The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Mod Thread

ZaneRockfist wrote:
4xis.black wrote:

Note about disabling vsync: It's not enough to do it in the 'SkyrimPrefs.ini' file, you actually have to insert the command into 'skyrim.ini' (iPresentInterval=0 into the [Display] section) . After doing so, you may find that your vertical mouse sensitivity (and the game's physics) get totally wonky. To solve this, apply the FPS Limiter patch to cap your frame rate at 60. Mouse movement is now a whole lot more tolerable for me.

I get screen tearing after I do it. Anyway to fix that without using vsync?

Bigger, badder video card, or lower your visual expectations.

Nimcosi wrote:

Bigger, badder video card, or lower your visual expectations.

It couldn't get much bigger and badder since I have a GeForce 465, which well exceeds the recommendations.

Go into your video card control control center thingy and try forcing both vsync and triple buffering.

FedoraMcQuaid wrote:

Go into your video card control control center thingy and try forcing both vsync and triple buffering.

Agreed. But he it looks like he purposely does not want vsync. So I was being snarky with my answer. Screen Tearing implies something is out of sync, so either lock it down (vsync) or fix the bit that cannot keep up.

4xis.black wrote:

Note about disabling vsync: It's not enough to do it in the 'SkyrimPrefs.ini' file, you actually have to insert the command into 'skyrim.ini' (iPresentInterval=0 into the [Display] section)

After a few days of trying to fix the vsync I finally figured this out! Came here to post but you beat me.

Nimcosi wrote:
FedoraMcQuaid wrote:

Go into your video card control control center thingy and try forcing both vsync and triple buffering.

Agreed. But he it looks like he purposely does not want vsync. So I was being snarky with my answer. Screen Tearing implies something is out of sync, so either lock it down (vsync) or fix the bit that cannot keep up.

I think the reason that he wanted it disabled was because of the FPS drops that it generally gives.
Triple buffering will fix that on strong video cards.
So that will take care of the screen tearing and the FPS drop.

FedoraMcQuaid wrote:
Nimcosi wrote:
FedoraMcQuaid wrote:

Go into your video card control control center thingy and try forcing both vsync and triple buffering.

Agreed. But he it looks like he purposely does not want vsync. So I was being snarky with my answer. Screen Tearing implies something is out of sync, so either lock it down (vsync) or fix the bit that cannot keep up.

I think the reason that he wanted it disabled was because of the FPS drops that it generally gives.
Triple buffering will fix that on strong video cards.
So that will take care of the screen tearing and the FPS drop.

Agreed. Just to be clear, in order for triple buffering to work vsync MUST be enabled.

The mod community really is astounding. The Inventory mod from before has been updated with a "potential" gamepad fix: http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads... - It apparently also allows sorting, as well as inherently placing equipped items at the top.

Which is how it should have been from the start, but hey, I'm malleable. I forgive.

Yeah, just giving you the ability to use the screenspace is a huge boost in usability for the game. I just wish it did the same for the "q" quick menu.

The inventory mod looks great, but there's issues with enchanting, so I'm going to hold off for a little while.

The enhanced crafting mods look good, as do most of the texture mods.

I love the disparity in the miscellaneous quests.

Quest 1:

go into a mine, kill six spiders.
Total time taken, 5 minutes.
Reward $1500

Quest 2:

Travel to a remote site, explore a labyrinthine cave system with a story told through journals unrelated to any quests all to retrieve a rare book.
Total time taken, about an hour.
Reward $30

I enjoyed this because just prior I had been thinking how given the obvious circumstances of the quest givers the rewards appeared somewhat unrealistic at times, then bam, hardest quest in a long time, virtually zero reward.

The reward was the journey.

Prozac wrote:

The reward was the journey. :D

I wouldn't be surprised if that's what the quest giver told you as well

So today I picked this thing up:

IMAGE(http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y276/Kolian/IMG_0127.jpg)
An MSI 'Hawk' GTX 560 Ti with a pretty significant stock overclock (made possible in part by an aftermarket heatsink). Combined with my i5 2500K at 4.5ghz, the results are quite remarkable.

I am now running Skyrim on literally the highest settings I can think of (except for ambient occlusion, which still manages to slay my framerate), maxed antialiasing, expanded uGrid tiles, higher-resolution shadow maps, etc.... Vsync off with the framerate capped at 60. There is essentially zero lag.

Hyetal wrote:

The mod community really is astounding. The Inventory mod from before has been updated with a "potential" gamepad fix: http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads... - It apparently also allows sorting, as well as inherently placing equipped items at the top.

Which is how it should have been from the start, but hey, I'm malleable. I forgive.

This Mod is amazingly great. I've been playing with it all day. I love the ability to sort by weight and value!

4xis wrote:

Science!

You are a scholar and a gentleman. Thanks for the report!

Nice to hear about the shadows being handled by the CPU. I bumped mine down to high and get at least 10% better framerates since my CPU is definitely the weak point in this system.

4xis.black wrote:

The shadows look pretty cruddy regardless, so why not take the performance boost?

QFT.

Stupid sounding question, but I am just without my PC over the long weekend, so I have the luxury of over thinking things.

I have a Phenom II 3.2. How is that compared to the i5 that seems popular among you all here? I'm thinking that if it is as CPU limited as you all make it sound I might be fairly well off for cranking things up a bit.

