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Skyrim Modding Guide


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Posted

Yup i do use RS children (and one of things to merge are its patches for falskar, wyrmstooth etc). so the file will come in handy if i decide to use custom weapon animations. Thank you again.

 

Posted

NPC mergers are the hardest, you have to move and rename facegen files, seq files, voice files, etc, or you'll have grayfaced silent NPCs, which is what happened to the previous NPC mergers I did. Doing it for something like Falskaar and Wyrmstooth is not something I would recommend.

Posted

 I've been using Selene Kate past year and half or so, i love the the mod except for one thing which drives me Nuts. Have you ever figured out a way so that Selene doesn't constantly run into or bump into your character all the time?.

Posted

check her mcm menu i think you need to switch off her idles. this will make her static though. if you stand still then her walking idles around you begin. maybe you have her set too close your pc character. try making her move away from you keep the distance bigger. this will prevent her to move so close to your character.

 

 

 If i remember right i thought Selene Kate was using Serana's AI might be wrong, but Serana didn't behave that way

 

Not really she got her own AI created. And that is the problem. when you stand still she will start to walk but if she is too close she will probably always try to walk through you. if you don't like that then either switch off her ai or try checking her mcm to make her farther away from pc character.

 

AI in games has never been smart enough.

Posted

use a mod named companion as followers this will move selene away from you, it is here regular idle that are making her walk around you but usually she will want to walk through you, since there is no real collision detection i think.

 

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/62863

 

I have heard that this mod is conflicting with Racemenu is that true?

 

I had it installed but it never really worked for me but i like the idea so......

 

Posted

 

 

NPC mergers are the hardest, you have to move and rename facegen files, seq files, voice files, etc, or you'll have grayfaced silent NPCs, which is what happened to the previous NPC mergers I did. Doing it for something like Falskaar and Wyrmstooth is not something I would recommend.

 

I wouldn't merge them into falskar just have all the patches in one file, as there is quite a few of them. But will start with easier things first :3

 

But regarding RS children - are you using the mod as it is? I made some changes to load- uninstalled MMck and mods related , started up game and bam 9 fps indoors. Dunno why i didn't notice it ealier but i backtracked disabling mods and found its RS children. HDT log was getting spammed with error missing belly node. No idea why game wants to attach HDT to children but i got to fix it by using rescalled XPMSE from here . Might be worth mentioning (post 74)

Posted

Never had that issue, I use RS Children and the Complete + USKP merged patch, I never have issues with FPS near children. Children don't have clothes with HDT enabled and it's the clothes that hold the mesh that is the body (say you have a CBBE body with 8 HDT nodes, you put on a UNP armor with 0, you now have a UNP body with 0 HDT nodes), so even if RS children had HDT issues you'd only see it when they were naked, or you have something wrong with their clothes.

 

As for Selene Kate I just started using her, and I'm not using companions at all on my current profile because I'm flying around all the time and companions don't like that. The Selene Kate I'm using is one fixed by UKC; he took out a few things that can cause issues and even crashes including some kill moves that the author of VioLens took a look at and advised him to remove.

Posted

I use the Uncapper as well, just put it in Mod Organizer/Mods/Uncapper/SKSE/Plugins/Uncapper.dll. All SKSE Plugins can be installed the same way by just keeping the folder structure.

 

 You'll need to manually drag and drop the files from overwrite to the Uncapper folder. You can double click the Overwrite to open it up then scrolling still works with the left pane so you can drag the items from the Overwrite pop up to the Uncapper folder.

 

Final edit worked !!

 

Just to inform that it worked !!!! Thanks for all your help :) adding below the path for anyone else having problem to determine where to move the 2 files using Mod Organizer.

 

C: ( main window drive drive if not selected another disk) Game Drive E: (for those who are using another hard disk for the games)

E: Steam\SteamApps\common\Skyrim\Mod organizer\mods\Skyrim - Community - Uncapper\Skse\plugins -->Uncapper.dll - Uncapper.ini

 

Thanks so much :) :) happy faces LoL

Posted

NPC mergers are the hardest, you have to move and rename facegen files, seq files, voice files, etc, or you'll have grayfaced silent NPCs, which is what happened to the previous NPC mergers I did. Doing it for something like Falskaar and Wyrmstooth is not something I would recommend.

