The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Catch-All

Bethesda confirms Dragonborn DLC for both PC and PS3.

Bethesda wrote:

We’re also happy to announce Dragonborn will be available on PS3 and PC early next year.

http://www.bethblog.com/2012/12/03/d...

tanstaafl wrote:

Bethesda confirms Dragonborn DLC for both PC and PS3.

Bethesda wrote:

We’re also happy to announce Dragonborn will be available on PS3 and PC early next year.

http://www.bethblog.com/2012/12/03/d...

Really hope this includes Dragonbone weapons for Smithing... or weapons that I can craft in Solstheim that are better. My Ranger Sneakthief is sick of glass being the best.

After playing with Vilja for a bit, it's a damn impressive mod, but if I had to personify her she comes across as needy, a bit too verbose, and one of those people who hates silence and will say anything to fill the gap. It's the kind of thing where a few minor tweaks to the frequency of chat and quest reminders would make it a bit more pleasant to have her around all the time (I told her to cool her heels in an inn while I deal with the civil war).

One other thing she brings up, not directly related to the mod but shown off by her slow phrasing, is how much I'd appreciate it if you could chat with an NPC while doing other things, even just running from A to B instead of standing on the spot while she takes her time to get to the point.

Demosthenes wrote:
tanstaafl wrote:

Bethesda confirms Dragonborn DLC for both PC and PS3.

Bethesda wrote:

We’re also happy to announce Dragonborn will be available on PS3 and PC early next year.

http://www.bethblog.com/2012/12/03/d...

Really hope this includes Dragonbone weapons for Smithing... or weapons that I can craft in Solstheim that are better. My Ranger Sneakthief is sick of glass being the best. :P

Dawnguard already added Dragonbone weapons.

Scratched wrote:

After playing with Vilja for a bit, it's a damn impressive mod, but if I had to personify her she comes across as needy, a bit too verbose, and one of those people who hates silence and will say anything to fill the gap. It's the kind of thing where a few minor tweaks to the frequency of chat and quest reminders would make it a bit more pleasant to have her around all the time (I told her to cool her heels in an inn while I deal with the civil war).

One other thing she brings up, not directly related to the mod but shown off by her slow phrasing, is how much I'd appreciate it if you could chat with an NPC while doing other things, even just running from A to B instead of standing on the spot while she takes her time to get to the point.

One of her dialogue options lets you adjust how often she speaks.

Scratched wrote:

After playing with Vilja for a bit, it's a damn impressive mod, but if I had to personify her she comes across as needy, a bit too verbose, and one of those people who hates silence and will say anything to fill the gap. It's the kind of thing where a few minor tweaks to the frequency of chat and quest reminders would make it a bit more pleasant to have her around all the time (I told her to cool her heels in an inn while I deal with the civil war).

One other thing she brings up, not directly related to the mod but shown off by her slow phrasing, is how much I'd appreciate it if you could chat with an NPC while doing other things, even just running from A to B instead of standing on the spot while she takes her time to get to the point.

You can tell her to talk little or not at all. If you do not at all she'll only talk for quest reasons.

Thanks for the pointer on the Vilja gagging.

Another question. Currently if I run textures on high, when I'm in some towns (Riften, skyforge at Whiterun), it gets pretty bad with pausing when the camera pans around for what I assume is loading textures, and outside in the world it's pretty much fine. Right now I've bumped it down to medium and it's fine, and to be honest I don't really notice the difference too much. That's on 4GB RAM, and 1GB VRAM, and from monitoring usage I can see on high textures it hits the VRAM capacity, while on medium textures it stays well below, around 50-75%ish. I suppose the obvious answer is that all that detail loves VRAM, so there's only so much you can cram in there.

I'm wondering if there's some way to bump the detail down only in towns? There's this mod, but it seems more universal.

Put the textures to medium, then install the three "LITE" packages of Skyrim HD that AREN'T towns - ignore the town ones altogether.

Dysplastic wrote:

Put the textures to medium, then install the three "LITE" packages of Skyrim HD that AREN'T towns - ignore the town ones altogether.

