lazygecko

Bethesda hates him! Overhaul your Oblivion sound using this one weird trick! https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/45214/

What priority values are they set to? AFAIK anything above 64 is going to make things very unstable and prone to crashing. One thing I did not like about this mod is that it seemingly doesn't differentiate between front and back hooves like the original sounds do, nor are there different sounds for different speeds like trotting and galloping.

Thanks for the comparisons. I think I prefer the more contrasted look of the originals. Might also be related to how the reflections work? I really wish we had a nice comprehensive retexture of the whole Dwemer tilesets. When I checked the 2K texture pack one, they just seemed to be the originals upscaled with some added detail and noise on top. Very minimal increase in fidelity for twice the performance cost, so not really worth it in my book.

I think Windsong is the best all-in-one package for staying true to the vanilla aesthetics, for both genders.

Well, I cannot say anything with 100% absolute certainty since I don't know the innards of how Skyrim handles music playback and I'm not a very techy person. It could be that Skyrim streams the music and doesn't store the whole file at once in memory. I'm not sure. I'll say that I think it's a shame generally in the modding community that the same care and expertise isn't given to sound that we have for visuals... Like the DDS optimizer tool. I've actually decided to do rounds on inspecting popular Skyrim mods that use custom sounds and see if they have the kinds of redundancies I mentioned earlier. Then I do my best to optimize the sounds, PM the mod authors and offer them to use the optimized versions in a future update. I just hope that the authors are still active and are willing to update their mods if they haven't in a while. I actually managed to cut the total size of the SkyTEST Realistic Animals & Predators sounds in half with no loss in quality and sent them to the author. If this kind of optimization could be implemented on all mods that use custom sounds, it would free up memory for everyone. Edit: I got around to checking the sounds from Pets of Skyrim and this is probably the single worst case yet... There are breathing loop sound for cats. It's an almost 5 minute long wave file, with an average of 30 seconds of silence between each noise. Having only these in practice very minor and negligible sounds loaded in your game is going to take up 13.5mb.I cannot stress enough how important it is to pay attention to these things...

They do have a FAQ but it just doesn't seem to adress ENBoost specifically. I googled the issue and this is where I ended up :) It just seems odd to me that the proxy option just stops it and doesn't install any of the RCRN files. Am I just meant to use the overwrite option then, and not the automated wizard?

Either it wasn't installed right so the files are missing (they should be in Data/sound/fx/wpn_is/axe1hand), or you have something further down your load order that overwrites the axe sound descriptors, or you are using a mod-added axe which doesn't have the right sounds assigned to it. I have made several updates to the mod with new features since initial release. A lot of new choices in the installer, like two new bow shot sounds, an alternate more subdued bow pull sound, and also overhauled the one-handed blade impacts on flesh+undead after numerous complaints about it (the changes have been implemented across all 4 weapon impact options).

I've decided to try RCRN with ENBoost but I'm having a bit of a problem here. You say ENBoost is supposed to handle RCRN via the proxy method. When I run the RCRN installer, I get the menu prompting me to either let the wizard handle things, overwrite, or configure the proxy. But when I choose the proxy option, the installer just quits without going any further.

Non-Dragonborn and non-Dawnguard versions sure would be useful to have. Although I'm not sure over the scope of the work involved to make that happen... It could potentially be a whole lot. I had to fix a lot of references back when I added DG and Dragonborn to the master lists, so I suspect the process would need to be repeated when doing it vice versa. And most of the compatibility patches would likely have to be remade (and probably have another one for the non-DLC version of AOS's .esp).

Well even if I did retain the vanilla file paths, there are still often more sounds for certain things than in vanilla, for example 5 bow shot sounds instead of 3. So if you install another bow sound mod that only replaces vanilla files, they will only play some of the time. Less repetition was one of my goals for the mod and is not something I'm willing to sacrifice, so I can't win either way really. I'm very transparent with how all this works in the compatibility section and explain how you can manually overwrite sound files with just a bit of manual work from the user. But of course as with any mod, there's plenty of people who won't even bother reading the description or readme which is apparent in the comments section. I don't feel like wasting time answering questions that are clearly coverd by the description.

If the masters in the main .esp are switched around, references to new records tend to get screwed up. I've had that happen to me after adding the DLCs to the master lists of my mods. Are there different versions of AOS.esp with and without Dawnguard and Dragonborn?