 

Regarding mod merging:  after years of doing it by hand - and yes, renaming the folders was a royal pain - I am now a total fan of using the Merge Plugins script for TES5EDIT, which now automatically moves and renames that stuff for you  thus preventing gray faced silent NPCs.  It also now handles things like navmeshes and MCM menus better than I ever did by hand, and so is now one of the essential tools in my modding toolkit.

 

While compatibility patches still need to be hand edited, and adding individual mods to an esm over time is still best done by hand, Merge Plugins 1.9 has totally revamped how I approach mod merging.  When used with MO profiles - for each merge, create a new profile that contains only the mods to be merged - it's now a breeze to switch to the merge build profile, create a merge, switch back to your main profile, install and check it out, then go back to the merge profile, reorder/add/patch/etc , then re-create a new version of the merge,  in virtually no time at all.

 

There are good guides to doing merging on the mod's Nexus page, of course.  But there is even more information over in the STEP community, especially on the STEP, REGS, and Skyrim Revisited forums - all of which are trying to help people create working builds using lots of cool mods, just like this forum does.  I enthusiastically recommend that anyone doing any serious modding - whether merging or not - should check them out.

 

BTW, as an aside, one specific fact about merging which I just learned (and which applies whether you use the script or do it by hand) is that you can't do it all in TES5EDIT - you need to use the CK sometimes, too.   Specifically, when creating a merge that contains navmeshes, you pretty much *have* to load the final esp though the Creation Kit, re-finalize your navmeshes, and then save, in order for the main navmesh reference record to be created properly.  Just thought you ought to know...

 

As I am now in the process of integrating a huge number of mods into a new Skyrim build (and thanks for the good info in this guide, everyone!), I have done a lot of merging, and expect to do a lot more.  I also plan to be avidly following this forum for some time, so I'll be happy to help anyone else with merging issues, to the best of my ability.

Posted

THe Merge Plugins 1.9 script was how I did my NPC mergers for Inconsequential NPCs and Ultimate NPC Overhaul, and it resulted in grayfaces and no voices every time. According to uglykidcid you pretty much have to do such things by hand, same with scripted mods as the script will break. I would suggest you go ingame and check out the NPCs you've merged with that script if they work properly if you've merged voice or look overhauls.

Posted

THe Merge Plugins 1.9 script was how I did my NPC mergers for Inconsequential NPCs and Ultimate NPC Overhaul, and it resulted in grayfaces and no voices every time. According to uglykidcid you pretty much have to do such things by hand, same with scripted mods as the script will break. I would suggest you go ingame and check out the NPCs you've merged with that script if they work properly if you've merged voice or look overhauls.

 

It's not perfect, I grant - but all the times I've seen it fail to copy resources, it was because my esp wasn't living in the same MO mod folder as its resources.  However, most of my experience using Merge Plugins 1.9 comes from FNV, which is slightly different, especially regarding scripting, and since I've just returned to Skyrim, I can see that I have some catching up to do.

 

When you tried to merge INPC and UNO, were you actually merging the whole INPC mod, or just UNO and a hand-built INPC-UNO compatibility patch?  Because as I'm looking at the mods - and all the various compatibility patches I already have for INPC - I don't view INPC as a potential merge candidate.  It has a ton of new characters and scripts, and plenty of compatibility patches for it and other mods, so I regard it as an unmergeable baseline mod, pretty much the esp equivalent of an ESM.

 

So, my strategy for merging would be to leave INPC intact, and only merge UNO, UNO-DG, UNO-DB, and a handcrafted INPC_UNO CP (in addition to any other NPC-altering mods that I have lying around).   In fact, that's what I'm about to do right now.  I'll let you know how it works for me :).

 

EDIT:  actually, now that I've just installed UNO, I'm re-strategizing, as I don't like the fact that UNO requires 4 different hair ESMs, and I don't want to waste the load slots.  So, what I'm going to actually do is boot up TES5EDIT with those hair esms and the UNO esps loaded, create a new hand-merged UNO-Hair.esp, and have all the UNO esps change their references from the old esms to the new UNO-Hair.  This has to be done by hand, as I'm actually changing the UNO esps (to remove their masters).   Then, I'll merge the UNO-Hair and edited UNO esps into a new 'UNO-Merged' esp, which I can then use as a stand-alone mod (no hair masters) in further NPC merges.