Interesting approach.

I was doing the Companions questline where

Spoiler:

Kodlak sends you out to get witch heads and you come back to the aftermath of an attack where he died.

It was bugged and wouldn't continue. I googled it and found that if you have the Helm of Winterhold quest active it won't work until you complete it. But if you clear the dungeon which happens to be the same for the next companions quest it may cause further bugging.

This can be fixed by: running through the dungeon and getting the helm without killing anyone. As a dual wielding heavy armor kinda guy... I thought "Well crap!" but decided to give it a try... I happen to be level 34 right now in some old Ebony armor. It was actually a lot of fun running around as the 20 or so guys tried to hack me up... kind of hilarious actually... had to run in a circle while waiting on a gate to open but I was tough enough to take a good number of hits and got out with no issues. I even levelled my heavy armor to 66 ;-).

On a side note... how does one get heavy armor to 100 without just letting everything hit you for awhile? I don't get hit often and it is mostly archers or mages at this point... does magic count on heavy armor leveling?

manta173 wrote:

On a side note... how does one get heavy armor to 100 without just letting everything hit you for awhile? I don't get hit often and it is mostly archers or mages at this point... does magic count on heavy armor leveling?

well, there are always books and people who you pay to train you... otherwise, you're stuck getting hit. I think.

Yeah, I got hit by that one too. IIRC you can also do the Helm of Winterhold quest then wait 30 days in-game. The instance then resets itself and the Companions quest will continue. Since then I just make sure I don't pick up the Helm quest until I'm done with the Companions.

I think there are one or two other quests that can get stuck the same way.

Amulet of Galdur is similar in that you can't get into Saarthal (where one of the amulet fragments is) until you join the College of Winterhold because Saarthal is locked until the College questline opens it. You can do the Amulet quest while you're doing the College quest though.

And I don't know what it is about this game. I had put close to 200 hours into it and had moved on, but after grabbing Dawnguard and Hearthfire in the Steam sale I've got another 20 hours or so into it. And I haven't even started Dawnguard yet...

Dragons really hate mudcrabs. After killing it this dragon just flew off...
IMAGE(http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/903233346005989136/0320959BEE0807E3C42A6EAF7316B0EA1F2D8CA0/)

And what is this guard doing?
IMAGE(http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/903233346043559691/96D80B5E30C3F0F822E1F816C318EB7037D85AD5/)

tanstaafl wrote:

And what is this guard doing?
IMAGE(http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/903233346043559691/96D80B5E30C3F0F822E1F816C318EB7037D85AD5/)

He is performing Kung Fu. He is in training, sitting in the horse stance for hours a day.

IMAGE(http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_l8GFIQjSVrA/S8wuXl4iFII/AAAAAAAAAEk/uDep9iNgNzI/s1600/horse+stance-00023.jpg)

Agree with the injection of life after grabbing Dawnguard. I even started a fresh character, and am having a blast. Dawnguard has also give me at least three 'underwear changing' moments, which the base game didn't have on me. I think it was situational, rather than deliberate on teh dev's part, but I actually yelped on more than one occasion.

Reading the above, however, has made me wonder about what questlines i'm going to follow next after Dawnguard. I didn't experience any inter-quest bugs the first play through, so maybe I just got lucky.

JillSammich wrote:
manta173 wrote:

On a side note... how does one get heavy armor to 100 without just letting everything hit you for awhile? I don't get hit often and it is mostly archers or mages at this point... does magic count on heavy armor leveling?

well, there are always books and people who you pay to train you... otherwise, you're stuck getting hit. I think.

I just found a bandit leader and let them wail on me until i reached a decent armour level. I stocked up on potions first and killed all the bandit minions first.

[quote=JillSammich]

tanstaafl wrote:

And what is this guard doing?
He is performing Kung Fu. He is in training, sitting in the horse stance for hours a day.

I know you have a female username with a male avatar and all but... er, he is a *she*. Or are you not talking about the guard?

imbiginjapan wrote:

Yet another screenie. I'll stop now, I promise. At least until something else cool catches my eye.

