1968. No, not the year. That is the total number of hours played on Skyrim without any mods. Yes, I know, I've been busy playing and not paying attention to the community. I'll take the selfish tag and all of the backend jokes that go with it.
When Special Edition arrived, I gave it a chance only to find out that most of the mods wouldn't work due to the very nature the SSE infrastructure. SKSE, SKYUI, and MCM will not be present; even after Ian and his team tried to keep up with the new version of SSE, it's a never ending task. SSE is too young and stupid to be played, regardless of the 64bit benefit.
So I loaded Skyrim, and started to play a bit. I decided to go over to Nexus and look at some of the favorite mods that I enjoy playing. Of course there are the staples after SKSE: SKYUI, Random Alternate Start (or Alternate Start - Live Another Life), Character Creation Overhaul, etc.
I decided to use Mod Organizer and follow Gamer Poets installation guide. So I installed it and then headed over to STEP wiki. I started at the ENB section and that is where I got myself into trouble. You see, the guide told to Extract d3d9.dll and enbhost.exe from the "WrapperVersion" folder inside the ENB archive (image) into .../skyrim/.
This is incorrect as you have to include the enblocal.ini. I wondered why my game wouldn't load. Now it loads great without any issues. I haven't run it yet after ENBoost ajustments, but I have faith.
Another issue I ran into is with Phinix ENB - while that does support a lot of other helpers and weathers (CoT, ESS, NLA, TS, AoS), it requires specific installations that would have to be done outside Mod Organizer. I"m not certain that is a good idea.
So now that I got my ENB Series setup and it works. What should I do next follow the SR:LE guide, install Vividian ENB (or Phinix ENB - need to make a separate instance if that's possible. I think Vividian would be just fine, but I like the features of Phinix. Does Vividian use SMAA?
I would appreciate some direction and advice as I try to get back to playing Skyirm (I spent more time modding SSE than playing the game! I don't want to do that for OldRim!)
Strat