Posted

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/34935/?

 

The mod above includes replacer looks for almost all the InqNPCs as well as Interesting NPCs, what I tried to do was to merge that plugin, the Cutting Room Floor Plugin and the Enhancements plugin together into one ESP. However this resulted in grayfaces and no voices for all NPCs, even for the children and the like that wasn't touched by those plugins. If you figure out a way to merge them properly let me know.

 

For UNO what I tried to do was to merge the UNO, UNO Dawnguard and UNO Dragonborn into one ESP, but I got grayfaces and crashes there as well.

Posted

Re: gray faces after using Merge Plugins:

 

It turns out that this is a known problem with the 1.9 script, in that it will only copy/rename facegen assets that have the same name as the esp being merged.  So, when merging something like 'UNO.esp', facegen files under 'skyrim.esm' will NOT be copied to the final output - and will be lost unless you manually copy them.  (Whereas, files under the 'UNO.esp' folder would get copied, and the folder renamed to 'UNO-merged.esp', as they should be).   Likewise, similar things happen to mods that contain voice and other resources for esps other than the ones actually being merged.

 

However, the problem has been fixed in the 1.95 version of the script - which can be downloaded from version 1.9.5 at the moment, or more directly from here (for which you also need the new mteFunctions.pas).   Apparently, this bug was *not* in 1.8, but was introduced in 1.9.   The 1.9.5 fix was announced by the author this post on the Merge Plugins forum; since he did it on Mar 15, I have no idea why he hasn't updated the main download on Nexus.

 

I have just downloaded and installed these updates, and can verify that they work.   Using the straight 1.9 plugin failed to copy the new versions of the skyrim.esm facegen assets to the merge output, while 1.9.5 copied things correctly.  I am currently in the process of testing my new merged mod, and will post it here with full installation instructions when I have it working.

Posted

Status update: The merge I did with the 1.95 script works perfectly!  No gray faces anywhere!  However, running merged UNO on a vanilla setup with no skin or makeup mods installed, I have to say that I think a lot of the NPCs look *really* unattractive.   And seeing blow-dried modern hair on Ralof in the opening cart ride is really jarring.  So, I don't think UNO is going to be a mod I'm going to make part of my standard build.

 

Unfortunately, real life calls me away again at the moment.  I'll upload my merge to a sharing site and post the link here soon.  But seriously, using the 1.95 script makes everything easy - just load the 3 UNO esps into TES5EDIT, run the script, and you'll have the same result faster than I can post it.

Posted

Zzz you fix one issue another pops up... what we have on plate today...

 

First off:  thanks sharing GalenZ.

 

ok my issue now... Immersive college of Winterhold got patch for Relighting skyrim , problem it is for UNMERGED one. What ... How are things when it comes to merging lightspace mods? i got relighting (it has merged version) and ELE. Would the script work well on them?

 

case2: Sacremas - You once mentioned testing what videomemory settings in ENB works best - did that bear any results?

Also ReservedMemorySizeMb - been trying various settings for this (from 128 to 1536) without real differance - stutters and thats that.

Posted

ok my issue now... Immersive college of Winterhold got patch for Relighting skyrim , problem it is for UNMERGED one. What ... How are things when it comes to merging lightspace mods? i got relighting (it has merged version) and ELE. Would the script work well on them?

 

case2: Sacremas - You once mentioned testing what videomemory settings in ENB works best - did that bear any results?

Also ReservedMemorySizeMb - been trying various settings for this (from 128 to 1536) without real differance - stutters and thats that.

 

Re: merging lighting.   A merge can only do what loading the merged esps separately would do, and it doesn't really matter what's being merged - lighting is just another set of objects in cells.   So, if your CWI-RS patch needs a master (the unmerged Relighting Skyrim) that you don't have, you obviously can't merge those two things together.   And you certainly can't add the base RS mod to the merged RS mod - you would get double light sources. However, if you have the original esps that went into the merged RS, and your new CWI-RS patch is mastered from one of those components, then you could re-merge the RS esps with the CWI-RS patch.  Otherwise, merging those files as they stand is a total no-no.

