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Please post in new thread [Skyrim] & [The Elder Scrolls]
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Though now I think about it, you could probably do some interesting stuff with Elemental Fury, Marked For Death and Slow Time on that build.
The warrior I made first and the mage I use now are both in the forties with essentially maxed relevant skills for them. The mage is damned nightmare; endless fireballs, double thralls, and doing crap like getting flying dragons down to zero health before they can even manage to crash-land. He can still die if I'm stupid, but otherwise he's just an unstoppable hellstorm. The warrior is just a monstrous tank. Barrels through most everything with no problem and is basically unkillable, either by magic or physical combat; constantly lopping off heads to boot.
In either situation, I can't help but think of how lame it would be to lose all of those perks just to keep your level low. Without using the perks, you're losing out on most of what makes Skyrim an RPG. Sure, you can do that if that's your thing, but it's a waste if all you want is just to make yourself super-strong. 100 on Smithing and Enchanting with the right perks is way more fun in a game-breaking sense then enemies just being constantly weak. You wouldn't even have to use potion glitches to do it; Smithing and Enchanting are plenty game-breaking with what they can legitimately. For instance, my warrior and his axe are so strong thanks to perks that I gain soul charge on the weapon because he can kill things so easily (perk for recharging weapons from kills).
Smart Souls.
It needs repeating if it has.
I love setting fools on fire and then chopping them down. The extra damage done to enemies on fire has been pretty key so far. I'm thinking I'll go for the fire specialization that causes enemies to run scared when low on health.
I tried for a period using a two-hander and swapping back and forth between spells and melee, but I kept getting wrecked by a group of tough thugs that came after me in town. It wasn't until I switched back to my primary setup that I was able to down them. It's a bit of a shame because I normally like swinging around massive hunks of steel.
I haven't been playing long, but I just discovered how to bind things to the number keys. Should make my life a heck of a lot easier. That would have been nice if it were explained ingame. :S
No it didn't. People wildly, wildly exaggerate the problems with Oblivion's levelling.
Personally I'm amazed that TES games are the only games in the world where people are enraged and confused by the concept of a game becoming more challenging as it gets closer to the end.
Yeah, but Oblivion made that late-game difficult curve in a way that was weird, and stupid, and kind of lazy. Broke-ass bandits rolling up on you with gear that costs as much as a house? Wolves that take more than one swing of a sword that can drop a Minotaur? The wilderness ends up being a frustratingly difficult place to explore, in that almost everything is sort of a PITA.
I like that in Skyrim a bear goes from monstrous poopants-inducer to an annoyance once you grow up. The difficulty ain't perfect, but at least I'm not thinking WHY THE FUCK DID THEY DO THAT constantly.
Edit: Including the quote would be helpful...
Why is your saturation/contrast so messed up?
FXAA Post Processing mods... likely Realistic Colors and Real Nights: http://skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1875
And here's a small comparison (I have more here) of vanilla, Realistic Colors, and Enhanced Shaders FX Pure ENB + Realistic Colors:
The ENB-based mods aren't quite perfect yet, and there are a hundred damned configurations out there, but they do do some great stuff with light sources. Realistic Colors by itself is much more consistent and less system intensive, which is why I don't yet have an ENB mod in the OP.
must. have.
Enhanced Shaders FX Pure ENB + Realistic Colors, you say?
EDIT: Enhanced Shaders FX Pure ENB is one fuck of a mod name, I have to say.
This is a totally OCD question/issue but I restarted once already and noticed that my save counter remained at what it was before.
I want to start over again and I'd like to start over at 0 saves.
Also, how do I stop myself from overencumbering myself from the intro? I left the keep carrying like 400 pounds of imperial armor. How do I stop myself?
Yep, that's the combo I use. It does make Winterhold and other light sources look amazing. You'll want to first install Realistic Colors, then rename its d3d9.dll file to something else, such as d3d9injFX.dll. Then install the ENB mod, open its enbseries.ini file and change the lines under [PROXY] to this:
EnableProxyLibrary=true
InitProxyFunctions=true
ProxyLibrary=d3d9injFX.dll (or whatever you renamed Realistic Color's .dll to)
The cool thing about this is that you can toggle on and off each mod individually - ENB off but Realistic Colors on, Realistic Colors on but ENB off, both on, both off, for example. It makes it easy to compare the mods to each other, with each other and to vanilla, or turn off one half if I don't quite like what one mod does to a certain area.
Steam ID: 76561198021298113
Origin ID: SR71C_Blackbird
That night shot looks AMAZING! Holy shit.
That said, the daytime shot of the statue looks like the blacks are being crushed. Too much detail is being lost for my tastes.
I really want to tinker with this myself... but I just want to play
Here you go: http://skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=822
Yeah, Oblivion was screwed up. I remember I did a ton of sidequests before starting the main quest because I heard the main quest started opening the Oblivion portals and kind of fucked with the main world. When I *did* try to start the main quest, I was so ridiculously high level that the NPCs (which for some reason didn't scale) would be one-shotted by monsters. Monsters that hit like trucks, but were so trivial for me because I had 100% chameleon and poisons that could knock them out in one shot without them ever seeing me. At that point the game stopped being fun and I kind of gave up. I never did end up beating it because of that (though I was the leader of all three guilds
Dashui's gonna pull ANOTHER mod combination out of his ass that makes everything look even better based on the last current while.
