Welcome back, folks. Yesterday we set up the bare bones for the new AE build and tested it to make sure everything was working properly. After giving it a clean bill of health, I spent some time going over the papyrus logs and resolved several script errors in the Creation Club content. I also pruned out some unimplemented features from Alternate Perspective that were causing errors in the Papyrus log. All that's left now are some false alarms (FNIS complaining that it doesn't have any animations to manage, for example) and one obnoxious but I believe benign block of errors related to the display plaques in the fishing DLC. 

 

 

With the foundation laid and the critical behind the scenes tools operational, we can start making the first steps in transforming vanilla Skyrim into a more familiar modded form. As I mentioned last time, I'll be using Patrician ENB, and that depends on certain specific mods for lighting, weather, etc. Today we're going to start installing those prerequisite mods. Normally I'd start with Lux, but for technical reasons I want to instead some other mods first (this will simplify the Lux patching process). Of course, we'll be revisiting the Lux patcher much later, but in the meanwhile I want to get the baseline settings installed and running right.

 

First things first, we're going to download Water for ENB and Bright Waterfall Fix. In an effort to avoid overloading my own work requirements, I deliberately avoided installing certain mods like Depths of Skyrim or the various supported worldspace mods. We'll tackle these later and patch them when the time is right. WFENB required a small amount of cleanup to resolve some ITMs and wild edits, but for the most part its conflicts were limited to top level cell data, which I expected and allowed to win all relevant (i.e., water-related) conflicts. The few CELL entries I had to patch were cases where WFENB was failing to forward location tags from Update.esm and/or USSEP.

 

 

One thing I'll need to remember when installing patches in the future is that I don't want to overwrite the core WFENB plugin, since I've cleaned some wild edits out of it and I'll be volunteering for a bunch of extra work if I revert it to its OEM configuration. But for now, we've got our water installed. Let's see how it looks... it'll probably be a bit funny since it's ENB water under vanilla lighting.

 

 

That's very... blue water. It'll be interesting to compare it with how it looks once the lighting mod and ENB preset are installed. Still, it seems to be working well. Note the terrain reflections in the final screen shot. 

 

OK, so next we've got a set of smaller requirements. We'll start with Embers XD. I used Embers in my last build and had somewhat mixed results, mostly because I had installed it kind of a scattershot way. This time, we'll do a clean install, alongside Inferno and the two mods' compatibility patch. At this point we also need to start in stalling Lux, because Embers depends on Lux Orbis and we also need to check compatibility for the Lux Via patch. That, in turn, brings into play some of Lux's soft integrations that we are going to need later - notably SMIM and a few other mods that impact interior meshes.

 

Lux being the patch-heavy mod that it is, now we've got a bunch of plugins to look at in xEdit (thankfully, almost exclusively light plugins). For the most part this was a pretty painless installation, though we are starting to get into a position where I have to forward a lot of top level cell data, mostly in terms of conflicts between Water for ENB and Lux - no surprise there since water and lighting data are both stored in the TLCD. 

 

OK, with all that updated and with the trusted winners group refreshed, let's hop into the game before we install the rest of the precursor mods. It's kind of looking like today will be accomplishing more than I planned, since my original expectation was to install Lux in the next volume of this blog but... you gotta do what you gotta do, right?

 

 

The new interior lighting and the improved rug meshes are immediately apparent. Note that the lighting here lacks the oversaturated orange tone that the 1900 build had. This is one reason I was looking forward to switching over to this new lights and ENB combo, and even without the ENB preset active we're already starting to see some of the benefits.

 

 

The shadows are much more evident compared to vanilla. However, in the final image you can see some odd interaction between the new lights and the vanilla weather, where the fog is causing a square glow around the torch here. This should hopefully fix itself when we install the specific weather mod that Patrician is optimized for.

 

 

The water is still vividly blue, but with the new lighting in place its starting to blend a bit better with the exterior. In the second image, you can see one of Lux Via's bridge replacers.

 

 

Here we've got a close-up view of the improve ember textures.

 

 

Dragonsreach, brightly lit in daytime. However, now we've got our first issue: missing textures on the tables. Fortunately this one was easy to solve; some research revealed an installation defect (I chose "replace" instead of "merge" when installing an alternate mesh) that caused some textures to be omitted. 

 

 

Much better! I think that'll do it for tonight. Next time we'll finish laying the groundwork for our ENB, getting the ENB Particle Patch going along with some sky and mist textures and, most importantly, the weather mod.