 

But...if you're willing to do some work, you can do some cutting and pasting, and hand-create something that *is* mergeable.  Let's assume you have 3 files, which I'll call RSCore, RSMerged, and CWI-RSCoreCP.  Now, CWI-RSCoreCP is only going to modify a limited number of cells.  What you need to do is use TES5EDIT to totally remove the records of those cells from RSMerged, and then gut RSCore to remove all records that *aren't* those cells.  You can then merge all three files together, because your new RSCORE and CWI-RSCoreCP will only affect a few cells, and RSMerged will *not* affect those same cells.

 

This same technique can be used to merge *any* mods that edit the same cells, whether with lighting of contents or whatever.   For example, Skyrim Radioactive edits a number of shops and gives them totally new lighting - which is totally incompatible with (say) ELFX lighting in those same cells.  But you can edit ELFX to totally *remove* its mods to those cells, and voila!  The two mods are now compatible!  Elianora has created a tutorial video going though that exact case; you should be able to generalize it to your CWI-RS issue.

 

Re: stutter.  The question isn't 'what video memory settings will reduce my stutter' so much as 'why are you stuttering'?   For example, f you're stuttering because you have more video data than will fit in your card's VRAM (which is a likely cause of unremoveable stuttering), then fiddling with memory setings will do nothing - you'll have to reduce your video load, probably by reducing texture sizes.  However, you first need to see if you *are* exceeding your card's capacity, and the best way to do that is by using the Skyrim Performance Monitor.

 

Running your game with SPM will show you *exactly* how much main and video memory you're using at any point.  And I dare say the results will surprise you - mine sure surprised *me* (I have a 3GB card, and on the intro ride to Helgen, was using 2 GB with just the hi-res texture pack - but when I added more HQ textures, that jumped to 2.8 GB - and I didn't even have multiple followers each with their own 4K skins active yet)!  If it turns out that you're frequently using max or near-max VRAM, then the only real solution is to dial back on your texture sizes.  Whereas you're maxing out main RAM, then you need to use ENB/ENBoost).  And if you're not close to maxing out either set of RAM, then you need to step back five and again try to figure out the source of the problem.

 

Those ENB settings affect *how* you use VRAM, of course.  As I understand it - and that understanding may be wrong to some degree or another - the 'ReservedMemorySizeMB' in enblocal.ini is the amount of VRAM that ENB reserves as 'swap space', and is thus not available for actual rendering.  Whereas, 'VideoMemorySizeENB' is the total amount of memory that ENB can use to hold all the meshes and textures is needs.  If your meshes and textures exceed your actual VRAM size, stuff will be offloaded into main RAM, and swapped back and forth as necessary between frames.  But doing that swapping is way slower than just having everything in VRAM - so you get stuttering.  Increasing the ReservedMemorySizeMB will not remove the stutter - it will just reduce it, by increasing the amount of data that ENB can swap in or out in one chunk.  But increasing also means that you have less working VRAM, thus increasing the *need* for such swapping - which is why you want to keep it as low as possible.

 

Ultimately, though, the only way to stop stuttering is to keep your VRAM usage down.  Stop being greedy about texture sizes, dial back to lower resolutions, and keep using SPM to monitoring your memory usage and FPS as you change things, until you get what you regard as acceptable performance.

Posted

I ended up not really finding a better solution and settling on buying a better video card and trying then. :P My new card won't be ready for install until monday/tuesday, it's a GTX 980 4 Gig which is a steep upgrade from my current GTX 580 1.5 Gig which made it a bit hard to test these things. For now I'm only using Realvision's default auto-detection of VideoRam. SkyrimTuner did serious tests on this on his end, as well as a lot of communications with Boris Voronstov, author of ENBSeries, and he found that it was best to let the ENBSeries auto-detect your video ram and reserved video memory rather than manually setting them, this led to the best result with the least chance of crashes.

 

If you have video ram set to too high in ENBseries it can lead to instabilities in your game, things not being rendered, and even crashes occuring, so regardless you want to stay below that.

