So about 4-5 years ago i was really interested in replaying Oblivion again and wanted to try going on all out on modding the graphics cus my favorite part about oblivion had always been running around and exploring the beatiful environments, so i started reading some mod guides and after much, much research and learning about modding i started the process and went as hard as possible, model overhauls, bug fixes, combat mods, retextures for almost everything in the game, i installed
wrye bash, oblivion mod manager, OBSE script extender and so on and on. And after like 50+ hours of modding (lol) i was done, and it all worked amazingly. All my learning and following the modguides word for word payed off and i was running the game with 200+ mods and a mod folder almost twice the size of the actual game folder with 0 lagg and litearlly didnt crash a single time during my entire playthrough, honestly i felt like the game ran even smoother then vanilla oblivion with all the performance optimizations, tweaks, unofficial patches, bug fix/ performance mods i installed.
So then came the time i started reading about ENB and how it could mod the lighting of the game and make it look way way better, even adding effects and such not supported by the original game. (Sorry if i am butchering the description of your
software lol, but its been like 5 years since i messed around with it)
And after a short bit of googling and finding a recommended ENB preset i liked from a modguide i enabled it and booted up oblivion. And holy shit my mind was totally blown, by adding modern lighting and lighting effects the game looked totally different, this 1 "mod" i had installed objectively made the game look way better then all the other stuff i had done combined. 1 lighting mod vs 50+ hours and 20+ gb of mods.
And with the ENB installed together with almost the entire game having been retextured with 2k textures i was running around in oblivion with (almost) Witcher 3 graphics on Ultra setting.
This post is turning into a short story/novell lol, sorry i had way to much fun remembering and writing this stuff...I shall call it: The Downfall of a Modder.
Because anyways here comes the tragedy.After having a blast playing through entire oblivion and the dlc i was looking around for some other rpg to start playing when i noticed skyrim in my game folder. And after booting it up i had short laugh at how my fully modded oblivion without
a doubt had way better graphics then vanilla skyrim.
And even tho i never liked skyrim as much as oblivion i thought, hey it could be fun playing through it again once atleast and try to make it look as awsome as i can with my new modding experience.
So began my second modding project... Modding skyrim however proved to be much more difficult then oblivion. Partially because the modding community there hadnt existed for aslong and also because it was much harder to find any good
guides / information on how things worked and such. About 5-6 hours into the process i ran into my first major roadblock and becoming more and more frustrated not being able to solve it i started tweaking some more with the ENB (which
i had previously installed like an hour before) and learned that the ENB itself had something similar to the .ini file for the game, where you could change values and such to tweak settings. And with my ever increasing modding experience
and also during this time i had started learning programming and was about 75% through a course on C#. So i thought, hey i know what i'm doing i'll mess around abit with this and maybe i'll find some clue about solving the problem.
Spoiler: I had no idea what i was doing.
DISCLAIMER: I am not here to blame anyone or point fingers at ENB devs. The file i was changing values in CLEARLY stated (in caps lock if i remember correctly lol) that i was modifying system files/firmware software on my computer.
So after tweaking some general stuff and enabling/disabling some mods i changed a value in this file and restarted skyrim for the 100th time to see if anything changed, and everything looked normal at first. But then when i started to move
the screen around abit i started notcing that everytime i did so the shadows would start to flicker rapidly in a nauseating way giving you a headache if you looked at it for too much. Certain textures, especially thin and sharp ones would also start to flicker aswell whenever they moved or you moved the screen. And no matter what i tried to do or change nothing would change this, by lowering the shadow quality i could reduce it a bit, but it was still totally unplayable.
Defeated i decided to give it up for the day , and chill abit playing Sid Meier's Pirates before going to sleep. It was then as i loaded up my save and started Sailing, i noticed...wait wtf the shadows / pixelated textures are bugged in this game
aswell now. In disbelief i stared at the crazy flickering and after a few moments i alt-f4d and started scrolling through my game library, Witcher 3: flickering, Doom: Flickering, Pillars of eternity: flickering, i even started up oblivion again
and noticed the flickering was now there aswell, when previously there had been none.
To sum up this part of the story, i tried everything to fix it but nothing worked, on a few games like Dota 2 it was hardly noticable once you turned the shadows quality down to minimum, and on other games like Sid Meier's Pirates it was so bad
that no1 could be able to play it for 30+ minutes staring into the flickering textures/shadows without litearlly throwing up from nausea.
And even on the few games like Dota 2 where it was almost impossible to notice with the right graphic settings, i tried the cinematic mode which allows you to zoom in by ridiculous amounts and when i looked at the tree shadows they would still flicker. You just couldnt see it/notice it with the normal game view.
For 350+ hours did i try to fix it (including formatting my entire computer and reinstalling windows THREE times) and search for people with similar issues, and even tho i found a few threads and maybe 25 or so people who had the same problem, i never once read about anyone being able to fix the problem. So finally i gave up and decided i would focus more on studying and other hobbies, and when i felt like gaming a little bit i would simply play dota / the few other games
i could.
The only usefull information i ever found out was that maybe 7 or so other people who had the same flickering had started experiencing it after installing skyrim ENB. Which in turn reconfirmed for me that it was 100% this that caused it start
for me.
So its been 4-5 years since i last looked into this and my question is simply this: Have you heard about anyone with this problem in this time, and has anyone been able to solve it?
After seeing the Elden ring release and a few other new games i've been tempted to start doing some gaming again, so if i cant find some solution here i'm simply going to wipe my pc one last time and start replacing every single part until its gone, starting with the motherboard, then the graphics card.
Thanks in advance for any help provided. Melkor.
THE END
