Still Skyrimming away. It's like a new game for me now, and yet nostalgic at the same time.
Both the ENB and the weather mod I'm using have too much bloom for my taste, and also looks a little dim on my monitor... though to be fair it's neither calibrated nor high quality, so there's that. But it looks pretty good out of the gate. I'll have to get some comparisons... it does some very interesting and unexpected things. Adds what I think are quite a few significant features to the engine's rendering. Not so much next level as things it always should've had, but just the lighting stuff alone is worth it. It adds considerable sophistication.. just some interesting finesse. Each individual thing is subtle, but the cumulative impact is something I think I can never go without again.
The complex particle lighting is by far the most interesting to me right now. All fire-based light sources (and many other things that glow) cast light and shadows that's something like GI... in a practical sense anyway. It is what it sounds like... it bounces particles out at the geometry and activates the corresponding pixels in the specular and to a lesser degree, normal maps, depending on density, frequency of collision, and distance. The objects that get hit have a slight fake bounce, slightly illuminating all nearby surfaces with diffused lighting, as well. It responds to fog and and cubemaps, for metallic and glass surfaces. Because of how it scatters, fires and torches no longer look like glaring yellow blobs with orange outlines. The actual diffusion makes the flames look more organic and defined.
In doing all of this, it casts directional shadows relative to the source. Some of them are real, but many of them are phantom in that the newly shadowed area appears to have become darker than the newly-illuminated one. This results in shadows often being flipped-around to look how they're supposed to. The light also bleeds into shadows... in vanilla the shadows have basically no light from the "source." With CPL you instead see a slight directional fade. It lays them down more gently with less of that fake exaggerated look. It also fixes perspective issues with AO, where it's completely even on all edges of something, with no apparent shadow directionality where light is hitting it at an angle. The side being hit directly gets cancelled out by the CPL, while the one actually being occluded gets emphasis.
I could go on and on about this. I don't know nearly enough to really say what it's all about. I'm just describing what I see visually. The way the ENB as a whole handles shadows, fog, volumetric and dynamic light leads to both more intuitively distinguishable object/surface separation, and and overall more natural, less video-gamey look. When you toggle, the difference is immediate. You realize how fucking weird the game actually looks without it. With all of the fancy new stuff, the game generally has the appearance of having more contrast, while actually having far less in many places. You lose sight of a good chunk of texture detail in places, but I think that's not so much a compromise as it is a preference. I personally prefer to give up some detail for a smoother, less jarring overall presentation. I feel like by default 4k (and definitely 8k!) textures look almost too crisp. Seeing every edge and contour with equal emphasis in this pixel-perfect way takes me out of the image in a big way sometimes. I feel like they shouldn't look uniformly detailed if the light isn't uniform across the surface. You'll see less detail in what isn't lit. And sometimes you'll see more in what is. Other times, you may see less becase the light is glaring or illuminating fog that occuldes the stuff behind it! But no matter what the case may be, I think materials always present themselves more convincingly as what they want you to think they are when the lighting reacts to the whole surface in a more dynamic way.
I guess that's the big thing it's doing with all of the singular changes it makes. Adding emphasis to certain places while removing it from others. Kind of like a very smart bloom and brightness/contrast adjustment. Probably what people are fruitlessly hoping to see when they push those sorts of things to 11 and completely fry the look of the game. ^_^ It would not be possible to tweak some simple sliders and do what ENB can now do in this game.
Performance isn't bad on my 3900x/RTX 2060 machine. For 1080/60 it's almost perfect. And it seems 6gb vram is plenty enough to run 4k everything... and even 8k on large things. Custom higher res dynamic lods, too. Ultra settings. Cranked godrays, distance, shadows, reflections... everything. Tons more grass with high-res texture. Thicker trees with more polygons and 4k/8k textures. Whatever weather and lighting. None of that bogs it down at all. The ENB just eats 5-10 (of 60) FPS very sporadically in the heaviest spots. For a rare worst-case, I'm fine with that!