Posted

hmm very interesting file that SPM.   It turns out my R9 280 3gig card is pushed pretty hard at all times.   I did a little test and with all my texture mods I normally run along with 3 followers ran into the Bannered Mare in Whiterun.   My card is basically maxed out all the time at 3040 gig, just standing there.   Now luckily I normally do not have a ton of stutter, but it is there at times.   To turn up the test, I picked the most graphic intense spell I could find and cast it non stop in the middle of the inn.   Try using Fire Storm spell (may have to turn on tgm in console to use it, spell id for me was 000A270C) and watched my gpu % go from 34% up to 95% and temp from 34 to 68.   Think I might have to go rethink my mod setup a little, maybe back off a few of the texture heavy mods I am using.   Or liquid cool my gpu :P

btw, in the test my cpu (8350 8 core) and 16 gig of system ram were taking a nap, hardly used.   at max usage think the cpu got up 30% and system memory was around 2 gig.

Posted

Skyrim by default uses only 2 cores of your CPU, same as does most games, you can use ini settings like those Ewi ones to make it use 4 cores instead but more than that leads to instability. Papyrus is what uses the main amount of CPU, and that's not set up for more than 4 cores.

 

Overall games uses very little CPU, it's not really worth it buying a really strong CPU if you're going to be using your computer mainly for gaming. I have a intel i5 2500k 3.3 GHz 4 core and 8 Gig Ram and that's lasted me for four years at least (maybe longer) and will last me probably 4 more before games start to become that demanding.

Posted

Well i'm kinda pushing things to the limit :P . I use afterburner to monitor resource usage. It is ~3600 MB VRAM used and 11GB RAM (8GB is skyrim i belive) , i got 970 that has 4GB but we later learned 0.5 of it is gimped so driver might be set to avoid using that last bit.

sorry i made it sound like i blame ReservedMemorySizeMb for stutters , i was more of probing for information what happens when i set it too low/high since i didn't notice any differance.

 

 

 

I'm testing in Whiterun with JK skyrim and some extra npcs , which is the most taxing place known to man :D I'm not too bothered by the stutter as it happens when view changes dramaticly (like when i run up to dragonsreach and then turn back to look down on city). Just disabling JK skyrim eliminates it XD (VRAM @3.4) .

I belive however it is not VRAM related but engine limitation (unable to utilize CPU fully i would guess?) when there is large amount of objects/meshes in field of view. Normaly i'm GPU bound , but with JK depending what i look at GPU usage drops, fps drops but CPU usage is as it was ( one core toping 80% rest 40-60% i5-2500k). WIthout JK, it is fully GPU bound except when i turn ENB off , then GPU use goes to 40%, frames go up a bit but don't skyrocket as they should 50-80fps (indoors that would be 200fps with full gpu).
Uh i did it again, wrote about irrelevant things, this "low fps while GPU&CPU arn't fully used" issue is like thorn in my side. Will at least spoiler it.

 

 

@ENB memory - hmm like on every ENB profile you are told to set videomemorysize on your own rather then using autodetect :s

 

Whilte doing the testing i noticed sometimes after leaving game MO will chew hard drive for a minute or two (rebuilding file list?) and after that when loading into game again i'm presented with some longest load times ever. Any idea? i didn't change anything in load order just edited enblocal to test different memory setting.

 

@merging - thanks will give it a shot and report.

Posted

hmm very interesting file that SPM.   It turns out my R9 280 3gig card is pushed pretty hard at all times.   I did a little test and with all my texture mods I normally run along with 3 followers ran into the Bannered Mare in Whiterun.   My card is basically maxed out all the time at 3040 gig, just standing there.   Now luckily I normally do not have a ton of stutter, but it is there at times.   To turn up the test, I picked the most graphic intense spell I could find and cast it non stop in the middle of the inn.   Try using Fire Storm spell (may have to turn on tgm in console to use it, spell id for me was 000A270C) and watched my gpu % go from 34% up to 95% and temp from 34 to 68.   Think I might have to go rethink my mod setup a little, maybe back off a few of the texture heavy mods I am using.   Or liquid cool my gpu :P

btw, in the test my cpu (8350 8 core) and 16 gig of system ram were taking a nap, hardly used.   at max usage think the cpu got up 30% and system memory was around 2 gig.

