Hey Skyrim friends! I'm so sorry it took me so long to update my ESP to be compatible with SSE (Form 44), but I FINALLY have updated it! I completely forgot about it and had been away from Skyrim for quite some time. I should have done a better job maintaining my mod for you all, so I do sincerely apologize that I didn't fix it sooner.
In addition to the ESP update, I also improved one of the textures that was causing some obvious black outlines when other Windhelm texture mods were installed (tweaked the diffuse, normal map, and environment mask). In vanilla Skyrim it wasn't noticeable, but I too had the black outline after installing several other mods for Windhelm. Now I think it looks better. Let me know what you think! I will upload some new pics too.
EDIT: Version 1.4 up with fix for ENB users (Alpha-Testing flag enabled). Thanks to jtharpla and gem249204 for their info about this. I tried it out and it works for me, so hopefully there won't be anymore issues with the textures, but let me know if you see anything weird.
Got to Windhelhm and there were no puddles at all. Flickering grey texture and that's it. Using Better Water Two and Blended Roads. Disabling mod did nothing, and I'd better not mess with trying to delete textures manually (yeah, mod was installed manually). Found the folder right while typing this comment, let's see what happens if I delete puddles and disable mod.
Edit :nope, still same thing. Maybe it's some snow altering patch for one of the mods I have?
Another edit: had BC7 compression on snow textures from Tamriel Reloaded mod. Let's see if deleting those makes any difference. Nah, still the same "textureless grey" texture on top of the road and snow. Weird that this is the only location where puddles are freaking out. Amon-Sul mod doesn't mesh with landscape well enough, Improved Whiterun has some dancing textures on parts of walls and near Lakeview Manor there is a perfectly normal fully brown floating tree, but this is so far weirdest "bug" I've had in game.
Edit3: Solved problem, puddles are back. It was presumably a conflict of Blended Roads texture with something. Placing Blended Roads back made it work just about right.
I have the same problem, but they are vanilla. The puddle object uses a water type and water seams appear when there is too much and near fog, as far I know. I've tried it yesterday to give a water type improved by WATER 2 and it didn't make a difference in quality, only in color. Maybe if I increase the fog distance of the LightingTemplate?
Just gave this a try and it looks very good. I have a heavily modded game with JK Skyrim and tons of town texture overhaul stuff. Nothing was out of place (no floating ice anyway, lol). I love how the ice reflects light, and in one instance even reflected the surroundings a bit. I'm using Re-engaged ENB and it looked great (I tried the full ENB version).
The only strange thing I saw was that some of the refractions seemed to indicate a sort of square pattern in the ice, as though the flooring underneath is supposed to be tiled? My flooring in Windhelm is rocky, so maybe my overhaul changed it from tiled to a more rocky surface? Even so it's not bad enough to remove the mod.
I would like to know also why a retexture of a puddle requires a ESP. Im staring at the vanilla bethesda texture at the moment and damn its ugly, so i really want to download this, but i cant justify adding the ESP.
OK i did some more research and investigating and i may be wrong but it seems that the author not only retextured the ice puddle but also added more around the areas, thus requiring the ESP. Was hoping for just a simple texture only replacement for the puddles.
I came here with a similar question, which perhaps you have answered. I'll post this anyhow ...
Question for any knowledgeable modder. I used the Creation Kit to squish this mod into an ESL last year. Never had a problem running with my ESL'd version since. The question is: Now that ESPFE is all the rage, why doesn't SSEEdit think this one should qualify -- which is to say, this mod seems so near qualifying, what's keeping it from being made into an ESPFE?
I didn't have a problem using SSEEdit to turn this into an ESPFE. The form IDs compacted without an issue. What problem are you running into in the process? Are you using the latest version of SSEEdit?
Like @jtharpla 's comment below mine says, the problem is solved by adding "Alpha-Testing" to the Texture Set flags.
