After hearing back from steve40, it would appear that there is some bad information going around about SkyBirds.
The save game bloat that people are talking about is intentional. The 2-3 mb extra in your save are not script instances, but rather, script variables. They are supposed to be there, and shouldn't be considered bloat. It is in my opinion, that when using SkyBirds with other script heavy mods, you slow down Skyrim's script engine. That's just logical. People probably assume that SkyBirds is the culprit because you'll immediately visually see the strain on the script engine from the bird's behavior. Also, I'm told by steve40 that using Save Game Cleaners, or script cleaners, can cause a lot of problems with SkyBirds, as well as many other mods. Skybirds is getting a bad reputation for nothing as far as I am concerned. It's a great mod, and if your machine is having issues with it, then I recommend the following fixes:
Unpark the cores of your cpu - This will help your performance. Set Power Settings of machine to High Performance. Crash Fixes by meh321 http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/72725/ Bug Fixes by meh321 http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/76747/ Reduce the amount of birds from SkyBirds to be <60, and set spawners to be <5. - This will reduce strain on your system. (I use 30/3) Woodpeckers malfunctioning? - Reset them in SkyBirds MCM menu. Keep the amount of script heavy mods that you use to a minimum. - Accept that your machine and skyrim have limits. INI Tweaks - It's possible to alter the performance of script heavy mods by changing certain INI settings. You'll have to refer to STEP for that. ENBoost - Great to use even without an ENB. Helps performance, but won't exactly do anything to help with scripts. If you have a recent Intel CPU that ends with "K", and it's water-cooled - Overclock it 10% if it already isn't. Again, just do it. DON'T clean SkyBird scripts from save games - That WILL cause you problems.
SkyBirds should also be fully compatible with Birds of Skyrim, as well as my patches. Not to mention, it's sound injector amplifies Birds of Skyrim!
Have a problem with birds being stuck? No problem. Here is a solution that worked for me and many others...
1.) Download and re-install the latest version of FNIS including the Creature Pack 2.) Run FNIS 3.) Once your behavior files have been generated, click on the "De-Install Creatures" button and close when it's finished
Now your birds and other animals should be fixed! (This applies to Birds of Skyrim, and not skyBirds)
Hello Mr. Ruhadre and Mr. Steve, is possible to request the last version without USLEEP dependency? Iam reinstalling Skyrim after one year aprox. updating my old mods list in the process. Your mod was indipensable for me.
Unfortunately, the majority of the fixes in USLEEP are very good fixes. Some of which have touched upon the faction system itself, which is how I fixed all the Birds dying in this mod to begin with.
Yes. BSA version prevents file conflicts and ensures other mods won't overwrite the files. It also ensures the mod/scripts get properly deactivated when you uninstall it.
Loose files do overwrite BSA's though, don't they? Have to be careful those (if using loose files in general), aren't unintentionally matching files inside an archive
What I meant was, loose files will overwrite/erase/delete each other, which can be a big problem. But files that are packed up in a BSA cannot be "deleted" by other loose files. Also, you can easily lose track of which mod a particular loose file belongs to.
I know that implementing something new is always hard, but what bothers me though is that even with AI avoidance that this patch gives to the birds, they move very very slow (extremely slow in some cases). It's like you bump right into them and it takes about 5 seconds for some of them to turn around and slowly start moving in opposite direction.
Is it posible to make them move faster and run away farther? In my opinion that would make them look more lively, because in real life even chickens move away very fast if anyone gets close, not to mention wild birds.
Engine sucks, I know, but still as far as I can tell some of the birds in this mod move and response faster, am I wrong?
For example this large red bird, that lives in the woods https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/110/images/17723-1-1390838441.jpg
I guess it's called Pheasant, it's noticeably quicker (or at least it turns around much quicker) than chickens and little chicks who almost ignore your presence and move very slow.
So based on this there must be a way to make other birds move(turn around) faster as well.
Animation may be the same, still I was talking more about changing the settings.
I thought birds have different settings, also some of them "sit down" and ignore the player, while others do not, however I realized that basically they are all "chicken" only with different models, and they tend to do this thing randomly from time to time.
Just to let you know, both move speed and turn speed of birds could be adjusted via plugin settings.
Right now every bird in your mod is as fast as chicken, but using those settings you can slightly diversify them, at least by making wild birds faster, which may be logical thing to do (apart form situations when they sit and ignore everything, in this case still nothing works).
