Ostriig on 1/12/2011 at 11:08

---

We have a mods thread sitting down the page but with Beth's games that only takes us half-way, so let's get one going for editing the .ini file. Thankfully, the nice folks over at [H] (http://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/11/23/tweaking_skyrim_image_quality/) have a guide for the main tweaks, a more detailed one than most out there I'd say. I'd suggest having a skim of it, though I'll put up a couple of annotations below.

Unsurprisingly, I mostly take issue with Skyrim's awful shadows. Seriously, by default these things look like Tomb Raider 3 shadows invented a time machine back in '98 and beamed themselves thirteen years into the future. And it doesn't help that setting the game to Ultra sets the exterior shadows draw distance to 8000 which, while rendering shadows far enough into the distance, obviously, also dramatically decreases the quality of the shadows. Depending on your personal preferences, as far as shadows go Ultra might not actually mean "best".

Anyway, what I wanted to add:

* iBlurDeferredShadowMask - this controls the shadows contours as they are projected onto surfaces. By default, it's 3, which means a little blurred, to give it a slightly soft edge. Now, a lot of people have suggested setting this to 0 or 1 to get the sharpest effect. [H] suggest going the other way, however, and I agree.

See, thing is that with a lot of work and fucking about you might get interior shadows to look decent so that when they are sharp they are reasonably non-jaggy by reducing draw distance to around 2000, but in exterior areas I really doubt you wanna do that. So your exterior shadows would look shit. Sharp. But shit.

Now, going the other way obviously blurs your shadow edges further. Which, in combination with a reasonable draw distance and a high shadowmap resolution, will make the blockiness almost unnoticeable. And I think that the soft appearence of the shadows also works well enough, though again that might be up to personal preferences. [H] suggest setting this value to 32, though I found that a bit too much, I'm using 16 right now, might experiment some more with it. There is one noticeable drawback to increasing this variable, and I don't know yet whether it's a sole factor or works in conjunction with using Ambient Occlusion - this puts an "edge" of non-shadow around characters, how thick depending on how high you set the value. Try it for yourself and see.


* iShadowMapResolution - sets the resolution your shadow maps get rendered at. Didn't see that coming, did you? Set to 4096, [H] suggest 8192 and say they saw no performance impact on their beefier test system, but I did on mine (i7-2600K, 8GB DDR3 RAM 1333Mhz, GTX570). It would be smooth under a static viewport but as soon as I nudged the camera it would start tripping over itself.


* uGridsToLoad - regulates how many adjacent world cells get loaded and has a big impact on exterior spaces as such. But beware the battle cattle screwing with this thing, as saves made with a higher setting than the one present in the .ini when you're loading the game will no longer work. That's to say that if you raise this setting and then go back down again the saves you will have made in the meantime will be off-limits. Apparently (http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showpost.php?p=26675605&postcount=5) there is a way to do it while playing the game which allows you to make a working save, but tread carefully, you may be setting yourself up for (http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1038063970&postcount=66) some hassle.


Oh, also, some water reflection tweaks that where suggested in (http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/11/the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim-tweaks-improve-graphics-disable-vsync-change-fov-and-more/) other corners of the net: