Hello, this topic consists of 2 main questions:

I would like to be able to play over steam, without having my settings reset all the time.
I discovered that when I press Play from Steam, all of my previously manually-edited settings, inside SkyrimPrefs.ini, are set to default.


1). How do I play over Steam and keep my manual graphic tweaks?

2). Does anyone know how to fix shadows? My shadows look squary and every time the shadows move because of the daytime, it shakes and flickers, like here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otLWROTbiZQ&feature=related


Please help me out

why are there no replies on this forum?

The only replies I've noticed are usually trolls tbh, but i'll give my 2 cents worth, have you tried adding it as a non steam game? If it's steam then it will bypass that problem, but if it's the game itself resetting it your probably screwed.

Select the game in your Game Library and make a desktop shortcut.

Nope.. made the desktop shortcut and when I start it, the same thing happens. The menu opens with options: Play, Options, Data Files, Tech Support, Exit

And a message pops up: "Skyrim will now detect your video hardware and set video options accordingly.", I press OK
Next popup: "Video settings have been set for Medium Quality."

And all of my manually tweaked stuff in my old ini file is gone - overwritten by the crappy, buggy default ini file.

You have to use "TESV.exe" not "Skyrimlauncher.exe"

But then I will not be playing through Steam? And my achievements in my Steam account will not be recorded?

That's weird. I've tweaked my SkyrimPrefs.ini and playing through Steam it just leaves it alone. I got the 'detect hardware' the first time I launched Skyrim through Steam, but never after that despite tweaking the .ini file. I've made (and reverted) a few changes to it, not a lot though.

Did you alter your original .ini file, or did you install a hand-created one? I don't know if this makes a difference, though . And are you talking about the one in your user Documents folder, or the defaults one in the Steam folder?

Who cares about achievements?

Steam will revert some tweaked ini settings (I think shadow settings; check yourself) when using it. Only way to prevent that is to start through skyrim.exe.
Be sure to check Steam for updates though.

Have you tried setting the .ini files to read-only? Should fix the problem. At least it seems to have fixed it for me. Though you'll need to undo that next time you want to edit them again.

And make sure you're editing the right .ini files. The ones you need to edit are in C:\Documents and Settings\%USERNAME%\My Documents\My Games\Skyrim (I'm on XP, dunno if it's different for Windows Vista or 7)

To set them as read-only, right click them, click Properties, check the "Read-only" check box, and click ok. (again, dunno if this is different for Vista or 7)

I replaced my SkyrimPrefs.ini file completely with this one http://www.4shared.com/file/rc_4qlkM/SkyrimPrefs.html? and probably made some tweaks to it - I don't remember 100%

I am talking about C:\Documents\My Games\Skyrim path

As confusing as it may be, D:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\skyrim\Skyrim the ini file in this path doesn't seem to be the one that the game uses for it's settings..

hmm, my Windows 7 is in Danish... the checkbox you told me to enable is in the bottom left side of the properties window, right? Under "attributes"?

If I remember rightly, there's a line in the .ini file that say's what graphics card you have. If the line in the .ini file you downloaded doesn't match the actual card in your machine, that's probably why Skyrim keeps auto-detecting. Find the line in your auto-detected .ini, and alter the line in the downloaded .ini to match, maybe?