Christ, I was so bored I decided to get into modding Skyrim for the umpteenth time -
again.
Some really solid improvements since I last got into it. In particular, the new animation engine, Nemesis, is doing wonders for making Skyrim PC control and movement more life-like. Especially when combined with Immersive Camera. Smooth Camera and iEquip. All you need really (in conjunction with SkyUI's built-in favourites system).
Smooth Camera makes controlling a Skyrim avatar a delight, with a much more polished "action" feel, almost like modern games in its slickness now. iEquip is a fantastic mod that you can use with basic features, or a lot more in-depth. Very easy to set up, very good for the thing of starting small with only a few preciuos items, and then building your kit as you go, so you understand it better in order to use it better.
Also there's a quick and dirty solution for the amateurish "jitter" problem that Bethesda have left in the game for years, that drives those of us who prefer to play in 3rd person crazy (I refer of course to the jitters your character gets if you have a mouse and you're prone to keep a light hold on it even when you're not steering. Tiny movements of the mouse are amplified into a horrible, brain disturbing jitter effect that ultimately makes you not want to play Skyrim (in 3rd person at least, and that's literally half the fun of the game for me). Mod called
Dirty Skyrim Animation Turn Fix. Bit of a DIY faff to set up, but easy enough to do with MO2. (The idea is genius. Since we can't get it fixed Behesda-side, you can at least get rid of the jittering effect to a very large degree by replacing the right60 turn and left60 turns with the main idle itself (copying it twice and renaming the copies the appropriate left and right names). The "mod" is just a file structure with vanilla versions of the files you need to look for if you have some fancy-schmancy animation mods.
Sheer genius in the simplicity of the idea! It means that instead of jittering you skate a teensy bit, but that's much less visually intrusive and immersion-breaking, to the extent you don't notice it any more and can get into muh immersion more easily. (My idea for a fix, btw, was to have a tiny mouse "dead zone," like a joystick deadzone, so that those tiny movements of your hand just don't trigger the half speed side move animation until it looks natural for it to come in.
And with the Nemesis engine (and combine that even again with animation variety from the Dynamic Animations Replacer and the various packs people have made for it), what you're controlling is the animations beatifully varying and blended in a natural looking way.
This time round I've taken to faffing about with, ahem, complex-to-set-up
Loverslab stuff, which has meant I've left the Special Edition landscape pretty much as-is. And actually it has its charms
au naturel (with Rudy ENB SE ofc). It's more "painterly" in terms of art design than the more realistic and detailed replacers I'm used to, but it's aesthetically of a piece and has its own powerful fairytale atmosphere. The colours are just really nicely done (with ENB ofc).
Another great little mod is ENB Light, which creates screen space particle effects by accessing the depth buffer (so preferably for third person gameplay - it only works to enhance lights that have their source on-screen, so sometimes it doesn't work if there's an important light-source offscreen relative to your first person view - still it's really worth it for 3rd peron, adds another tweak in terms of beauty and immersion). It adds things like glowing magic light from your hands, which lights the area around you and casts shadows - you can also do torches, fire and other lightsources, and even dragon's breath if you have a computer that can fight God. I know Skyrim can do that anyway with painstaking editing of your .esp file, but it's another very effective "quick and dirty" solution to high quality lighting in-game.
Oh, and mustn't forget Pascal Gilcher's raytracing mod for Reshade. It's a fantastic replacement for ambient occlusion - turn that shit off and bask in the glory of some kind of mysterious thing that's somewhere inbetween ambient occlusion and actual raytracing. Looks so much better, everything looks that bit more solid and life-like.