Quick and Easy Question About Animations

[Catthedragon]

I know that the game engine bears a limit as to how many animations you can have without affecting stability. But do animations that are downloaded, but not enabled/registered, count toward this total?

 

i.e. is it the downloading of animations or the enabling/registering of animations that affects game stability?

[GeorgiaCav]

Individual animations don't count against your .esp count, but the animation mods (SLAL packs, etc.) do.

 

What individual animations apparently do count against are your string counts. For more on this, see this thread. If I'm reading ReSaver right -- and unless it's counting something different (which is possible), not only does each animation count against your string count, but each actor and each stage counts. If you're planning to do a long play-through with a single character, it is something you need to keep your eye on. The linked thread includes solutions.

[Nazzzgul666]

In my experience animations don't affect stability at all (if crash fixes is installed), and FNIS tells me that i have 11.768 installed, so... pretty much the limit even of the extended FNIS XXL. What you should expect are (slightly) longer loading screens. To answer your question, i think there is one important step missing: installing animations.

So, 

-downloading animations doesn't do anything (except occupying space on your HDD/SSD). Skyrim doesn't survey what you're doing on the internet, and if it would, that point would certainly concern me more than anything else.

-installing animations has probably the biggest effect, even if you don't register them in SLAL/sexlab

-register animations in SL: i could imagine that it might have an impact on performance and maybe a high number can even cause crashes if a mod has to chose one of 500 animations instead of 1/20 every time and maybe even more than once at the same time and your PC can't keep up. Not entirely sure how that is solved in sexlab, it might also depend on the mods triggering sex.

 

If you meant installing but not enabiling the .esp... i have no clue. I'm using MO where i can install and uninstall mods just as easy as i unable and disable .esps, there is no point in having animations installed but not enabled.