I once saw a post stating after the holidays an official guide of all the .ini commands and what they do would be posted. Has that happened as yet?

The Nvidia tweak guide stickied on this forum is basically that. It's not just for Nvidia users either.

oh man. I wish Bethesda would explain every single INI command, and in detail.

Koroush's guides are almost always the most detailed, but even he does not have all of the commands.

Thank you, I found that some time back on the Nvidia website. It does have some useful information. It is not -however- the entirety of what I would like to see.

I doubt I am the only one that would like to see a documented, official, list of all commands that could be out into each of the .Ini files and what, exactly, each does. An even better step that would, I believe, take little more effort on the part of a staff programmer would be a small utility that takes care of editing both .ini files, a front end, so-to-speak, with explanations and easy to click buttons, or boxes to fill out. Not so different from the DNA web site. http://donotargue.com/cfg-makers/skyrim/

Included, of course, would be options to reset to a default set of .ini files and recovery from Ugrid experimentation. Simple things to include in such a program would be adjusting linked attributes, back to uGrids this would mean setting the value to 7 or 9 or whatever would in addition take care of all other values like the cell buffer values.

having done some programming in the past I do not see how this would take significant time or effort on the part of Bethesda while providing a huge boost to customization to users who otherwise would not access or tweak an .ini file on their own. I suspect the greatest part of the time taken to create such a utility would in fact be researching and defining values and affects of all the parameters that could be put into the configuration files and used by the game and not in fact writing the code. After all it has been clearly demonstrated that Bethesda's philosophy is to keep in UI elements to the most bare and simply the rest of the code being fairly straight forward read two text files and give some plain text descriptions with the ability to make charges then write the files back to the hard drive.

Do I have hopes that the promise to, at the very least, post a guide to the .ini files be kept much less the extra days work of building a front end for them, not really, I do however hope to be wrong on this.

Well, Bethesda has quite clearly stated, that they would like to focus on consoles, and not develop for the PC at all. From that perspective, it would not be in their commercial interest to create ini editing tools. I assume you have noticed, that they did not even use compiler optimizations for the PC until certain modders began doing it for them.

I honestly believe that was one guys job and he forgot lol. They never said they don't want to do pc, just that console is a much much bigger audience for them, so common and business sense dictates that should be their main focus. Sad but true

http://www.gamebreakers.co/news/industry/the-ps360-bethesda-call-for-a-one-console-future/


There are other comments like this, and some specifically mention the hassle of developing for PC, but I can't be bothered to find them all. So, even if in your eyes Bethesda can neither do nor say anything wrong, please don't kid yourself about this.

What point are you trying to make? That Todd wishes there was only one console? If so then yep, it's there in black and white.

If you're trying to say he wants to ditch pcs and move to console only, you have some serious reading between the lines skills lol.

Sure he does, although for the moment, and until modding can be brought to consoles, Bethesda can't drop PC's. However, expect that to change over time with whatever will follow based on extending the Steam Workshop concept over to consoles.

Amyway, I am now dropping this subject, as it is unlikely to lead to anything constructive. Oh, and having worked as a business strategy consultant, I can indeed read between the lines in matters like this.

fun fact of the INI


Many of the ini commands are nearly identical if not exactly the same as Unreal 3 Engine INI commands..

lol

The PC is easier to develop for than any other time in the past and I'm sorry but game developers cannot have it all their way. It's bad enough that they treat the PC as a Xbox360 emulator and expect us to play on joypads to make their life easier.

Actually I bet it's a lot easier to develop on consoles since there is pretty much 1 configuration of hardware they have to worry about to insure compatibility (2 if you want to count the 2 main consoles - PS3 and XBOX360). With PC's the technology is ever changing, about every 6 months there are newer and better hardware. You have AMD and Intel CPUs, and all their variations, you have AMD and Nvida GPUs and all their variations. And then you have all the different chipsets out there. And sometimes each of these different pieces of hardware have their own quarks, ect. Then as the hardware increases in performance, they are expected to release games with high FPS and the best graphics to compete with other venders games.

Consoles last like 5+ years of the same hardware, and the same way of doing things for each of their games. The same limitations. The same expectations in terms of performance and graphics.

I'm a PC guy who has both consoles, but rarely uses them. Just playing devils advocate

Well, this thread is about Arisu's efforts to at least clarify which ini values are used and which are completely worthless. He examined them vs actual system calls and created a table that lets you filter them out catagorically. Pretty useful any ways in that while it doesn't given any definition for the values it lets you dispel the claims of people who're clearly making up their own conclusions on how useful certain settings are.