I bet you should be familiar with TES5Edit, so I made a screenshot showing what I'm talking about.
That won't fix the lag in the game Package execution which is causing the 5 second delay you are talking about. Like I said, it's a game engine problem.
I do agree that there is a problem with engine limitations.
However there are those settings on top of that, which cause additional delay AFTER / APART FROM the engine lag.
When bird tries to run away from you (if it tries at all, because sometimes they ignore you), usually it starts turning it's head to the opposite direction.
With current settings birds turn their heads very slow, so running away takes additional time.
What I am suggesting is increasing the values of those settings so there would be less additional delays apart from those that are caused by the engine.
No need to take my word for it... You can try to use this .ESP that I quickly made to see if there is any improvement.
The settings are exaggerated in order to be able to see the differance (birds move speed x2, birds head turn speed x33).
https://we.tl/t-Mw7guRlcwS
Yes, it doesn't solve the problem completely, but as for my subjective opinion it makes birds more responsive and it makes more difficult to chase them, that's for sure!
I don't have any issue with the flee response time, the max delay I get is about 1.5s in areas like towns where there are a lot of other npcs running Packages. If your PC is a potato or you are running a lot of mods, especially ones that add more npcs, you will experience longer delays before package execution across the board.
steve40 is exactly right about everything. The animations are all the same and it's the game engine + avoidance AI that make the animation play to begin with. However, getting them to react faster and getting them to move faster are 2 different things. The speed settings you are showing I believe is tied to the actual animation length. It might be possible to make the birds appear "more active" by increasing the actor speed settings, or the Actor's "AI Energy". The latter would work by increasing sandboxing activity. Sorry for the delay on replies btw...my 8 year old PC died. I'm working on migrating my Skyrim work onto the new rig as we speak. I'll have to do some experimenting when everything is set back up.
important question for Ruhadre... are you also responsible for skyBirds? if you are, i have a suggestion for future patch (or you could move message forward to the appropriate modder) can you not allow spawning of birds (maybe not just skybirds) in extreme weather situations, like snow storms. it would greatly enhance immersion. also in extreme places, like Throat of the world (sometimes skybirds spawn to keep company to paarthurnaax :P ) finally, there needs to be a fix maybe for birds spawning inside water/sea and walking around midair (within the water). problem consistently occurring at the Windhelm docks at least, if you want to recreate, during the day. THATS ALL, THANKS FOR YOUR GREAT WORK ALL RESPONSIBLE FOR BIRD MODS!
steve40 is the original author for skyBirds. Currently, I support performance patches for skyBirds Oldrim, which will be a platform for back-ported updates from SSE here soon.
As per the skyBirds page, "The birds will retire to their nests at night or in foul weather". So that feature already exists in skyBirds. As for Throat of the World, there are plenty of birds that prefer snowy mountains to live. Is Paarthurnaax having a bird buddy so wrong? He's friendly to humans afterall, heh.
I am interested in checking out the Windhelm docks to see what's going on with that though. Sounds like a spawner in a possible bad location.
That would mean he probably deleted it unfortunately, or the hosted link expired. I've been looking into a new solution that I believe you all will appreciate here very soon ;)
Just a heads-up, there is a change from USLEEP 3.0.11 which apparently hasn't been forwarded in 1.4: "The ForswornFaction and ChickenFaction have been set to be friendly towards one another to prevent Forsworn from slaughtering their own chickens at Bruca's Leap Redoubt." See: https://afkmods.iguanadons.net/Unofficial%20Skyrim%20Legendary%20Edition%20Patch%20Version%20History.html
Turns out my version of USLEEP was outdated. I updated it and carried over the changes. I do agree with steve40 in that the approach seems a bit broad, but it is what it is.
I don't know if it's feasible to implement, but I'm wondering if a version that removes collision on birds would be feasible? My reasoning is that, while I love seeing the birds around, every now and again, one will end up directly in my path, and stop me dead in my tracks, as if they were a stone wall.
If collision on the birds were to be removed, that would make it possible to move through them / past them, as would be intuitive.
I don't know if this would radically screw up other elements though.
The better solution would be for me to implement steve40's fixes from the SSE version of Birds of Skyrim. At the moment, I have my attention on other projects, but I will revisit this patch, as there are many things yet I'd like to do with it.
I just recovered from a round of bad health, and I'm reviewing where I am at with my mods currently.
I'm working on updating BOS64 tonight, mainly to just fix the merchants. Afterward, I'll get to updating things on this end.
As for SkyTEST, I believe the ONLY incompatibility would have to do with chickens. The reason I have put off the SkyTEST patch was due to it being updated frequently at the time. I didn't want to release a patch, and then be responsible for updating it if the author decided to change something major in his mod. With that said, SkyTEST is a mod that makes MAJOR changes to the game. A mod like that is going to be incompatible with TONS of other mods. Rather than ask every mod author out there to make their mods compatible, I believe it makes far more sense for the author of SkyTEST to provide patches to other popular mods, or provide compatiblity. In alot of mods I have produced, I have went out of my way to provide compatibility with tons of other mods, but that's just me.
Also, users can patch the chicken issue themselves quite easily with TEST5Edit. If someone is running alot of mods, then they need to do some manual patching anyway.
Regardless, I WILL make a SkyTEST patch to go along with 1.3
IRogueCellI wrote: Are you planning on adding a volume slider, like in the SSE version?
Well...I can't promise that specifically. I am working on bringing all the SSE features over to here, but it's an uphill battle because I'm not a programmer like steve40 is.
1.3 is in development, and it will be coming along eventually. I can promise that I will work on this until I am satisfied.
Adding a volume slider is really easy, no scripting necessary
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After hearing back from steve40, it would appear that there is some bad information going around about SkyBirds.
The save game bloat that people are talking about is intentional. The 2-3 mb extra in your save are not script instances, but rather, script variables. They are supposed to be there, and shouldn't be considered bloat. It is in my opinion, that when using SkyBirds with other script heavy mods, you slow down Skyrim's script engine. That's just logical. People probably assume that SkyBirds is the culprit because you'll immediately visually see the strain on the script engine from the bird's behavior. Also, I'm told by steve40 that using Save Game Cleaners, or script cleaners, can cause a lot of problems with SkyBirds, as well as many other mods. Skybirds is getting a bad reputation for nothing as far as I am concerned. It's a great mod, and if your machine is having issues with it, then I recommend the following fixes:
Unpark the cores of your cpu - This will help your performance.
Set Power Settings of machine to High Performance.
Crash Fixes by meh321 http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/72725/
Bug Fixes by meh321 http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/76747/
Reduce the amount of birds from SkyBirds to be <60, and set spawners to be <5. - This will reduce strain on your system. (I use 30/3)
Woodpeckers malfunctioning? - Reset them in SkyBirds MCM menu.
Keep the amount of script heavy mods that you use to a minimum. - Accept that your machine and skyrim have limits.
INI Tweaks - It's possible to alter the performance of script heavy mods by changing certain INI settings. You'll have to refer to STEP for that.
ENBoost - Great to use even without an ENB. Helps performance, but won't exactly do anything to help with scripts.
If you have a recent Intel CPU that ends with "K", and it's water-cooled - Overclock it 10% if it already isn't. Again, just do it.
DON'T clean SkyBird scripts from save games - That WILL cause you problems.
SkyBirds should also be fully compatible with Birds of Skyrim, as well as my patches. Not to mention, it's sound injector amplifies Birds of Skyrim!
steve40 and I, (especially steve40), worked hard together to bring a whole new Birds of Skyrim to Special Edition.
http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/3097/
1.) Download and re-install the latest version of FNIS including the Creature Pack
2.) Run FNIS
3.) Once your behavior files have been generated, click on the "De-Install Creatures" button and close when it's finished
Now your birds and other animals should be fixed! (This applies to Birds of Skyrim, and not skyBirds)
Iam reinstalling Skyrim after one year aprox. updating my old mods list in the process. Your mod was indipensable for me.
Big thanks anyway
I know that implementing something new is always hard, but what bothers me though is that even with AI avoidance that this patch gives to the birds, they move very very slow (extremely slow in some cases). It's like you bump right into them and it takes about 5 seconds for some of them to turn around and slowly start moving in opposite direction.
Is it posible to make them move faster and run away farther? In my opinion that would make them look more lively, because in real life even chickens move away very fast if anyone gets close, not to mention wild birds.
For example this large red bird, that lives in the woods https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/110/images/17723-1-1390838441.jpg
I guess it's called Pheasant, it's noticeably quicker (or at least it turns around much quicker) than chickens and little chicks who almost ignore your presence and move very slow.