Niice! That fourth row looks fantastic. I'll be trying out the Enhanced Shaders FX Pure ENB 102e tonight.
I have gone a little mad recently testing and taking screenshots of various ENB mods. I've only shared the results of ES FX Pure ENB here. There are so many God damned different user configurations uploaded on the Nexus that keep getting linked around or endorsed and I've tested a good portion of them.
I've had complaints with most, such as nights being too dark or too bright, water glitches, fucked up grass colors, etc. The Enhanced Shaders ENB configuration is the only one that's been visually consistent for me, and it's also the most popular. There's also a Vanilla Plus version of Enhanced Shaders FX, but I'm currently more a fan of what Pure ENB does with light sources than Vanilla Plus.
Realistic Colors is an FXAA Post Process Injector-based mod with a few sprinkles of its own tech. I've had absolutely no problems or complaints with it, it's the best of that bunch, and so I'm done experimenting with other FXAA PPI-based mods.
ok, someone please explain to me what "Ambient Occlusion" is
That's SSAO. You can think of it like extra shadowing, and it absolutely kills performance. I leave that option off.
Edit: Rangar explained it better. It looks good, but it really does tank my framerate.
It better simulates the way light radiates in real life.
Say you're looking at a really bright spotlight, then you move behind a tree. That spot light, if it's powerful enough, will bleed around the edges of the tree. That's ambient occlusion at work.
would leaving that out be what makes the shadows look kind of blurry and blocky, and characters in sunlight have white outlines around them?
(like in this picture)
because Id like to fix that if possible
oh ok that makes sense
If you have both installed, you could leave ENB enabled but toggle Realistic Colors off when you're in dungeons. That way you'll get slightly darker and more vibrant dungeons without blinding yourself. And then you can turn Realistic Colors back on when you get outside.
It's fun to experiment with the both of them in your game. SHIFT + F12 will toggle the ENB mods on and off, and PAUSE will toggle Realistic Colors on and off.
Just so I don't end up spending as much time as you have (because fuck, I obsess over visual tweaks too), can I just drop the Enhanced Shaders FX Pure ENB into my data folder and go without any tweaking to get the results you did in the fourth column?
As much as I love modding my gaming experience, I just don't want to spend a ton of hours that I could use to be playing. :lol:
EDIT: I should add that, in essence, occlusion is what allows an object to be blocked from the players view by another piece of geometry.
At it's most basic form, without occlusion everything in a video game would be a huge transparent mess.
Yes, that's all you have to do.
The ENB mods do include an FPS limiter, though, that you may want to enable if you've noticed your game stuttering. Gamebryo is kind of a fucked up engine, and ATI/AMD cards don't entirely play nice with it, either, and so the game can visibly stutter if the framerate drops even by a single digit (modded or not). It was driving me crazy. Enabling the limiter and setting it to 32 frames fixed that issue for me.
I haven't experienced any stuttering, but I'll definitely keep that in mind if the mod causes any. Thank you!
Is there a performance hit to using these?
I read on the mod page that the creator took a hit of losing at most of 3FPS... but lots of users get no hit whatsoever. YYMV basically.
Realistic Colors doesn't cost me anything. ENB mods do, however, but the impact is greater because I have an ATI card. It's anywhere from five to ten frames, depending on the location. That's partly why I haven't added an ENB mod to the OP until recently. If you have an Nvidia card, though, the impact is negligible.
Anyway, I just finished taking the rest of the comparison screenshots for Pure ENB by itself. I'll be uploading them shortly. You can view all the comparisons I take here: http://minus.com/ambitious_pen
Is there a way to use both that d3d9.dll, for its performance enhancement, while still using these visual tweaks?
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I'm not sure if the d3d9.dll files the lighting mods include those optimization, but ENB lets you run two d3d9.dll files simultaneously. I'm guessing you could set the performance file as the proxy. However, you then wouldn't be able to use Realistic Colors with the ENB mod.
Your example describes bloom lighting. It does not describe ambient occlusion.
Ambient lighting is uniform background light. When it is occluded, shadows result. For games, these are not the same as shadows cast by specific light sources, like a flashlight.
To determine whether a point is shadowed under AO, the computer must answer, "how much of the 'sky' is visible from this point?" If none of it is, that point is completely shadowed from ambient light. If all of it is visible, it is completely bright.
It can add a whole lot of depth to the image:
It's not too amazing in Skyrim. You can see it in action here:
In that video, there are multiple types of shadows. The AO is responsible for the sort of blobby ones underneath the grass.
Thanks for the response. I actually just tried my game without the performance DLL, and... it runs great, still. I'm wondering if TESVAL is enough on its own, or maybe one of the updates improved performance and I didn't realize... not sure, but whatever! This frees me up to try these visual tweaks.
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