The new cloud effects look great, Boris! Skyrim is REALLY coming along with ENB now, one of the most realistic and immersive games there is.
Regarding performance, I thought I would just point out. I upgraded from 0.236 to 0.241, so a moderate jump. I've noticed in the last few forums that people have been saying, after EACH update, that they only experienced a 1-2fps hit. I would say, cumulatively, all the various graphics updates recently have incurred a grand total FPS hit of around 8-10fps. I used to get 30fps consistently with v-sync on with 0.236. I get 20fps consistently now, and if I disable v-sync, I get around 20-22fps.
That has moved the game out of the realm of playability, and into the realm of barely playable. I say barely playable, because it can be, if you aren't in combat or anything like that...but the quirky thing about Skyrim's game engine is that frame rates below 30 really kick the crap out of the scripting engine. It seems the game allocates a certain amount of time each frame for scripts to run, and with a lower frame rate, scripts run more slowly. That creates a really weird lag that gets a little worse and a little worse until you hit a higher FPS area (like a small, uncluttered interior) where things can "catch up".
I know you don't like to optimize your code, but I just thought I would offer the opinion that it could be very helpful if you did. If all of the graphics changes for the last five to seven versions only incurred a 1-2fps hit in total, that would be really good. But it has cost me at least 8fps (I run an SLI pair of overclocked 760's, which are about as performant as one 780), and that 8fps has indeed affected game playability. It is certainly up to you if/when you optimize, but I would like to officially request that the newest graphics features do be optimized at some point. I don't want to disrupt your momentum, you've been doing some amazing things with Skryim, and I don't want to see that stop! But I also don't want to see my frame rates drop to 15fps by version .250, either. ;P
I also wanted to ask about something else. I used to play the game only with a frame limiter (no v-sync), used to be 60fps, but I've dropped it to 40fps since the game seems to be fine so long as it runs faster than 30fps, and at 60fps it puts a little bit too much strain on my video cards. Since v0.236, I have found that I HAD to enable v-sync in order to eliminate a stutter that occurs when panning vertically (pointing my characters view up and down from horizon to the top of the sky). The stutter does not exist when panning horizontally. It is very disconcerting and gives me a headache when I play for more than a few minutes. If I enable v-sync, the stutter goes away, but my frame rates, which used to be around 45fps, drops to 30fps, and sometimes as low as 20fps (and now, with v0.241, it is ALWAYS 20fps.) The stutter does not seems to occur if I go back to versions prior to 0.236 (I have some, although not all, of the older versions, so I am not sure exactly which version introduced this stutter.) I know that the v0.22x versions seem to be ok.
Anyway, the stutter is a bit frustrating. It would be nice to have my frame rates in the 40-50fps range again, but v-sync will only allow 60fps, 30fps, 20fps, and 15fps, so even though I have the computing power to support a higher frame rate, I am not able to take advantage of it. At the very least, if the most recent graphics improvements were optimized, that might get me back up to 30fps, which is playable, if not ideal.
Well, thanks, Boris! You always do phenomenal work. I am stunned at how realistic Skyrim FEELS these days...it doesn't just look realistic, it feels realistic with the amazing water and the cloud shadows (I haven't yet seen sun rays...not sure why, although I simply copied in your default cloud settings without tweaking them yet, so I may just not have something configured right.)
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), and I get the feeling your core audience already has fantastic GPUs and don't care about optimization. So I really don't mind if you don't optimize. Besides, it's your free time - work on whatever you enjoy most 