[Skyrim] Useful INI Settings

[Arthmoor]

Then chances are we're assuming these values incorrectly. There's no way you could possibly have a stable game with 1GB devoted to the music cache. That's half the 2GB limit right there. Which means the 2GB setting makes zero sense. So it must be in bytes instead, which seems illogical but must actually be correct.

[alt3rn1ty]

So all USKP users hard drives are working overtime on sounds with only a 4k cache

 

I am going to remove my recommendation from Kill The Orchestra descriptions

 

SMPC is the worse one, still only recommending uMaxSizeForCachedSound=512

( bottom of the sticky post http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/778240-uskp-addon/page-63#entry10946786 )

[Arthmoor]

As I said, there have been no odd reports of problems. I'm not about to change anything without solid evidence of a real issue. We know for a fact that the default causes effect sounds to play incorrectly, which is what we set out to fix.

[VaultDuke]

So all USKP users hard drives are working overtime on sounds with only a 4k cache

I am going to remove my recommendation from Kill The Orchestra descriptions

SMPC is the worse one, still only recommending uMaxSizeForCachedSound=512

( bottom of the sticky post http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/778240-uskp-addon/page-63#entry10946786 )

If you say music requires hundreds of mb, and the vanilla setting is 256 kB, wouldn't that infuse next to the same level of wear in the hdd anyway as 4 kB. Imho, before jumping to any conclusions, either some evidence was necessary or we need someone to explain how this sound caching actually works. The papyrus cache size worked differently than people assumed, too.

[lmstearn]

I'm guessing the allocations in [Audio] reserve a portion of the system's paging pool.

A quick scan of Skyrim.ini verifies that all settings dealing with memory are in bytes, not kb.

[alt3rn1ty]

If you say music requires hundreds of mb, and the vanilla setting is 256 kB, wouldn't that infuse next to the same level of wear in the hdd anyway as 4 kB. Imho, before jumping to any conclusions, either some evidence was necessary or we need someone to explain how this sound caching actually works. The papyrus cache size worked differently than people assumed, too.

 

Yep I am not jumping to any conclusions, just generating more discussion on a setting we are pushing without fully understanding what is being set, or the effects it is having on peoples machines out there, apart from it doing the obvious and stopping the stuck sounds its meant to be doing.

 

I am in the process of trying to determine exactly what a good setting would be .. But as mentioned previously I dont know if I am still preventing something I have never personally experienced.

 

I am also experimenting with settings and studying my hard drive activity light ( my laptop does have a 3.5 IDE HD ) as an indicator as to how much extra it is having to work ( my hard drive activity is just about predictable on my system, I have only necessary background services running ) .. So far keeping it set at 4094 is having no increase in activity in comparison to having it set at default setting in smashed patch.ini

 

If I find anything of use I will report back here, but its looking doubtful

 

 

Oh and those two other settings

 

uiInitialCacheSize=1048576

uiMaxAudioCacheSize=2097152

 

.. I wouldnt mess with those - Tried reducing them both by half their value last night, and slowly but surely Bad Things start to happen with sounds. Weird and wonderful loud bizarre sounds start to emit from your speakers, loud and bizarre enough to make me jump in my seat.

 

But I actually think those settings are not unreasonable if they do represent 1gb and 2gb

The first is an Initial setting, which the game probably lowers on the fly

The second is a Max setting, future proofing against modders adding music and sound mods ?, or even allowing its own system on much better machines in future to expand its intelligent use of caching, over say a five - ten year period of machine advancements which game makers do anticipate to happen

 

I still think the setting we are messing with is actually kylobytes, and 4094 does equal 4mb, not k, just going by all the file sizes the game has to throw around. It just makes sense, even though those two other settings would seem to be ridiculous

[VaultDuke]

testing is good. keep at it.

but I wouldn't be surprised if the setting still did something different than we expect. I mean may I recall the case of the iMaxAllocatedMemoryBytes, where everyone thought 72kB was very low until SmkViper told the community to keep it low, because the value is actually per stack (whatever that means). so, yeah. I wouldn't go around randomly assuming what values might sound good. but I agree, the USKP change may as well cause some (unnoticed until now, which also means probably very minor if at all) side effects.

testing is good. maybe there is even a software around, that measures HD activity?

[alt3rn1ty]

 I keep my beady eye on anything SMKViper has to say 

Software I am using ProcMon, VMMap and windows Resource Monitor ( Task Manager, click the Performance tab, click Resource Monitor - Disk activity tab ), aswell as the HD indicator light as a rough guide for alerting me to big increases in activity which I then check out in Resource Monitor by alt tabbing windows

 

Actually .. Skyrim Performance Monitor will be ideal for this, it has Disk IO graph, so I can do a timed run, before and after settings and compare.

 

Edit : PS .. Everyone had an offer of upgrading to Win 10 in their system tray ?, I wonder if after allowing it to install a dual booting OS will still work.

[InsanePlumber]

Some useful entries that I use.

 

Skyrim.ini

[General]

sIntroSequence=

;removes Intro, Beth logo when you turn on game

 

sMainMenuMusic=

; removes main menu music

 

fEncumberedReminderTimer=900

; message about overloaded will be displayed every 900 seconds

 

[Combat]

bForceNPCsUseAmmo=1

; NPC will have a limited number of bolts arrows (end of endless ammunition for NPC)

 

[Interface]

bShowTutorials=0

; no more annoying tutorial


sPosePlayerRaceSexMenu=

; no crossed hands during character creation

 

uMaxCustomItemNameLength=64

;increase the maximum name length for created items (default is 32)


[Menu]

rConsoleHistoryTextColor=0,250,0

; font color for the old console text (RGB)


iConsoleTextSize=16

; font size for the console


rConsoleTextColor=0,200,0

; font color for the console text (RGB)


iConsoleSizeScreenPercent=100

; screen percent of what it will take console after activation

 

[alt3rn1ty]

Reference the testing of uMaxSizeForCachedSound= setting

 

 

I did a couple of runs, both with vanilla music and sound files

 

Save position was inside Whiterun main gate.

 

Load up Skyrim Performance Monitor, exit from anything else which could randomly affect the results in the background ( disabled WIFI and NIC )

 

Each run consists of walking ( press and hold shift constantly throughout ), from Whiterun Main gate, turn left up the hill, follow the path to the eldergleam tree then turn up towards Dragonsreach, once at the door turn around and walk down to the market area, around the well and then back to the main gate

 

Each run duration was 2 seconds short of 7 minutes. And the exact same path taken. This was an early morning run where people are starting to come out of their abodes during the walk, so plenty of NPCs passed in close proximity, aswell as all other sounds used in Whiterun.

 

First run with uMaxSizeForCachedSound=262144 set

 

Second run with uMaxSizeForCachedSound=4096 set

 

 

Good news for USKP = No discernible difference in Disk I/O whatsoever ( and this is with my laptop IDE HD, so a lowest common denominator scenario )

 

I also had the relevant part of Resource Monitors window visible to corroborate Skyrim Performance Monitor along the way

 

Here's SPM before and after readings from SPM

 

 

 

 

So as far as I can tell, using this setting is not going to be any kind of extra load for hard drives

 

And the detail you cant see in the above screenshot, is the graph timeline of Disk I/O, where you see the initial flurry of disk activity at the start of the game loading, and then caching kicks in so for the rest of the duration the game just streams in what it needs ..

 

Top Graph, purple line ( this following screenshot was the 4096 run ) :

( The graph profile was very similar on both runs )

 

 

[alt3rn1ty]

Well I tried, but I still cant make sounds get stuck

 

So without being able to make the problem happen, I cant determine an ideal setting to stop it happening.

 

Someone else needs to experiment with this.

[alt3rn1ty]

Arthmoor - DoubleYou just had a nice find in FalloutPrefs.ini settings

 

[Audio]

fASFadeInTime=2.0

fASFadeOutTime=10.0

fRegionLoopFadeInTime=5.0

fRegionLoopFadeOutTime=5.0

fAudioDebugDelay=0.0

bEnableAudio=1

bEnableAudioCache=1

bMultiThreadAudio=0

bEnableEnviroEffectsOnPC=0

; cache sizes in kilobytes

iAudioCacheSize=2048

 

 

The find is that comment - ; cache sizes in kilobytes

 

Which would possibly mean Skyrim ini settings for audio caches would also be the same ( being similar game engine, and an awful lot of the same settings are duplicated in the Skyrim game setup )

 

So your 4096 setting would be 4mb

 

http://forum.step-project.com/topic/4699-kill-the-orchestra-by-alt3rn1ty/page-4#entry128299

[Arthmoor]

Well ok, so our original thought that it's in KB is right. So 4096 = 4MB. Seems reasonable enough. All of the debate is interesting, but it still doesn't mean we need to change anything I think 4096 works just fine. I have not noticed any repeating sounds cropping up with that. Resetting it to vanilla causes them to happen in every new cell the player visits.

 

You mentioned SMPC setting it to 512. I'm not actually sure why he did that as there was no evidence whatsoever provided for why it should be needed. I think he was just trying to pull a "one-up" on us for no real reason.

 

I think I'm gonna laugh if these same settings exist for FO4 and the same solution fixes the same problem

[alt3rn1ty]

Surely FO4 will be a brand new game engine 

[lmstearn]

Hmm, that's interesting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_rate#Multimedia_encoding

If we load up a mod with a soundbyte of 80 minutes (4,800 seconds) of CD-DA data, it will require 846,720,000 bytes of storage. Which has to be loaded in cache. Not disk cache, but RAM cache for it to work properly.

But reducing the uiMaxAudioCacheSize etc should abort the load into cache if there are filesize checks in place, and the other sounds should continue to work in-game. Possible engine bug?

Edit: Actual sound and music memory management is controlled outside Skyrim.exe, and thus not monitored by SPM. The Creation engine probably uses wma-like player calls with a playlist that gets reset on an wilderness exterior/ town exterior/dungeon interior. It's a Windows Subsystem request, which is not shared by other processes in recent Windows versions. (Does anyone hear any incoming email/Skype/VOIP/System dings in the background any more?)

This is all pure conjecture btw, we really don't know unless we see the code.

[VaultDuke]

Just for the record, smpc had that audio tweak before uskp. Doesn't explain why he chose 512, but it has definately nothing to do with wanting to go lower than us.

[alt3rn1ty]

Reference Seraphiel666 problems with this setting as discussed on Nexus USKP comments :

 

Last couple of days my new laptop ( bought a few weeks ago ) started experiencing something similar, not quite as drastic as what Seraphiel666 described in the first couple of comments on Nexus, but a slight pause / lag when in conversation and dialogue has to load, and other random times with loading sound files as Seraphiel666 described.

But thats probably due to me having uMaxSizeForCachedSound=8192 ( which was slightly higher than USKP setting, so probably took me longer to notice any impact a low setting would have )

I did not experience anything quite so long as minutes, nor did I experience a cacophony of many sounds coming back all at once, but just the occasional annoying fraction of a second lag which became more often as the game progresses, and enough to make you think something underlying is going wrong.

 

Tried 32768 - Didnt work

Tried 65536 - No lag at all.

 

I also tried an inbetween setting to try and refine it a little - 49152 didnt work

 

So it looks like I can confirm for anyone who also has this slight lag problem using USKP, you need uMaxSizeForCachedSound=65536

And you need an ini which loads later than USKP ini ( or just edit the USKP ini, if you remember to re-do that when the mod is updated again or you have a re-install of all files )

 

 

Damned strange I didnt have this problem on my old less capable laptop though.

[lmstearn]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA8BU3919440

[WDeranged]

Previously I'd used Generic Inventory Sound Fix but this time around I decided to try the uMaxSizeForCachedSound tweak.  Now, It may be a total coincidence (curse this engine!) but I've experienced my first inventory crash in a thousand hours of Skyrim, all I did was click a totally vanilla book from a merchant and the game immediately bombed out.  Like I said, could be random chance but I thought I should mention it here.

[VaultDuke]

USLEEP packs that fix already anyway. So not sure what you did. It most certainly just was coincidence.

[WDeranged]

USLEEP packs that fix already anyway. So not sure what you did. It most certainly just was coincidence.

 

Yeah I was using the cache size tweak from USLEEP whereas normally I use this mod which edits sound descriptors to fix the issue.  I just thought it might be related as books are one of the item types with the issue and it was the first item I clicked.

[Arthmoor]

I'm not sure how fixing those sound descriptors helps, especially since we tried that once before and found that it would break things like weather sounds for some odd reason. We reverted that change pretty fast back then. When the ini fix came up, we figured it was worth a shot, and it's worked perfectly fine since. One line in an ini fragment vs having to edit HUNDREDS of sound descriptors for a proper, thorough fix. You can perhaps see why we went with the ini fix

[alt3rn1ty]

Arthmoor - Give this a good looking at sometime : Skyrim Project INI by DoubleYou

 

Personally I would add it as a general recommend for anyone to use in the OP, DoubleYou has been researching this on the STEP forum for a long time, and its pretty good from what I have seen so far ( there is a lot of previously unknowns / bad advice debunked with this tool )

 

I dont think anyone has researched any Bethesda INI tweaking quite as much or so well as this project has achieved, its shown me a thing or two I did not previously know about.

 

 

He has also done a similar portable tool for Oblivion and the Fallout games - At the moment I would guess that Fallout 4 is still a WIP until Bethesda leave behind doing any official patches to the game.

[Nebulous112]

I have used spINI and I will vouch for its efficacy. It is suggested if you use the default Ultra settings for Skyrim that you use the spINI high settings.

I use the spINI beta version.