Edit: 4 core 955

Two notes, for anyone as into performance tweaking as I've gotten over the past few hours:

-By far the biggest performance hit comes from shadow detail. It would seem that in this engine, shadows (specifically the kind generated by dynamic light sources like torches, lamps, etc...) are rendered primarily on the CPU. The 'iShadowMapResolution' parameter, unsurprisingly, seems to control the resolution of the shadow maps (512, 1024, 2048, and 4092 are the reasonable values). I don't understand the specifics of the implementation, but the upshot is that when the shadow resolution increases linearly the work required goes up quadratically, and the more dynamic light sources you have (as well as objects casting shadows) the more rendering needs to be done. For me, in the Ragged Flagon (a very laggy area), the difference between the 'high' and 'ultra' setting (essentially 2048->4092) is about a 30-40% performance hit and a whole bunch of nasty mouse lag. The visual impact is that the 'blockiness' of shadows changes proportionally to the resolution, but in my experience they're always pretty damn blocky.

So ultimately, while the shadows look somewhat nicer at the ultra setting, turning it down to 'high' gives reasonable results and also ensures better performance in all those lagfest indoor areas. The shadows look pretty cruddy regardless, so why not take the performance boost?

-The level of antialiasing is controlled by the 'iMultiSample' parameter. While the 'ultra' setting puts this way the hell up at 16 and 'high' puts it at 8, on my monitor (1680x1050) I can't detect a visual difference above 4 even though the performance hit is around 25% for 8 and 50% (!) for 16. So by leaving this at 4 I get perfectly smooth edges and a very good frame rate.

With these tweaks, leaving everything else essentially at 'mega ultra', I am getting 52 fps in the laggiest part of the rather laggy Ragged Flagon. Mouse movement feels pretty good as well. I am hoping this performance gain will carry over into Skyrim's many underground caves, where Bethesda has often seen fit to go a little overboard on the fog and lighting effects.

I finally just solved my crashing problems. Inside areas I was pretty much okay, but outside I couldn't wander around more than 5-10 minutes before being dumped to desktop. I've been fast traveling as much as possible and quicksaving a ton just so I didn't lose progress. Any outside travel was just a misery of constantly relaunching the game.

So, this solution is pretty system specific. I have a 32-bit Windows7 system with 4GB of RAM. I've been using the 4GB patch everyone is raving about but I was still crashing a ton and finally figured out that it's worthless with a default 32-bit Win7 system. I found a log file which basically said the patch failed and it's just loading the regular EXE. After some research I found the problem is that by default the 32-bit OS automatically divides the RAM so 2GB are given to the OS and 2GB are given to user applications. The fix is a switch that you flip that forces the OS to only give 1GB to itself and 3GB to user applications. While this obviously doesn't allow the entire 4GB to the game, it is enough to allow the patch to run properly and let the game use all 3GB.

The difference is amazing. Before I could barely walk between landmarks right next to each other on the map and now I can walk between entire major cities. I was literally crashing every 5-10 minutes while outside and today I played for like 4 hours without a single crash.

So, again, it's pretty system specific. 32-bit Windows7 with a 4GB of RAM. If you have less RAM or 64-bit Win7 this will not work (with 64-bit Win7 this isn't even an issue, so ignore all this).

Go under Start -> All Programs -> Accesories and right click on Command Prompt and select "Run as Administrator". And then type or paste in:

bcdedit /set IncreaseUserVa 3072

Reboot and that's it.

* One word of caution. You're reducing your OS to only 1GB of RAM for it's processing so depending on your system, your drivers, what you have installed, etc. this could potentionally cause some other problems. From what I've read it's pretty rare but you may want to research the "IncreaseUserVa" property yourself just to be safe. You can always revert it back to default if there are any problems.

wouldn't another solution be to not use the 4GB patch?

kazar wrote:

wouldn't another solution be to not use the 4GB patch?

That's effectively what it was doing before. Without the boot option there wasn't support for the 4gb loader, so it just used the vanilla 32bit (2GB) exe.

kazar wrote:

wouldn't another solution be to not use the 4GB patch?

As Scratched said, my constant crashing was happening with the vanilla game. I tried using the newer version of the 4GB loader and was still crashing so then I was thinking the problem was somewhere else. But then I finally realized the 4GB loader wasn't even loading properly so it was still launching the game with the regular EXE. I wish the creator had made it so there was a pop-up message if the loader failed, but it just silently fails and loads the regular EXE. I just happened to come across the log file in the My Docs\My Games\Skyrim\ folder (Skyrim4GB.log) that had the error in it.

So, since it's bound to happen, does anyone have an ETA to when we will be able to tame and ride the dragons?

oMonarca wrote:

So, since it's bound to happen, does anyone have an ETA to when we will be able to tame and ride the dragons?

It'll never really work well with how this engine breaks up the world so it will probably never be official, but it shouldn't be hard to fake it.

An on rails dragon ride might work in gamebyro.

There was a dragon riding mod in Oblivion, I'm sure there will be one in Skyrim.

I'm just waiting on horse armor.

That was relatively painless! Loaded in the beta driver from Nvidia first thing and ran with and without the Ambient Occlusion on. Pretty damned slow outdoors in Whiterun. Loaded up the 4GB launcher, turned AO down to Performance, no sweat I'm back to normal. Bumped down shadow detail in the game console pre-launch from High to Medium. I get a slight flicker in the shadows as I pan, but the shadow quality difference is negligible and my framerate overall went up and I'm in the mid 50s all day now.

I tried it with and without the 360 controller on and I saw no discernable difference in the framerate. Is that still slowing things down? Also, if I switch the mouse can I dial down that flicker by messing with the mouse smoothing or whatever that nonsense is?

I'm not sure what you mean by 'flickering shadows', but no, I doubt disabling mouse acceleration will fix that. (But if you're playing with a mouse you should disable acceleration anyway.)