A vast or significant amount of the 100+ hours I’ve spent playing Skyrim so far has been tweaking the game back and forth between playable and beautiful, often shifting many times every day. While messing with uGrids in the Gamebryo Engine can destroy save files and create massive instabilities within the game it offers some of the better enhancements to visual quality and is the actual limiter for many standard tweaks. uGrids are literally the game world itself, how much the of the game world the engine will actually render and calculate at any given time, broken up into ‘grids’ around the player with the default being 5 and playable being 7, though more adventurous users going for great still images opt for 13+ uGrid for what I can imagine is not so much a game but rather a crash fest.
Besides playing Skyrim and tweaking it endlessly, taking screenshots has to be the third highest use of my time within the game and while I’ve not focused on this aspect as much I have managed to rack up almost 400 images. I’ve submitted some of the more notable images I’ve taken over at http://skyrimphotography.net/, just navigate over to the Star Photographers section to see some of them. I do sync my Steam screenshots folder for the game to Picasa as well so ‘all’ of the screens I’ve taken thus far will always be located here with newest at the bottom.
A list of the most notable mods I ‘track’ on SkyrimNexus.com:
Better Sorting – renames many items
Bookshelf Patch – attempts to fix ‘floating’ placed objects
Embiggen Skyrim – makes skyrim support borderless windowed mode (most stable)
Enhanced Blood Textures – significantly better looking blood splatters
Essential followers plugins – companions in all beth games seem useles if/when they can die
Immersive HUD – iHUD – dynamically hides/shows HUD elements
JaySuS Swords – some great unique models here, not in use by me but definitely one I follow
Legendary Smithing Upgrades – weapon improvements without exploiting potion system
Lost Art of the Blacksmith – adds upgrades to otherwise none upgradable items
Pure Waters Adaptive Flow – one of the few water texture tweaks that I think are good
SKYRIM ENHANCED SHADERS – takes the enbseries tweaks and makes them look good
Skyrim Flora Overhaul – not worth actually using at the moment, but very good work
Skyrim Incremental Saver – very useful since the game doesn’t have a good save system
Skyrim Online – extremely ambitious project…
SkyUI – great UI replacement, adds valuable sorting options and display of items
TESV Acceleration Layer – extreme increases in game performance and stability via code efficiency
Vals Crafting Meltdown Alpha – new blacksmith functions like reverse smelting, arrow crafting etc
Weapon Retexture Project – WRP – great work on making weapons look better
Weapons of the Third Era – adds great, unique weapons from Morrowind
World Map in full 3D – while cumbersome in practice, full navigation of the 3d map is nifty
XCE - Xenius Character Enhancement – all wrapped up into one, characters look better
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