Edit: Oh right, the damn link
http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1337888-rel-arisus-skyrimini-reference-all-1483-settings-and-their-default-values/

While some aspects of developing for a console are easier... (one system and guidelines to follow..... no other unique "parts" to have to consider).... other factors make a developers life a living hell... for example all the various restrictions that go with it... example being ram/vram/processing capabilities.....

Even the creators of Grand Trismo 5 for the PS3 really had a great dislike for what they wanted to create but due to the limitations and hardware capabilities of the ps3..... they had to trim tons of things back... and try and balance it.. even though at the time, PC's are forever changing and improving...

Some developers that develope specifically with the PC in mind are able to quite often make functions and feature or increased level of detail that MAY not be support at the time of creation, but knowing what the future brings, has sometimes made available the higher end settings so newer machine could take advantage of it totally destroying the consoles...

Well that's a given, of course it's easier to develop on consoles, though I heard the PS3 isn't exactly easy. The simple fact of the matter is that the PC is easier than it's been in the last 10 years and developers are just moaning because they're used to preset hardware. Just ignore the rants about PC being a pain to develop for, it made many of these game developers a lot of money over the last 20 years and they didn't moan so much then. Developing games for consoles comes at a higher price as well ,since they have to pay for the development software and fees for Microsoft and Sony.

i was also going to mention that if developing for the pc is so hard... how come there are so many one man developers and content creators developing a huge abundant amount of stuff that puts some of these multi million companies to shame?

Some of them are flash.. some of them are java.. some of them use any combination of different tools to build on/use. So it's not like they have to SPECIFICALLY target hardware... they just have to follow a simple set of accepted rules for the pc... apply it...

They don't have to specifically target hardware... that's actually a very lame way of developing.

For example.. while Unreal engine is damn good, it does some somewhat stupid things.. or i should say some developers that use it as their base engine do some stupid things.

Bioware for example with mass effect uses a specific cpu/video/hardware configuration detection system.. meaning if you use newer components or components that thier detection scheme doesn't have a register for.. it has a tendency to set the wrong information.

My 6950 2gb card is detected as a negative vram value.... also sets a configuration similare to something in the range of a x1900 model video adapter.... (stupid)... also detects my cpu's cores.. but then gets an inaccurate cpu score resulting it it select a cpu mode similare to that of an intel core 2 duo

They use a settings system that has values 1/2/3/4/5.. where 1 is the lowest and 5 is the highest... and it set my machine as a 3 for each which is pretty poor.

Manually changing this is the only way as there is no settings via various modders and the game launcher to change it... Performance is increased when i changed these to the correct values.. and picture quality too

I would like to side with this.

And I agree, that it would be very nice to have a comprehensive description of all the ini values.

Also, it would be nice, if using the saveini command in the console would reliably save all the relevant values currently in effect. The ini file created in the main game Data folder by that command (if I remember correctly, and unless it has been fixed, which I doubt) seems to be a remnant from a previous game application of the same core engine, and it causes some issues with the loading screen or UI, or something like that.

It populates the Skyrim.ini file with every possible parameter represented by the current game state. Some of these settings alter the rendering of the load screens, resulting in a global red tint. I'm not sure of this command's usefullness other than to attach a lower uGrids setting to a save game. Even in this case, I'd replace the Skyrim.ini with a backup after the procedure is completed.

Quite. I consider it to be highly suspect. Especially considering, that Skyrim uses two separate ini files, but this command creates only one. The ini file it creates may contain some relevant values, that one might like to examine, but after having a look at them, I feel, that one definately should delete, rename, or relocate the file before resuming play. Fortunately, it does not seem to change the content of the normal ini files used.

Anyway, I must correct by previous post, by stating that ~saveini creates Skyrim.INI in the Data folder, and not the main game folder.

Unfortunately, I suspect this will be never be fixed, but I dare not explain my reasons for thinking so .

Nice info, good start.

Thanks for posting.

Going through some of my saved bookmarks, I noticed this one, that might also contain interesting information, though I have not looked at it that closely. (I have taken the approach to mostly postpone ini tweaking until the game is patched to a relatively stable state.)

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1272621-ini-compendium/

And then there is this one as well, although it is an old topic with no recent posts:

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1266192-the-definitive-skyrim-ini-file-before-and-after-photo-comparison-thread/

And finally, one cannot speak about topics involving ini settings without mentioning this one:

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1274926-ugridstoload-skyrimini-comparisons-and-explanation-default-57911/