According to Boris (creator of ENB), it is because normal maps don't support Alpha-Blending (semi-transparency) and so normal maps appear as squares. Not really noticeable in vanilla, however ENB uses the normal map, among other things, to generate the AO, thus having square AO. The only downside of Alpha-Testing is it is absolute, just either visible or not visible, no in-between, which means the soft fading edges are replaced by hard edges. But to be honest it still looks nice and not noticeable unless you know what you are looking for.
https://imgur.com/a/w1vWzy0
My suggestion is to include it as optional file for ENB users.
This is good info as well gem249204. I'm very thankful for the helpful info from you and jtharpla so I can actually know how to fix the problem. I will probably upload as version 1.4 because I think I screwed up version numbers in NMM for some users with my previous updates. But I'll keep the 1.3SE version around for Non-ENB users. Thanks again! :)
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In addition to the ESP update, I also improved one of the textures that was causing some obvious black outlines when other Windhelm texture mods were installed (tweaked the diffuse, normal map, and environment mask). In vanilla Skyrim it wasn't noticeable, but I too had the black outline after installing several other mods for Windhelm. Now I think it looks better. Let me know what you think! I will upload some new pics too.
EDIT: Version 1.4 up with fix for ENB users (Alpha-Testing flag enabled). Thanks to jtharpla and gem249204 for their info about this. I tried it out and it works for me, so hopefully there won't be anymore issues with the textures, but let me know if you see anything weird.
Just the Windhelm only - for the frozen puddles, of course.
Also is this om with JK skyrim?
Edit :nope, still same thing.
Maybe it's some snow altering patch for one of the mods I have?
Another edit: had BC7 compression on snow textures from Tamriel Reloaded mod. Let's see if deleting those makes any difference.
Nah, still the same "textureless grey" texture on top of the road and snow. Weird that this is the only location where puddles are freaking out. Amon-Sul mod doesn't mesh with landscape well enough, Improved Whiterun has some dancing textures on parts of walls and near Lakeview Manor there is a perfectly normal fully brown floating tree, but this is so far weirdest "bug" I've had in game.
Edit3: Solved problem, puddles are back. It was presumably a conflict of Blended Roads texture with something. Placing Blended Roads back made it work just about right.
I've tried it yesterday to give a water type improved by WATER 2 and it didn't make a difference in quality, only in color. Maybe if I increase the fog distance of the LightingTemplate?
The only strange thing I saw was that some of the refractions seemed to indicate a sort of square pattern in the ice, as though the flooring underneath is supposed to be tiled? My flooring in Windhelm is rocky, so maybe my overhaul changed it from tiled to a more rocky surface? Even so it's not bad enough to remove the mod.
Nice job on this.
Great mod.
I was wondering;
What specifically about the mod requires an ESP?
If you can please explain the ESP component/dependency it'd be much appreciated.
I'm going through mods that look like they shouldn't need an ESP but do, to work out WHY they need an ESP to try to better understand modding.
Thanks!
Question for any knowledgeable modder. I used the Creation Kit to squish this mod into an ESL last year. Never had a problem running with my ESL'd version since. The question is: Now that ESPFE is all the rage, why doesn't SSEEdit think this one should qualify -- which is to say, this mod seems so near qualifying, what's keeping it from being made into an ESPFE?
(See "added more around the areas" above.)
Like @jtharpla 's comment below mine says, the problem is solved by adding "Alpha-Testing" to the Texture Set flags.
According to Boris (creator of ENB), it is because normal maps don't support Alpha-Blending (semi-transparency) and so normal maps appear as squares. Not really noticeable in vanilla, however ENB uses the normal map, among other things, to generate the AO, thus having square AO. The only downside of Alpha-Testing is it is absolute, just either visible or not visible, no in-between, which means the soft fading edges are replaced by hard edges. But to be honest it still looks nice and not noticeable unless you know what you are looking for.
https://imgur.com/a/w1vWzy0
My suggestion is to include it as optional file for ENB users.