IMAGE(http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/540693575985582754/BD6C6C4FBCA70E46EE0D7F6C4317257AB89EAE4D/)

What the heeeelll

How do you do this? Is it hard to install this mod or whatever you did? I just got Skyrim and I want it to look like that o_0

Duoae wrote:

I know you have a female username with a male avatar and all but... er, he is a *she*. Or are you not talking about the guard? :)

Nope... just wasn't paying that much attention. Oops. Give her my apologies. I don't want to piss of a woman with a sword and a nice set of... studded leather armor.

JillSammich wrote:
Duoae wrote:

I know you have a female username with a male avatar and all but... er, he is a *she*. Or are you not talking about the guard? :)

Nope... just wasn't paying that much attention. Oops. Give her my apologies. I don't want to piss of a woman with a sword and a nice set of... studded leather armor.

Just don't let it happen again... Now, where's my sweetroll?

Anyone play Dragonborn yet?

Draco wrote:

Anyone play Dragonborn yet?

I tried to be reasonable, and put it on my Christmas list (well, an MS points card), so if I've got the willpower, not yet.

Orrrr I'll use those points for the Forizon rally expansion, and buy Dragonborn soon this week tonight.

Duoae wrote:
JillSammich wrote:
Duoae wrote:

I know you have a female username with a male avatar and all but... er, he is a *she*. Or are you not talking about the guard? :)

Nope... just wasn't paying that much attention. Oops. Give her my apologies. I don't want to piss of a woman with a sword and a nice set of... studded leather armor.

Just don't let it happen again... Now, where's my sweetroll?

Someone stole it.

Mex wrote:
imbiginjapan wrote:

Yet another screenie. I'll stop now, I promise. At least until something else cool catches my eye.

IMAGE(http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/540693575985582754/BD6C6C4FBCA70E46EE0D7F6C4317257AB89EAE4D/)

What the heeeelll

How do you do this? Is it hard to install this mod or whatever you did? I just got Skyrim and I want it to look like that o_0

If you don't mind taking the time and tweaking I'll be happy to help. First off what sort of graphics hardware are you running? You need some extra performance headroom to work with. It might be best to take the actual mod advice to steam chat as there is kind of a stack of ini edits, etc involved.

Edit: There is a reason some folks just say to heck with it and run vanilla. I think getting Skyrim pretty is worth the effort though.

Duoae wrote:

Just don't let it happen again... Now, where's my sweetroll?

Stole it.

IMAGE(http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/6236/photonov2491929am.jpg)

It was very tasty.

imbiginjapan wrote:

If you don't mind taking the time and tweaking I'll be happy to help. First off what sort of graphics hardware are you running? You need some extra performance headroom to work with. It might be best to take the actual mod advice to steam chat as there is kind of a stack of ini edits, etc involved.

Edit: There is a reason some folks just say to heck with it and run vanilla. I think getting Skyrim pretty is worth the effort though.

Thanks! It's a 15 inch Retina Macbook Pro with a 650m Nvidia card and 8gb of Ram, I think they use an i7 processor. I plan to run it at like 1280x800 res so hopefully I can run this sort of graphics at a decent pace.

I just installed Skyrim yesterday, and I added a bunch of graphics mods from the Workshop and it looks slightly better, but nothing like yours : s

imbiginjapan wrote:

If you don't mind taking the time and tweaking I'll be happy to help. First off what sort of graphics hardware are you running? You need some extra performance headroom to work with. It might be best to take the actual mod advice to steam chat as there is kind of a stack of ini edits, etc involved.

Edit: There is a reason some folks just say to heck with it and run vanilla. I think getting Skyrim pretty is worth the effort though.

I'd be interested in at least a high-level summary here. I want the results, but I guess I'd like to know how much effort I'm looking at, first.

Gremlin wrote:
imbiginjapan wrote:

If you don't mind taking the time and tweaking I'll be happy to help. First off what sort of graphics hardware are you running? You need some extra performance headroom to work with. It might be best to take the actual mod advice to steam chat as there is kind of a stack of ini edits, etc involved.

