty).

I am REALLY glad to see someone already putting together a better interface. I was wishing for a good way to see things by weight!

One mod request I would probably find to be real handy would be an 'Auto-Drop Low Value Inventory' option. Basically, if you have a full inventory and you want to pick something valuable up, the mod would check your inventory for the item with the lowest value per weight and drop it automatically. I find I'm doing this manually ALL the time.

Pawz wrote:

I am REALLY glad to see someone already putting together a better interface. I was wishing for a good way to see things by weight!

One mod request I would probably find to be real handy would be an 'Auto-Drop Low Value Inventory' option. Basically, if you have a full inventory and you want to pick something valuable up, the mod would check your inventory for the item with the lowest value per weight and drop it automatically. I find I'm doing this manually ALL the time.

Perhaps a function that sorts items in terms of their value per pound, so you can choose what you drop so as not to lose anything important.

If you're using the Main Font Replacement mod to change fonts around you can also change the font used by the books in the game. If you change map "$SkyrimBooks" =
to the name of the font you're using (fontconfig.txt in the Data/Interface folder) it will affect the books found in the game. Here's a shot of it with the Fertigo font:

IMAGE(http://www.pucemoose.com/pics/book10.jpg)

On another note, those of you running with VSYNC off; how are managing the differences in X/Y axis mouse sensitivity that occurs when VSYNC is off (at least for some people; I know it affects me). Are you using a FPS limiter, or are you not affected by the issue?

I haven't really noticed it at the framerates I get (I assume 30+). Occasionally the game will become veerrrrrry laggy, at which point the X/Y differential does manifest itself, but restarting the game always corrects the issue. (Which leads me to wonder whether there is some form of memory leak involved in the FPS drop.)

The only time I even notice the difference is when I'm in a cave and my FPS go to 120+. Other than that it's not really a big deal.

I just got used to it. I don't generally find myself needing to look up/down quickly, so it hasn't been an issue.

I don't really notice it any more, unless I hear a sound that makes me check the sky, which hasn't been much.

I run Enhanced Blood Textures from skyrimnexus (one of the top ones)

It changes the blood textures to be a bit more "gritty". It's similar to the melee splatters on your screen in L4d2 if you're interested

Minor change, but I like it

It seems I have two copies of the SkyrimPrefs.ini file on my system. One is in the steam install directory and the other is in the c:/users/xxx/my documents/my games/skyrim folder. The latter is where all my save games are going so I assume this is the SkyrimPrefs.ini that is 'active'. Does anybody know for sure?

It's the one in c:\users....

The one in the install directory just contains the defaults.

I tweaked some settings and it didn't really seem to make much of a difference. That's when I noticed CoreTemp reporting my q6600 at stock speeds. Check my BIOS and had a nice little message about a startup failure causing my OC to revert back to factory settings. Kind of freaked me out, but I re-overclocked and jumped into the game. Between then tweaks and the OC I'm getting 40-75 FPS in the world with occasional drops. Even higher FPS in caves (hit 299 FPS) and in town it started out really good. I was getting 30-75 FPS with 30 being the lowest low. I quit the game for dinner and Steam downloaded an update. Turns out they encrypted the launcher for some reason (piracy probably?) and the game would not launch without a Steam error.

I had to delete both SkyrimLauncher.exe and TESV.exe and redownload. Still wouldn't work. No error, but a crash on launch before the intro movie. I figured it had something to do with the modified dll I downloaded and have been using flawlessly since the hour after I installed. Deleted that, and the game launches. However, the performance is not nearly as good as before this patch. Markarth is unplayable, my FPS were in the single digits were before they never dropped below 29. The old large address aware fix doesn't work, but there is probably a workaround already. Kind of a stupid patch from Bethesda.

edit: This seems to be the new fix for LAA. The first one didn't work for me.

http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads...

I found this in the the thread on the skyrim forums it did work, but it's still labeled FNV4GB.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=MBBKAPTJ

Also, new drivers are up for ATI users. A whopping 2-7% performance increase.

mateofalcone wrote:
Citizen86 wrote:
mateofalcone wrote:

I've been a fan of ENBSeries for a number of games, and I decided to give it a try with Skyrim.