Safe to say a fully loaded ENB (I forgot I'm also using ReShade for FXAA, ambientlight, and finesharpen,) will probably start to put a hurting on anything short of a 1070ti. I'm *juuusst* in that sweet spot of running the game smoothly.
Vanilla with just Vivid Weathers looks flat, stark, and washed out compared to this. You see every sharp, simple edge... with little to no ambient occlusion on the textures. Or you see those perfectly uniformly dark occluded corners. Without even having proper DoF, it looks papery. Though even DoF doesn't help that much on its own. In conjunction with other things I think it is a bit easier to look at... saves my brain from trying to judge the differences in distance between the objects that it finds strange because they're missing the cues it's used to following. When I see everything sort of smushed flat on the depth plane, it does hurt my brain a little bit... just feels like too much going on when you're closer to something.
I'm really selling it all short, tbh. To me the difference is huge. I haven't touched on half of what it does. That particle lighting is just the beans though, man. I'll do some comparisons at some point. Another thing I could mention is water. It fixes the transparency to show more realistic diffusion... instead of being milky it's just a slight haze. The color is darkened as well. It gets more dynamic splashing. But my favorite part is how it adds diffraction from the wave peaks to surfaces underwater, where the light is hitting straight on. I think you can see it in one of the screenshots. It basically replaces the whole water system, only using the textures and meshes you have installed. Goes down to more minute things like displacement and the behavior of the waves.
...it's just... a lot of little things like that. Several more.
Keep in mind with these I've done little to no adjustment. This is just after normal setup. I just installed everything, including extras, and left the default config. At some point I'll start trying to balance it better to not be as overdone, but right now I'm sticking with it to get a feel for it and decide if I
want to try to tweak it. If I decide to swap weather mods, it would be wiser to take the ENB set-up for that one instead. I could always make the ENB files into a mod so I can try toggling. Dunno how well it'll work with SE, though. That said, I think it does some interesting things as-is... I'm very impressed with it. Not just compared to what I'm used to with FO4's worse visuals and much, much more basic ENB, but compared to other games. It may still be just an old game with many incorrigibly old-school quirks, but I can honestly say I get wowed regularly by what I now see, and it does a good job of enticing me to play more and goes a long way towards making me want to connect more with the experience of just being in the world. People say graphics don't matter... I think that's moot because visuals still do... and that's not just graphics. But I'd still argue that the best you can get is always what you want... that's just common sense to me. It's like... if you enjoy music a lot, you probably don't need the best setup to get totally immersed - even something basic or even shitty would be fine. But hearing your favorite music on big, even-toned, kickass speakers is still a huge benefit!
Writing is easily one of my favorite things and has been since I learned how. I also greatly enjoy all forms of conversation. So quite often, I just go and become completely zen for awhile. I guess for me, it's one part leisure and one part thinking exercise. In a setting like this, I can relax and not worry too much about form - I can enjoy writing and thinking with fewer constraints... writing more as I might speak. I also like how the act of writing where it's going to be seen forces thought patterns that wouldn't manifest otherwise. It forces me to tie up loose ends drifting around... sort of a de-cluttering, because I can't just ramble incomprehensibly in front of people all of the time. But mostly, it's relaxation. I'm not like most people I meet... just in the way I form thoughts. I think in very clear language. It rolls out in paragraphs up there. I'm constantly stringing more together with words in order to make sense of things. And that changes the way I express myself.
I don't think that much of it. Tried medication for a while, but it's all poison that I didn't really need to function or be happy. I just try to make the most of the good parts of what makes me different. They say many adults with ADHD devise their own coping mechanisms. Maybe that's part of why I write like I do... just sifting through the constant noise and distraction. But then, I don't fully agree with how ADHD is defined or dealt with - it's often miscategorized and abused. I think it's made to be more than what it actually is, in most cases. It's only a plight when you don't accept that you aren't normal and keep trying to function in ways that your mind doesn't have features for. Learn to navigate it and you find you can do things that other people can't do without a ton of effort, and it's natural to you.
