I think I'm actually bored of Fallout 4. Oh well. Just downloaded Skyrim SE again. It says only 150 odd hours. That can't be right. Looks like I've got about 1000 more to go before I catch-up to FO4! I figure by next year, I should have that nice and chiseled out. Gonna come down to how good my time management is with modding it, and how much I value my current dating life. I mean, that's what? A couple hours a night? Not really too bad - better get to work
Gonna use a different mod manager this time. We'll just see how Vortex handles it, since I've got more chops with that than I do MO2 at this point.
That's the other thing... I had a pretty huge mod setup for it a coupla years ago. Even though FO4's engine is technically a little more advanced, it's 50% less optimized and actually a lot more limited in many ways. It has more fancy-looking baubles, whatzits, and crusticles in vanilla form than Skyrim SE could even dream of, but that all takes a big bite into what you can do with it on your end, because when you start changing things, the new features and functions just break that much more easily. It seems more advanced, but modding stability-wise, it's just awful. Skyrim SE is looking rock-solid for mods at this point. Skyrim, I feel, does what it CAN do better, and it's easier to fix problems. Not to mention, it just looks so much better imo. What's there is already great... it just needs some modern polish and it's looking almost like current gen. I've seen screenshots of modded Skyrim SE games that look like it was literally ported over to Unreal Engine.
FO4 never gets there... because again, they loaded it down with resource hogs you will never get past, that visual things possible in Skyrim, can't be handled by FO4's engine... at all. Little things can knock all of those cobbled-together features right off the table... and they're glued to the tablecloth. FO4, I would say, is the line where they completely overshot what thier engine can handle. And it shows in the half-assed optimizations that still leave it running like crap and make modding it more frustrating and convoluted than ever before. Wrong compromises IMO.
Not to mention, vanilla FO4 looks horrible. You're starting with something shitty and trying to make it
decent. With Skyrim, you're starting with something good and trying to make it look
great. The changes with FO4 don't add much and are EXPENSIVE as HELL... Skyrim can look more primitive at times, but it still winds up looking better in the end... because it's simpler you have more options. Sounds counter-intuitive, but it's painfully true.
I did manage to get FO4 to my liking, where I think it actually looks pretty immersive and plays just as well. I've got a bunch of screenshots to sift through. There's still a lot you can do. It's just... I don't know... not as fruitful. Even the absolute best I can do winds up underwhelming compared to what I did with Skyrim, knowing way less about their engine than I do now. The experience all around just doesn't compare.
Oh, and you can edit static meshes! And it doesn't even hurt performance on modern hardware! If you tried to do this...
...or this...
...or this...
...in FO4, it's a dice roll as to whether your game will drop down to 20-30FPS, or straight up crash. Or both. And I mean... just look at those friggin barrels man! FO4's meshes were better than Skyrim SE's, but you won't see any looking as good as that damned barrel, or that fence. And in FO4, you can't change it due to their beryllium-diamond, hyper-rigid pre-combined mesh system. That alone kind of hurts it. I'm thinking it's a big part of why modded Skyrim looks more 'modern' than modded FO4. SMIM is so magic, and not having a way to do the same for FO4 really sets the tone for everything wrong with FO4 from a modders perspective. It's full of more roadblocks that are just like that. They must've thought they could do it better, so nobody would need to mess with it anyway. They were wrong. they made a lot of bad choices.
Interestingly enough, Skyrim SE still has a more active modding community than FO4. Wonder why that is? I'm starting to think maybe FO4 was a big step backwards for them... and that people might see that... and don't bother messing with it, hmmmm...
Nah, but for real it does get more love from the modding folks. The quality is just worlds better. I'm gonna enjoy seeing what people have done in my time away. There's so much still coming out there. There's what, a couple dozen DLC-sized side-games now? Some of these groups have said "screw modding" and decided to make a whole new game with Skyrim SE as base. If anything, it's crazier now than it ever was. Maybe as the zeitgeist of FO4 modding matures, it'll reach that point. But somehow I doubt it. The limits have pretty much already been tapped with it, and interest was never as high. I give it a couple more years before it starts becoming seriously forgotten by mod authors. A lot of the best ones it ever had have long since dropped it... often saying the game isn't up to it in too many ways to be worth the time and effort. It really stings sometimes, people get discouraged when things that used to work don't, and there isn't a suitable replacement. Just sad. If I didn't know better, I'd think Bethesda is actually TRYING to kill their modding scene.
Back when I did my old setup, I was only pushing an RX580 and a 1st gen Ryzen 3. Lets see how it scales with a 2060 and 3900x lol. I wonder how much can I pile on before I totally bottleneck the engine. Bring on the mods! Fuck 4k textures. I'm upscaling all of those 4k textures to 8k! I'll be the biggest texture modder on the scene for sure!
edit: Oh lord, I have been on a downloading streak. Depending on how dog tired I am tomorrow, I may or may not attempt to install a couple hundred mods in one go. Wouldn't be the first time. In some ways it's more efficient... once you know all of the things to just do along the way to make life easier for yourself. In some ways, I think I'd rather do the bulk in one go because it's easier to lose track of what you've done when you go incrementally. Instead I'm forced to go through each one, checking for issues and deciding on rules with all of the others fresh in my mind. Plus, I already know most of the mods I'm installing. I know if and where they're going to clash, what to prioritize, what I prefer/am going for, and what might need patching and/or load order tweaks. I even know some of their persistent bugs... which is crazy to me that I actually remember.