On a whole you shouldn't need to worry about a performance hit as much as textures and the likes. But you should be aware that digital sounds do swallow a lot of memory resources just like bitmap images do. The kinds of sounds you should be most mindful of are ambient sounds and music, since these tend to be the longest in length and that's going to be the most significant factor in how large the file is. The most demanding type of sound mod I could imagine would be music mods that are in .wav format, since they are extremly large compared to the compressed .xwm format normally used. So that could end up being the factor that pushes your memory usage over the edge. Sounds mirror textures in a lot of ways since you have to watch out for the same kinds of pitfalls a texture artist (or modeler) can make, where a lack of proper optimization can skyrocket the size with little to no visual gain from it. Silence trimming, stereo-to-mono downmixing, bit depth and sample rate optimization are all things that need to be accounted for when finalizing sounds for ingame use. I don't really take joy in ragging on other people's work, but Better Animal Footsteps is a textbook example of how not to do things because all the common mistakes are in there. 22-32khz sounds have been saved in 44.1khz sample rate, bit depth was upped from 16 to 32 bit, there is tons of lingering silence after the sounds have finished playing, mono sounds have been saved in stereo (some of the sounds are in stereo with some kind of reverb added, but that is moot when it ends up being processed through a mono output model that sound has been assigned with in the CK). These are all things that needlessly add to the filesize and make them eat up way more memory than they could be. Going from 22-44.1khz will double the size, as will doubling the bit depth, as will going from mono to stereo, and then there's the silence adding to the length while simultaneously factoring in all the previous things. This is the equivalent of taking a 512px texture, simply upscaling it to 4k, and then adding an all-white alpha layer on top of it for good measure. These are the things you need to keep in mind for sound. That's also why I consider ambient and music mods to be the most at risk of being RAM hogs given their usually long lengths. Sounds of Skyrim seems to take these things into account for the most part.

Mod author here. I've lurked on on STEP for some time but I never really felt the need to create an account and participate in discussions. Until now that is. I'd like to try and answer any questions and clear up any confusion. Now don't get me wrong, I'm a staunch supporter of AOS and what LK has provided (I think I was even the very first endorser), but ever since AOS exploded in popularity it's like I always find myself having to justify the usage of my own mods along with it, and people don't seem to fully understand what it is both mods do and don't do, so you can imagine it feels a bit frustrating for me. So as for how AOS and IS work together, let me put it this way: AOS overhauls several parameters such as Output Models, Reverb Parameters, etc that universally affect how sounds behave in Skyrim. From my perspective that in itself is a monumental change and I consider it to be the very core of what AOS brings to the table. I've seen comments in the past that installing my own mods over AOS more or less makes it redundant and that you should choose between one or the other, but for the aforementioned reasons I don't consider that to be true at all. Here's a rundown on some of the major stuff I added in IS that AOS does not cover (based on my own comparisons, anyway) For weapons, I've made a wider selection of different impact types. For shield blocking, I made it so that different sounds are played for blocking one-handed or two-handed weapons instead of 1 universal set. For footsteps, I created a brand new set of sounds exclusively used by NPCs for every armor type. AOS seems to use the same footstep sounds for player and NPCs. Since both types of sounds are heard from the perspective of the player, they really ought to be of a different character since there are a lot of nuances that you can only hear in close proximity. Having a recorded close proximity sound played at a lower volume isn't quite enough to sound natural and believable. I also made sure the bone-rattling skeleton footsteps change depending on the surface they walk on, instead of using just one set of footsteps. AOS also doesn't adress the issue with pre-loaded generic sounds for footsteps (this function seems to be a leftover from optimizing for the memory-starved consoles). So even though AOS has for example a sound for landing with heavy armor on snow after jumping, you effectively won't be hearing it most of the time since the universal pre-loaded one takes priority. The main pack without the optionals should have zero overlapping files. The conflicting ones are probably the dungeon ambiance, which I moved over as an optional choice that retains vanilla file paths unlike the others. A comparison video would be useful to have. Though I don't think it's my place to do it. For now I can just create some quick mp3 comparisons roughly simulating the context in which they are used. Not perfect but it servers its purpose. Two-handed sword hitting flesh. This uses the instant impact option for consistency with AOS timing. Running and sprinting on dirt with heavy armor. There's a difference in approach here in that AOS uses 8 (4 left foot, 4 right foot) sound cycles universally, while I use 10 for running and 6 (which is the vanilla amount) for sprinting and walking. Since you'll be running most of the time and only walking and sprinting some of the time, I figured prioritizing it like that was a better solution. Casting firebolts. This uses both of the firebolt install choices available.