Brumbek

...when I work up the desire to torture myself I will attempt to review the 92 meshes and see which ones need updated collision. I'm betting many of them do since Bethesda created such rubbish collision for many clutter items. I should mention...updating the collision won't necessarily fix weird physics issues. For instance, many clutter objects are placed just barely on top of each other or inside each other. Hence, the engine has to resolve this issue upon cell load, usually causing the objects to slightly move up or down and hover briefly. So just saying...if an item has proper collision it still can wreak...havok...if it isn't placed precisely. About that incompatibility with Dynamic Things, yeah...understood. Obviously, you'll have a mod conflict, although it wouldn't be serious I wouldn't think since either mod would overwrite the other...but users might not understand and freak out. Anyway...I'll post back once I have time to update some collision. NifUtils makes it possible...but it still is very unfun and prone to errors for unknown reasons.

Well, just to clarify, this often happens because of how the collision is set up on models. Bethesda often made the colliision model not the same size as the visual model. This causes no end of trouble, such as the cursor picking up objects you aren't looking at. As you probably know, you could add collision to fix this issue if you wanted. If the carts that hovered are the exact same size as the other carts, you could perhaps get away with copying the collision from the other cart mesh. Otherwise, more complex methods using NifUtils would be needed to merge/recreate the collision. And that is not fun, let me tell you. Who dares mention Brumbek!? Oh, I mean, hello. Interesting mod, thanks for your efforts. I looked over all three meshes. The Pie looks fine. The Plate's collision is wacky, being comprised of two ugly boxes that don't even fit correctly. Oh Bethesda, using a square collision on a round plate! Honey Nut collision is too small but shouldn't cause issues except perhaps falling an inch or two upon cell load. So the Glazed Plate collision should be fixed. By fixed I mean recreated using NifUtils. Will this fix the shaking plate thing? No clue really. It is possible some plates are placed too close to the edge of the table and hence the player bumps into one of the square edges, but this shouldn't cause all that shaking. But full disclosure: I don't really understand the collision/physics of Skyrim...but who does?

Hi everyone, I suppose I'll chime in with my thoughts. All this rock talk does intrigue me. I sure wish I had more time to fix everything. What really needs to happen for things to be done right is custom textures need to be made for each rock. This is what professionals would have done (apologies Bethesda). The way it is now, Bethesda is trying to fit two rock textures onto all the 30+ main rocks/mountains in the game. This is just plain sloppy and results in inevitable texture seams. Now...the problem with doing custom textures for each rock is it totally breaks compatibility with all the rock texture replacers. Hence, I've held off on doing much rock work on SMIM. I have done minor UV fixes and I do continue to add more UV fixes as I play and spot errors. If I were to truly "fix" the rocks, I would have to pick one "ultimate" or best rock texture mod and use that as a base for my texture work. Again, everyone would then be forced to use my textures or just not use SMIM's rocks. So I need to figure out what is the most liked rock texture. I like Ewis Alternative Rock Textures quite a bit. I've considered using that as a base. SparrowPrince's Bigger and Boulder is great for hiding the seams, but it loses too much detail and is too sharp/grainy for my tastes, no offense SparrowPrince! Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. As z929669 notes, I could merely do a much more extensive fix-up of the existing rock UV mapping to ensure no stretching horizontally or vertically. I suppose I should do this...it is just so tedious and again doesn't fix the ugly texture seams. Anyway, sorry for long post. I'm honestly too busy right now to fix much else on the rocks. I'll be gone till mid-October on vacation. Feel free to respond with your thoughts and perhaps in October or November I can dedicate serious time to improving the mountains and rocks. Bethesda really just needs to hire me so I can devote 3 months full time to fixing all this, ha! Thanks for your interest and thoughts.

You can use my ESP however you want. Merging it into yours is a good plan. That Windhelm Ice decals looks nice! Good work on that. I agree Windhelm could use icy puddles, not watery. One thing to keep in mind with decals too...is they apply to whatever is above them too. You'll note by default in Windhelm the decal "splashes" over to on top of the barrels and crates which is extremely unrealistic. So this is another concern with decals. Don't ever place them under objects. Hence another reason why decals aren't recommended, but for a few places like your Windhelm screenshot it looks good. SparrowPrince will probably include some variant of this in a WATER update, FYI. Although if you keep working at this, perhaps he should either recommend your mod or you to work together on it.

Thanks! I finally got around to making my version. Basically, I disabled all 34 decal puddles the game uses and replaced them all with the real water puddles the game uses 100 other places in the game. They should have never used these ugly decal puddles. As PCG4m3r has no doubt found out, you can't seem to fix the texture on the decals...even with very high quality textures the decals look terrible in-game. So...real puddles was the only proper solution, IMO. Here is an archive with my .esp and screenshots comparing. (ESP is perfectly clean.) Before After Before After Anyone is free to modify and improve what I've done. I've check out half of the ten locations in-game and they all look great with the real puddles. I will mention to SparrowPrince he should include this in WATER. PCG4m3r: Feel free to use my .esp or incorporate into your mod...more could be done like more nuanced placing of puddles...anyway. Thanks to all for the info about this issue.

Hello friends, finally joined STEP forums. Brumbek here. I made a mod called SMIM, perhaps you've heard of it??? ;) I salute you for finding this. I missed the decals on my first look. Arthmoor the genius had to help me. Well...deleting the puddles obviously is one method...but that isn't what the developers intended, since you lose the puddles entirely.The true fix for this would be to create a new proper puddle .nif that uses the proper puddle textures you mentioned in yellow. Then insert the new puddles and disable the old ones. That is the true solution. This could be done by modifying the waterpuddle01.nif mesh.I may attempt this at a later date...replacing all terrible decal puddles with proper puddles...perhaps even the USKP would include this fix then, although they may deem it beyond the scope of the USKP. I will update this thread if I do take the time to replace all the puddles. For now, though, the decal puddles remain a mystery to me. Perhaps only the developers would know if decal puddles can be improved.