 

Sounds a lot like my rig (GTX 780 3G, 16G RAM, 4 core overclocked 4670K CPU), and given that I was using 2.9G VRAM in Helgen, I'm sure that I'll be having experiences similar to yours, too.  However, I would like to point out that SPM is only telling you about the resources used by your Skyrim process, which is *not* all the resources that Skyrim is using.  ENB is actually a different process on your system, which holds a lot of video data in main RAM, and on a 64 bit system, is NOT limited to 4GB - and this is what the whole 'ENBoost' thing is about.

 

Gopher did a video way back when he switched to ENBoost, and his SPM showed what a huge difference it made in his memory usage.  Before ENBoost, his main RAM usage was hovering near it's limit of 3.2G, as a copy of all the video data had to kept in the Skyrim process (which has a 32 bit limit).  And this often caused really low frame rates, lots of stuttering, and CTDs when he ran out of memory.   His 4GB of VRAM wasn't even full, and he had plenty of spare actual RAM in his system, but Skyrim was still running out of memory.

 

But  when he turned on ENBoost, all those problems magically went away.  His Skyrim memory usage plummeted to less than a gig, his FPS went up, his stutter vanished, and best of all, he didn't CTD anywhere near as much any more.  That because all that raw video data was now being stored in his ENB's 64-bit memory space, not his Skyrim process.

 

My point is that, while your CPU may be puttering along, the RAM usage indicated by SPM is misleading, as it doesn't show how much RAM your ENB is using.   ENB is using *at least* as much RAM as your VRAM, and likely more - which is a *good thing*.   This also means that all those extra GB of main RAM your have *aren't* being wasted.  Your Skyrim+ENB could easily eat up 6-7 gig - and hopefully more, as ENB can keep more video data in memory rather than always having to read it from disk.   And (at least on my system), Windows and other background processes use up at least another 2G (or even more, if you're not careful).  That means total RAM usage while playing Skyrim can easily exceed 8G - which means Windows would have to start swapping stuff out, which leads to slower startup and possible stuttering.

 

This suggests that if you are stuttering, one fix *may* be to upgrade your RAM from 8GB to 16GB.  Reading video data from RAM is still way faster than reading the same data from an SSD (much less a HDD).  This is, in fact, why I actually upgraded my system from 8G to 16G - and to me, the $80 to give ENB a few extra gigs to play with was *totally* worth the price.

 

Also, I may have inadvertently overstated the 'danger' of having your VRAM maxed out. Having maxed-out VRAM is not, in itself, a problem - but it may be a symptom of one.   If ENB is doing it's job right, it *should* be trying to keep as much data in VRAM as possible, all the time, even if it's not all being used during any one frame.  So, you *should* be seeing maxed out VRAM in graphic-intensive areas.  (If you aren't, then you should definitely dance with glee, then go get some higher-res textures, you lucky dog).  Maxed-out VRAM does NOT necessarily mean you have too much video data.

 

But if your system is stuttering *all* the time, and your VRAM is *always* maxed out (where 'all' in this sense means in graphic-intensive areas that reduce your FPS from it's maximum), then you're likely overtaxing your system with too much texture data.   As always, the ultimate test is performance.  If you like your FPS and can deal with an occasional stutter, you're fine.  But if your think your FPS is too low, or you're stuttering way more than you like, then start cutting down those texture sizes.  Like going on any sort of diet, reducing your texture gluttony can be a difficult process - but you'll probably like the end results :).

 

 

Posted

According to Boris Voronstov, author of ENBSeries, ENBoost and ENB's can handle up to 1 TB of VRAM, that's how high he set it when he made that addon. However such a space-age video card probably won't get invented for a few decades at least, so upwards of 6 GB is probably the most we can pull out of it.

 

It's also important that even if you have 16 GB RAM and 4 GB VRAM, do not set your video ram to ~18 Gig as a lot of guides want you to! This causes extreme instabilities, and can lead to crashing or even the video card overheating. Find instead your system's Dedicated Video Memory and add that to your VRAM, that's as high as you should ever go. This is also the identical number to having ENBSeries auto-detect it, which is why RealVision is now set to that as default.

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