Welcome back! Yesterday we got water, fire, and lighting updated, as well as a number of collateral benefits to the outside world from Lux Via. Today, the goal is to get as close to possible to installing the ENB preset - and ideally to actually achieve that milestone. This will start with installing the ENB Particle Patch as well as several environmental mods that will support an installation of SOLAS Weather. Before we do that, however, let's check out Papyrus log from the last session and snoop around for any new errors.

 

 

The first page looks good - just the fish plaque properties and FNIS complaining about now having any animations to handle. That continues on the second page, and then we transition to initialization messages, which finish up with USSEP's self-checking protocols. So we've managed to stay clean (except for the dirty fish!) since the last tranche of updates!

 

With no action required here, let's proceed to install the particle patch. In the old days, this mod made a lot of top level cell data edits, so there might be some work involved with installing it. However, I'm going to check to see if it has a Synthesis patcher - if so, I can skip most of that integration work.

 

 

This mod has a lot of conflicts, and per the advice on the Patrician ENB page, we are going to let it lose all asset conflicts. To accomplish this, I've put the assets very high in the load order; I'll also be moving the plugin artificially high to ensure any BSA-to-BSA conflicts are lost, except versus the vanilla stuff.

 

 

I am going to conflict-resolve this one in xEdit first before I move on to the weather mods. I did not see a synthesis patcher for the particle patch (though I did find one for Water for ENB which I added to my preset but did not run yet). This means I'll need to pay attention to TLCD, in particular (if memory serves me right), internal weather flags.

 

 

The good news is that the modern version of this patch is much lighter-weight. The only conflicts in the whole package were a small number of TLCDs, where the particle patch added a different weather or image space choice than Lux. The others matched up with Lux already and didn't show up as conflicted. After a quick review, I determined that none of these records needed patching and we allowed Lux to win all the conflicts. That was a much easier installation than last time, when I spent literally hours hand-patching almost every CELL record in the game  

 

With the particle patch installed, now we can install the environmental mods that SOLAS will load on top of. There are actually a bunch of these, but for now I'm only going to do the mandatory ones. We'll save the optional ones for after I get the ENB Preset going. The mods we're going to install now are:

 

• Picta Improved Sky Meshes 
• Obsidian Mountain Fogs Tweaked  
• Storm Lightning
• Thunder Sounds
• Mists of Tamriel

 

Some of these mods I already had, but I've reinstalled all of them to ensure I am running the latest versions. Before we proceed further with cleanup, we'll also need to install the SOLAS weather mod, since Mists of Tamriel depends on it. We'll grab it now while bypassing the grass mod section for the moment. We can come back to that before we install the ENB preset. We're also going to grab Sounds of Skyrim at this point since one of the SOLAS files relies on that one.

 

 

With all these mods in place, let's head over to xEdit and reconcile them. Looks like we have some conflicts to work through, but hopefully most of it will still be benign and fine to more or less leave alone.

 

 

The load order has already properly sorted the weather records, so we can ignore those; we've also got some conflicts with ENB Water top level cell data, but now that we have a synthesis patcher we can ignore those too (but not other TLCD conflicts). Consequently, out of all this junk below, I only had to patch 3 records - two had locations that I needed to forward, and one had a music edit.

 

 

The only real issue was with Sounds of Skyrim, which extensively conflicted with Lux. I could have patched these, but I had a hunch that there might be a patch inside the Lux installer. A quick check revealed that, in fact, such a patch did exist, and I added it to the relevant folder.

 

 

The patch resolved 100% of the object reference conflicts, though I needed to make some small tweaks to some of the top level cell data because of some odd image space inconsistencies. I have a bit of a suspicion that this patch might have been built against an earlier version of Lux that didn't include all of the image spaces, since they generally seem to be subtypes of the ones that appear in the patch.

 

After some consideration, I decided to directly update the SoS patch rather than patching the TLCD separately. This will help avoid future issues related to mod group organization and keep the size of my custom patch reigned in.

 

 

Somewhat frustratingly, after all this work the Water for ENB patcher failed, so I had to go back and manually patch all the WFENB water data entries. I'll have to investigate the cause of this some time in the future to try and fix it, but for now I'm back to manually patching the water records  

 

 

With the water records manually patched, let's take a stroll through Skyrim to see how it's changed and to generate a new Papyrus log for analysis.

 

 

Leaving the inn, I found myself immediately in the middle of a morning rain shower. It's hard to tell from the static screen shot, but it looks dramatically better than its vanilla equivalent. So far so good! The rain cleared around the time I reached Falkreath, and you can see the new mountain mist textures in the distance. In the third image you can see the view of Lake Ilinalta from Half-Moon Mill. While the blue tint is visible up close, the water is starting to look much more naturalistic as it fades into the background.

 

 

I walked the rest of the way to Solitude to see how the ocean looked. Still a little too blue for my taste, but you can see the LOD seam in the distance here is barely visible, which is great. Again, the ENB preset isn't loaded yet, so this is not necessarily the actual final appearance.

 

I had a single error in the Papyrus log, relating to a leveled predator spawn.

 

 

This is a case where a vanilla predator spawn was disabled by DLC, but retained elements of the record that triggered other behavior. We're going to go in and trim some specific elements out of this record so that hopefully it'll load correctly. I'll probably run into more of these in the future, but for now we'll tidy up this one and just know we need to watch for more of these as we proceed.

 

 

Basically, I removed the linked references, which are what's interacting with the leveled predator script. These issues may go away on their own in the future when I install SkyTEST or an equivalent mod since those move the predator spawns further from civilization. That would eliminate the need to forcibly disable these spawns since the reason they're turned off is because of interaction with DLC-added buildings.