And also, I have about lost the ability to play any of these games without a lot of mods. At least the texture mods! I can't go back to bethesda's textures anymore. To my eyes they're so bad I can barely tell what they're supposed to be sometimes! They don't have to be 4k, but they can at least use the newer compression formats and be made with more sophisticated techniques. Even if they were fully utilizing the engine, I'm sorry, but the artistry in the textures isn't there. The worldspaces and assets themselves are great. It's what makes the whole thing. It just winds up looking like a smokin hot babe after 5-10 years of meth with those textures and meshes. You can see there's a good foundation, but the parts you can actually see just look wrecked, man. Just kind of a "...what HAPPENED?!" situation at times.
That's the cool thing about texture modding these games. Texture deployment hasn't changed ALL that much over the years... different types of textures and such. Methods for deploying them can vary considerably within different engines, but most of those engines, even Bethesda's have about the same general capabilities. The techniques for making textures have grown more than how they're used. Bethesda has normals, speculars, alphas, material shaders... even a few others that aren't used as much - so someone with enough technical skill and artistic talent can make a huge impact on even the older games simply using modern texture sensibilities. And as I'm downloading Skyrim mods, I'm realizing how good Skyrims texture modders are. There are so many of them, and a lot of them are better than the maybe 3-5 actually legit good FO4 texturemen. I see a lot of totally original ones with detailed painting, real-deal photogrammetry... even combinations. Real, original stuff done the proper way, not the noise/sharpening-blasted, upscaled 'optimizations' you see so much of with FO4. They could be making these for AAA games! I mean it man, these people are talented. The only thing that's really always going to date Skyrim is the geometry and LOD limitations. I swear... that and maybe the shadows/reflections/fancier lighting stuff.
But then there's so much more for weather and lighting. Between just the textures and the lighting, there's so much to be improved on - without even pushing to much higher technical levels than the base game. Just better leveraging what's there with better quality, better conceived stuff. One thing bethesda never does is look at what they have and ask themselves "What can I do better with this?"
Like... imagine you go to visit BGS while they're working on the next ES game and as soon as you walk in, you see all of the devs sitting, watching modding videos and taking notes to teach them about their engine. I'd believe you.
I joked about 8k textures... but I've found way more than I thought there'd be. And they truly are glorious looking... but why. Just why. Period intended. I get 4k textures... they make a bigger difference than is obvious at first. They're great for certain large UV-mapped objects. If you were to take the mesh and squish it flat you'll see it can be much larger than the whole screen. And then, as those meshes often get stretched (even with static objects,) the added information is needed to avoid that taffy effect. But even filling a 1080p display with 4k, I swear the difference in perceived clarity and plausibility is obvious. 4k scaled down in-game just looks better than a perfectly-fitted, native 1k. I think part of this is that ALL textures are compressed, meaning they all have artifacts, and they all have detail loss. That's how they can be 'big enough' and still fuzzy. Haloing and color artifacts are simply less evident on a larger file scaled down than a smaller one rendered 1:1. So even though they're not scaled up, they still appear blocky if they're not large enough to minimize the scale of the artifacts themselves. Just seems to help clean-up edges quite a bit... though smooth patches can also be majorly less splotchy.
8k is just beyond ridiculous, though. Like *just* a little bit of the way there. I guess you can technically run the game at 4k, where you would see a very clear difference between the 4 and the 8. But still... that's asking a lot, not so much your hardware, but the engine. When the textures for a house are in themselves ~1gb, it gets to be a bit much. Or maybe your dragons are 2-3gb. With good hardware, 4k textures are actually no problem in Bethesda games. It won't be the thing too hurt your frame rates, though it debatably reduces frametime consistency a bit. I just gotta assume 8k are for screen arching. Do people really try to play a game so old with such massive texture files? Maybe just flexing that 12gb GPU?
I wonder how big a single texture can be before it crashes the game. Hmmm...
I actually can't wait to dig back into this game. I just got so burned-out on it after a while. Not to mention some pretty terrible things happened in my life during the time when I was introduced to and got deep into Skyrim. It wound-up tied to two people who frankly never deserved anything but my disdain and apathy. It sucks when rotten memories sour some of your favorite things. I had to learn some hard lessons back then and ended up leaving a lot of things behind... my beloved Skouirum being one of them. Now that life's been good, it's all joy and anticipation. I might even appreciate it more. I wish I could start tonight. Wish I had started this afternoon. Super-awesome to see nothing really changed and people still make and update mods for one of my all-time favorite games.