I've liked ENB as well, but I think this one is definitely still in alpha or beta. I was getting graphical anomalies and crashes with it on.

Thankfully (for me), I've had less graphical glitches with it on. Given what it is, I'm sure your luck is tied directly to the hardware on which you run it. My card is a 560Ti 2GB. I haven't tried it on my laptop's AMD to give an account.

I'm not sure, I have a mobile Nvidia 560m. It could have just been a Bethesda game being Bethesda though.

i38warhawk wrote:

http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads...

I found this in the the thread on the skyrim forums it did work, but it's still labeled FNV4GB.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=MBBKAPTJ

Also, new drivers are up for ATI users. A whopping 2-7% performance increase.

The importance of this link cannot be understated -- Pete Hines even linked to this on his Twitter account. I'll still be keeping my backup copy of the LAA patched pre-Steam update TESV.exe, but this should allow everyone to once again begin allowing Steam to manage Skyrim while having the game continue to be able to take advantage of more than 2 GB of RAM.

The LAA is making a noticeable difference to people? I wouldn't think Skyrim with stock textures would require it...

Citizen86 wrote:

The LAA is making a noticeable difference to people? I wouldn't think Skyrim with stock textures would require it...

It allowed me to turn the draw distances up from about 3/4 to the max the sliders allow while retaining the same framerate, and let me install some of the higher resolution textures that are available on the Nexus.

Well this is... interesting (linked because the the video image thingy is somewhat NSFW, the video it's self is fine though)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yeyzi...

Realistic Water Textures

And

Skyrim HD - 2K Textures

Pretty awesome additions. I have only tried the water so far. Looking forward to seeing the high res textures.

TempestBlayze wrote:

Realistic Water Textures

And

Skyrim HD - 2K Textures

Pretty awesome additions. I have only tried the water so far. Looking forward to seeing the high res textures.

Nice, looking good so far. I'm going to wait on the Skyrim HD one, since they don't have all the textures updated yet. I can't stand having high res textures in some areas, but low in others.

The water mod I'll probably install tonight, along with LAA.

zeroKFE wrote:
Citizen86 wrote:

The LAA is making a noticeable difference to people? I wouldn't think Skyrim with stock textures would require it...

It allowed me to turn the draw distances up from about 3/4 to the max the sliders allow while retaining the same framerate, and let me install some of the higher resolution textures that are available on the Nexus.

This. It's not so much about making the base game work, it's about removing the artificial restrictions. More mods = more memory usage, and if you're capped at 2G then that's no bueno.

It's a 10-15 FPS difference for me. In Markarth without LAA I get between 5-20 FPS. With LAA it's 25-60 FPS. That's pretty huge.

i38warhawk wrote:

It's a 10-15 FPS difference for me. In Markarth without LAA I get between 5-20 FPS. With LAA it's 25-60 FPS. That's pretty huge.

I'd love to know what the hell they're doing with their engine that it makes that much of a difference. This is a game that runs on systems with 512MB total RAM.

I think it's a simple matter of higher draw distances requiring more RAM; the 'ultra' settings are, as the name would suggest, difficult for contemporary PCs to run. That said, if you're Bethesda and you're making Elder Scrolls games, at some point you should bite the bullet and refactor your code to be compatible with 64-bit addresses.

Now that I've heard about the frame rate boost (and warhalk, turns out my 2500K was downclocked to stock settings as well! :?) I am curious about trying out this LAA thing. For you modders in the know:

-Will this EXE bait-and-switch trick like they did with New Vegas work correctly even if Bethesda releases yet another new EXE? Or will I have to update as needed?
-Does the LAA patch increase crashing, and to what extent does it do so?

The one that actually modifies the EXE has already been broken. This new one is a separate EXE which launches the game for you, and enables what needs to be enabled to have large address space usable. In theory this shouldn't require you to get a new version just because a patch is released. In theory.

You have to redo the LAA patch for every update.
I haven't noticed any crashing.