 

OK, so it looks like the new additions are all running fine so far. Let's wrap up the last piece of the puzzle: grass. Patrician requires complex grass, but doesn't mandate a specific grass mod. For future compatibility with Seasons of Skyrim, we're going to use Seasonal Landscapes. At this point, we're also going to install Depths of Skyrim to cover the underwater flora. I toyed with also merging in elements of Turn of the Seasons, but I'm trying to minimize "low value" (i.e., purely aesthetic) worldspace changes, especially when they start dependency chains. We'll go and clean these files up in xEdit, then we need to run DYNDOLOD to generate the various bridge textures like the snowy variants.

 

The only conflicts from this tranche were some top level cell data issues with Depths of Skyrim, easily patched. 

 

 

So now it's time for DYNDOLOD! We'll be installing Version 3 Alpha. At this stage, we won't be installing any of the extended grass distance resources, since this DYNDOLOD build is purely for compatibility testing and won't reflect the final configuration of the world. While the underlying resources generate, let me talk for a moment about my plans for building out the world.

 

Basically, the reason the 1900 build failed wasn't because of any one mod or feature. It failed because the collective load it put on my system was too much to overcome, even with modern hardware. This was particularly noticeable in areas with high draw counts and/or high NPC population, and we'll be adjusting our philosophy to mitigate both of these things. As I mentioned earlier, mods that add new NPCs are going to get much tighter scrutiny going forward (mods that use existing spawns but add more diversity will get much more lenient treatment). This will drop the overall actor population, especially purely decorative NPCs that still end up inheriting lots of AI packages and cloak spells that take up processing resources.

 

The other thing we'll be doing is avoiding unnecessary draw calls. That means I'm only going to be changing the configuration of worldspaces (Tamriel, as well as the city interiors) unless it yields a tangible in-game advantage. So quest mods that add buildings are one thing, whereas decorative mods will have a much higher bar for inclusion. Those decorative mods also often have knock-on issues such as requiring CK or xEdit work to resolve landscape, object reference, and navmesh conflicts, as well as unexpected immersion breaking flaws such as positional desynch with objects like beehives. 

 

Finally, we're going to be seriously looking at mods that have serious overhead requirements without adding a lot to the game. SkyBirds already got the boot for this reason during the last build, and other mods like, for example, Real Names, will probably not survive this transition even though they're genuinely good mods. A lot of Loverslab stuff will be similarly scrutinized. Devious Devices is likely to survive because of the number of quest mods it's required for, but other mods - for example, Sexlab Parasites - that add chance-based content with little or no narrative content but run cloaks, polling, or other always-on mechanisms, will probably be omitted. Devious Strikers will probably survive, but a lot of other stuff won't - especially mods that can be needlessly disruptive. Prison Overhaul, for example, is on very thin ice. Of course, it never worked right to begin with, but it also has very high overhead in the game that's just disruptive overall. 

 

This'll probably have the side effect of making the game world a bit less NSFW in the sense of less random lewd stuff happening, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. All the kinky stuff in the world doesn't help if the game's not playable. 

 

Getting back on topic, I love being able to run DYNDOLOD without getting a ton of errors. I'll be working hard to maintain this state of affairs as the game continues to come togther.

 

 

So, we've got grass. We've got DYNDOLOD. That polishes off all the mandatory mods for this ENB configuration. So let's download the ENB itself and get the root builder updated. OK, no problems there. Last but not least, we just need to make sure the ini settings are right, and then we can go in for a test drive!

 

 

So how does it look with the ENB Preset installed and the ini settings loaded? Right away, we can see that potato man looks more detailed and sharp, so that's a good start... though his low poly hair is painfully obvious now! Below him, you can see the Helgen tavern. The dark spaces are dark, but the bright spaces are well-lit and much easier to see than in my last setup.

 

 

Interior FPS is 180, exterior (Tamriel) FPS is 120 in Helgen, so we are well within our objective goal of 60 FPS and threshold level of 30. 

 

 

The exterior views are extremely detailed, and Patrician seems to dispense with the janky focus feature that many Skyrim ENBs use with varying levels of success. Exterior FPS did drop to around 100 when I got out of Helgen and had broad vision lines, no doubt from the fact that DYNDOLOD is currently running on "high." That still gives a very comfortable cushion on FPS, so we'll stay with that setting until or unless we start showing signs that we need to lighten up on that score. 

 

The water is still very blue, but it's changed from the 'mineral slurry' sky blue to an almost topaz color. It's not a look that I'm used to, but its very vivid and serves as a good simulation of the reflected sky to go along with the terrain reflections. In the third image you can see some DYNDOLOD jank that I'll need to drill into if it doesn't fix itself as the build matures. We've also got some square glow on the light sources still, visible in the fourth image. 

 

After leaving Whiterun, I walked all the way to Winterhold and took the final screen shot, showing the frigid northern ocean. Not withstanding the minor issues I saw near Whiterun, I'm very happy with how this is looking so far. But what about the script load? Let's look at the Papyrus log.

 

 

Well, well, well. I have 3 megabytes of this crap in my log now. I feel like I might be missing some assets... turns out I missed a step in the installation process, so let's try this again.

 

 

Much better! And the Papyrus log? Fish notwithstanding, we're back to a clean start.

 

 

That just leaves the optional files for this ENB. I decided to use most of the recommendations, though Better Facelight may get dumped if it still triggers the Shadow Scene Bug. 

 

 

 

Everything installed smoothly, and after a little bit of asset tweaking on the fire effects mod, the square particle halos are gone from the torches where we'd seen them before.

 

 

Well, that's the end of this session. Depending on how I'm feeling I might start on - and even finish - part 4 later tonight, but more likely it'll wait for later.