Starting Skyrim on PC Options

[Renee]

Yes, it looks like it's finally happening. It's raining and lovely outside, and is supposed to do so all through Sundas. I mean Sunday. And I am going to maybe start Skyrim on PC tomorrow.

So what I want to do here is to collect any advice the community here at Chorrol feels like contributing. For instance: I still want to install my game outside of Program Files, right? That sort of advice. I have heard that modding Skyrim is different from Oblivion.

What's the best (easiest, actually) mod manager to use? That's a good place to start. OBMM isn't as fancy as Wrye Bash, for instance, but I still use OBMM most of all because it does what I need it to do. And so I am assuming Skyrim also has several mod managers to try using, right?

I'm pretty excited about my first character. I already know a lot about him, since he is based on a character one of my friends from high school (1980s, lol) created. The only tricky thing is this character will be Asian, and I'm going to want some Asian face-tweaking mod, because I could never create this guy with vanilla tools on Xbox (yes, I tried). Anybody know a mod that adds some Asian elements to faces?

[Lopov]

I'm taking back what I said earlier about Antialiasing and Anisotropic filtering. Today I set both to 2 samples and I noticed a big improvement in graphics, Ivarstead was not only visible high from High Hrothgar but I also saw its mill running and water was running down waterfalls while before they seemed frozen from the distance. Stutter isn't any better or worse with AA and AF enabled so I'll gradually increase it as I play. Also, the game looks better in general.

I had two CTDs in the past 3 hours of gaming, but the first one happened before I enabled AA & AF so that's not the issue. The game just crashed without any warnings or errors. It both happened close to Ivarstead but this might be a coincidence. It both happened about 30 seconds after I made a quick save but this might be another coincidence. I downloaded SSME, some people swear by it - I did some playing with it before going to work and I didn't have any CTDs for now but I didn't really play for long. Is there any way to find out what caused the CTD? I'll also try saving only with the console.

This post has been edited by Lopov: Dec 8 2014, 10:11 PM