Edit: There is a reason some folks just say to heck with it and run vanilla. I think getting Skyrim pretty is worth the effort though.

I'd be interested in at least a high-level summary here. I want the results, but I guess I'd like to know how much effort I'm looking at, first.

Ok, then... I'll see if I can put together a list of mods & associated edits.

You asked for it.
Before doing this stuff you may want to back up your skyrim game folder to another location in case things go horribly wrong. All the below applies to my Nvidia GTX 670. No idea what might happen with an AMD card.
I do want to note the below can give you some dark-ass nights and dungeons, depending on the options you choose for Climates of Tamriel and Realistic Lighting. If this is not to your taste, there may be ways to counteract that.

First create an Application Profile for Skyrim with the following - the ENB wrappers will take care of this stuff.

Ambient Occlusion Off
Anisotropy Application Controlled
AA Mode Application Controlled

Then...
1. Download The HD Texture Pack DLC on Steam (which is free)
2. On nexus Mods get Climates of Tamriel. Follow the instructions to install. You can choose some options for darkness of Dungeons and Nights with this install.
3. Download an ENB mod from Nexus mods. I use one called "Become Skyrim". Not all ENB mods have the d3d9.dll packed in, so before installing check which version ENB you need and get it from the ENB dev site. I've had the best luck with .113 - I got a number of lighting bugs using 0.119 based ENB mods. When installing, copy all the ENB files first from the base ENB then overwrite with the preset you want to use.Some come with additional mods to load, install those as well into Data.
4. This is optional and it may not work with every ENB set. Get the Project ENB. In there is a set of optional files for Climates of Tamriel. There is a set of files in the FXAA injector (extra Sharpening Only). I added these to the above Become Skyrim install.

Other Mods To Install - some of these you can get on Steam Workshop and others only on Skyrim Nexus:
Real Rain for Climates of Tamriel*
WATER 1.5
Green water fix for WATER 1.5
Lush Trees & patches
Lush Greens
Vurt's Skyrim Flora Overhaul
Revamped Exterior Fog
Remove Ambient Interior Fog
Birds and Flocks
Enhanced Blood Textures 1.5
Towns and Villages Enhanced - there is actually 1 mod for each town + 1 for villages.
High Quality Snow texture
Enhanced Distant Terrain
Real Mountains
Watery Rocks
Better Dynamic Snow
That's Ice
Vibrant Auroras
Terrain Bump
Lanterns of Skyrim All in One
More Dynamic Shadows With Striping Fix

If the ENB you chose did not come with Realistic Lighting, download that and give it a try as well.

* I actually had some trouble with rain both with and without this mod where it was nearly transparent. This was a problem for me because I have a mod that causes exposure effects when it's raining. To fix this I replaced the fxraindrop.dds texture from this mod with the one from Natural Skyrim Rain. The rain looks a bit "big" but I can see it. Your results may vary.

Load Order: I did the HD texture pack first, followed by all the above list except the WATER mod, then the Climates of Tamriel components, and finally the realistic lighting, then the WATER mod, green water fix and dynamic shadows mod.

INI Tweaks:
Run Skyrim. In options Set everything to Ultra, AA 4x, Anisotropy Off(to start, mess with these afterwards.)
In My Games there is Skyrim.ini and SkyrimPrefs.ini. Back these up.
Here are what mine look like. The relevant items is everything in General,Trees,ImageSpace,TerrainManager,Display, Water and Grass sections.

Skyrim.ini

Spoiler:

[General]
sLanguage = ENGLISH
sIntroSequence =
uExterior Cell Buffer = 64
uGridsToLoad = 7
iLargeIntRefCount = 999999
fFlickeringLightDistance = 8192

[Display]
fShadowLODMaxStartFade = 2000.0
fSpecularLODMaxStartFade = 4000.0
fLightLODMaxStartFade = 7200.0
iShadowMapResolutionPrimary = 2048
bAllowScreenshot = 1
iPresentInterval = 0
fSunShadowUpdateTime = 0
fSunUpdateThreshold = 2.0

[Grass]
bAllowCreateGrass = 1
bAllowLoadGrass = 0

[Water]
bReflectLODObjects =1
bReflectLODLand =1
bReflectSky =1
bReflectLODTrees =1

-----------------------------------------------------------------
SkyrimPrefs.ini

Spoiler:

[Imagespace]
bDoDepthOfField =0
iRadialBlurLevel =2

[Display]
iBlurDeferredShadowMask =3
fInteriorShadowDistance =3000.0000
fShadowDistance =8000.0000
iShadowMapResolutionSecondary = 1024
iShadowMapResolutionPrimary = 2048
iShadowSplitCount = 2
iMaxAnisotropy =1
fLeafAnimDampenDistEnd =4600.0000
fLeafAnimDampenDistStart =3600.0000
fTreesMidLODSwitchDist =10000000.0000
fGamma =1.1600
fDecalLOD2 =1500.0000
fDecalLOD1 =1000.0000
fSpecularLODStartFade =2000.0000
fShadowLODStartFade =1200.0000
fLightLODStartFade =3500.0000
iTexMipMapMinimum =0
iTexMipMapSkip =0
iWaterMultiSamples =0
iWaterReflectHeight = 1024
iWaterReflectWidth = 1024
iMultiSample =4
iShadowMode =3
bTreesReceiveShadows =1
bDrawLandShadows =1
bFull Screen =1
iSize H =1080
iSize W =1920
fMeshLODFadePercentDefault =1.2000
fMeshLODFadeBoundDefault =256.0000
fMeshLODLevel2FadeTreeDistance=4096.0000
fMeshLODLevel1FadeTreeDistance=5688.0000
fMeshLODLevel2FadeDist =10000000.0000
fMeshLODLevel1FadeDist =10000000.0000
iScreenShotIndex =2
bShadowMaskZPrepass =0
bMainZPrepass =0
iMaxSkinDecalsPerFrame =25
iMaxDecalsPerFrame =100
bFloatPointRenderTarget =1
sD3DDevice ="NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670"
bFXAAEnabled =0
iShadowMapResolution =4096
fShadowBiasScale =0.1500
iShadowMaskQuarter =4
iAdapter =0
iPresentInterval =0
iShadowFilter =3
bShadowsOnGrass =1
bTransparencyMultisampling =0
bDeferredShadows =1
bDrawShadows =1

[Grass]
b30GrassVS =0
fGrassStartFadeDistance =7000.0000
fGrassMaxStartFadeDistance =14000.0000
fGrassMinStartFadeDistance =0.0000

[TerrainManager]
fTreeLoadDistance =75000.0000
fBlockMaximumDistance =250000.0000
fBlockLevel1Distance =70000.0000
fBlockLevel0Distance =35000.0000
fSplitDistanceMult =1.5000
bShowLODInEditor =0

[Trees]
bRenderSkinnedTrees =1
uiMaxSkinnedTreesToRender =60

[Water]
iWaterReflectHeight =512
iWaterReflectWidth =512
bUseWaterDisplacements =1
bUseWaterRefractions =1
bUseWaterReflections =1
bUseWaterDepth =1
bReflectSky = 1

Heh, more buggy fun and games.

Just finished one of the fort takeovers for the civil war, I go back to Ulfric and at the stage where he's supposed to give me some reward (armor apparently) the conversation just pauses. I can't quit out of the conversation, can't get at any menus besides the console, doing "load quicksave" puts me back in control, and I can do anything but enter conversation until I quit the game and restart. Travelling to another city and back doesn't help.

edit: enableplayercontrols doesn't help either.

imbiginjapan wrote:

Edit: There is a reason some folks just say to heck with it and run vanilla. I think getting Skyrim pretty is worth the effort though.

Absolutely. If you are going to roam around a big open world, it should look as pretty as can be.

:O You are a big in Japan and also big in my heart, thanks!

I'll give it a serious go, and I swear upon my dead hamster's grave, Harvey, that I'll get this thing working, at least half-assedly