So based on this there must be a way to make other birds move(turn around) faster as well.
I thought birds have different settings, also some of them "sit down" and ignore the player, while others do not, however I realized that basically they are all "chicken" only with different models, and they tend to do this thing randomly from time to time.
Just to let you know, both move speed and turn speed of birds could be adjusted via plugin settings.
Right now every bird in your mod is as fast as chicken, but using those settings you can slightly diversify them, at least by making wild birds faster, which may be logical thing to do (apart form situations when they sit and ignore everything, in this case still nothing works).
I bet you should be familiar with TES5Edit, so I made a screenshot showing what I'm talking about.
However there are those settings on top of that, which cause additional delay AFTER / APART FROM the engine lag.
When bird tries to run away from you (if it tries at all, because sometimes they ignore you), usually it starts turning it's head to the opposite direction.
With current settings birds turn their heads very slow, so running away takes additional time.
What I am suggesting is increasing the values of those settings so there would be less additional delays apart from those that are caused by the engine.
No need to take my word for it... You can try to use this .ESP that I quickly made to see if there is any improvement.
The settings are exaggerated in order to be able to see the differance (birds move speed x2, birds head turn speed x33).
https://we.tl/t-Mw7guRlcwS
Yes, it doesn't solve the problem completely, but as for my subjective opinion it makes birds more responsive and it makes more difficult to chase them, that's for sure!
are you also responsible for skyBirds?
if you are, i have a suggestion for future patch (or you could move message forward to the appropriate modder)
can you not allow spawning of birds (maybe not just skybirds) in extreme weather situations, like snow storms. it would greatly enhance immersion. also in extreme places, like Throat of the world (sometimes skybirds spawn to keep company to paarthurnaax :P )
finally, there needs to be a fix maybe for birds spawning inside water/sea and walking around midair (within the water). problem consistently occurring at the Windhelm docks at least, if you want to recreate, during the day.
THATS ALL, THANKS FOR YOUR GREAT WORK ALL RESPONSIBLE FOR BIRD MODS!
As per the skyBirds page, "The birds will retire to their nests at night or in foul weather". So that feature already exists in skyBirds. As for Throat of the World, there are plenty of birds that prefer snowy mountains to live. Is Paarthurnaax having a bird buddy so wrong? He's friendly to humans afterall, heh.
I am interested in checking out the Windhelm docks to see what's going on with that though. Sounds like a spawner in a possible bad location.
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/91666
Enjoy ;)
"The ForswornFaction and ChickenFaction have been set to be friendly towards one another to prevent Forsworn from slaughtering their own chickens at Bruca's Leap Redoubt."
See: https://afkmods.iguanadons.net/Unofficial%20Skyrim%20Legendary%20Edition%20Patch%20Version%20History.html
I don't know if it's feasible to implement, but I'm wondering if a version that removes collision on birds would be feasible? My reasoning is that, while I love seeing the birds around, every now and again, one will end up directly in my path, and stop me dead in my tracks, as if they were a stone wall.
If collision on the birds were to be removed, that would make it possible to move through them / past them, as would be intuitive.
I don't know if this would radically screw up other elements though.
Can you give an ETA? Only asking to know how long I have to wait till I can start my playthrough. (sorry, English is not my native tongue)
I'm working on updating BOS64 tonight, mainly to just fix the merchants. Afterward, I'll get to updating things on this end.
As for SkyTEST, I believe the ONLY incompatibility would have to do with chickens. The reason I have put off the SkyTEST patch was due to it being updated frequently at the time. I didn't want to release a patch, and then be responsible for updating it if the author decided to change something major in his mod. With that said, SkyTEST is a mod that makes MAJOR changes to the game. A mod like that is going to be incompatible with TONS of other mods. Rather than ask every mod author out there to make their mods compatible, I believe it makes far more sense for the author of SkyTEST to provide patches to other popular mods, or provide compatiblity. In alot of mods I have produced, I have went out of my way to provide compatibility with tons of other mods, but that's just me.
Also, users can patch the chicken issue themselves quite easily with TEST5Edit. If someone is running alot of mods, then they need to do some manual patching anyway.
Regardless, I WILL make a SkyTEST patch to go along with 1.3
Adding a volume slider is really easy, no scripting necessary