Kelmych

Yes, it was wrong in the batch files. You can download the new version ( I checked and it is available). Since a lot of the details aren't relevant to many of the forum participants I'll send you a PM.

4 and 5 are wrong; on each line one of the slash characters after Textures is backwards 4) robocopy "%cd%\Vanilla Extracted\HRDLC2" "%cd%\Vanilla Textures\HRDLC2" *.dds /s /xf *_n.dds *_msn.dds 5) robocopy "%cd%\Vanilla Extracted\HRDLC3" "%cd%\Vanilla Textures\HRDLC3" *.dds /s /xf *_n.dds *_msn.dds There should be some files ending in _n.dds several levels inside some of the folders in Vanilla Textures from STD and the DLC. They should be <3 megabytes. You can copy and past to the command windows as I mentioned.

You can copy them as they are and use them.

There have been other improvements since 0.7.3 . In some cases Ethatron made changes to the processing code to change how DDSopt functioned vs. just adding textures to the .ini . If you want to search the DDSopt guide forum you can find discussions of these, however it would take a while to do this.

In the Download DDSopt section it does say DDSopt 0.80 pre-release 4 from Nexus. There is a Quickstart Guide you might find useful to get an overview of the processing

We use v0.8.0 pre-release 4 from Nexus (Jan 2013). pre5b is an older release (Oct 2012) before Ethatron put v 0.8.0 on Nexus.

The black.dds texture was listed in the DDSopt ini file that came with DDSopt pre release 4 (the version you should be using), so it should have been skipped in your initial run. I wonder what happened.

I have no explanation of how an individual command can work but the batch file doesn't. If the batch file still isn't working you could always copy the commands from the batch file one at a time and run them. Do this just like you did for the command that worked (copy to clipboard, right click in command window then hit enter). There are only 12 additional commands.

There are only a few (I counted 5) vanilla Skyrim textures in the new version that weren't in the version of DDSopt.ini in the release 4 archive, ignoring the interface textures I just added which aren't that critical. I'm not sure which texture Torminator is referencing; I can't relate the missing texture in the picture you sent to any of the textures in DDSopt.ini .

No. You can just copy the original versions of these textures (which are in Vanilla Extracted) on top of the ones that were optimized. You can copy them to the "Vanilla Optimized" folder and then rearchive the files, or you can just copy them from where they are in "Vanilla Extracted" directly into the same location in the 7zip archived optimized texture folder (this will work quite easily as long as you followed the instructions to create a non-solid archive; if not it takes longer). You won't typically have all the textures included in the DDSopt.ini file, so don't worry about the ones you don't have. The need to use a modified DDSopt.ini file is mentioned in Setup of DDSopt here, in DDSopt Configuration here, and in DDSopt Initialization File here  in the guide.

If you followed the steps in the current version of the guide you don't need the Skyrim textures BSA or the HRDLC BSA, and you do need the DLC BSAs. You should have archive files with the optimized textures from Skyrim - textures and the HRDLC BSA. In addition you will have archive files for the optimized textures in the DLC BSAs. You don't need the three HRDLC esp plugins either.

When creating BSAs Optimizer Textures has a default that uses less severe compression; the default in BSAopt is for maximum compression. Apparently the current version of Tesv.exe can't handle BSAs with full compression. You can try recompressing you BSAs to level 8 (vs. 10) and see if that works (I think that is the compression level that OT uses). Note that the problems with using BSAopted BSAs in Skyrim doesn't seem to affect all users since it depends on which specific resources are being used, so using OT may or may not work for you. NMM doesn't do uninstallation correctly; that's why STEP won't use it.

Did you try the steps listed in this previous post yet?

I'll check; these batch files should be the same ones that are in text format on the wiki. When using the new batch files it doesn't actually matter; any .txt and .lnk files from any the the vanilla BSAs are eliminated from the output.

Thanks. We should put a note in the mod file about the incompatibilities in installation configurations. I'll do so if you don't do it first.

I been entering SR mods into the STEP mod list; please correct this since it sounds like it didn't do so correctly for current STEP. I thought the SR base was the correct one.

I put a page in the DDSopt guide here with a discussion of the differences between OT and DDSopt

I edited some of the descriptive material in the batch file, but downloadable one is otherwise similar. When you ran cmd.exe were you able to use robocopy?

No, you should be fine following the instructions for the HRDLC Optimized mod. In some cases depending upon your system you won't use actually the optimized HRDLC when using this mod, but even then you will use all of the rest of the optimized textures from the vanilla BSAs.

As you surmised, it happened because to load order you are using isn't the same order as the one in the master plugin list in the SkyRE-US Patch. When building a patch, the order doesn't always come out the same as the load order. Usually the patch creator resorts this list before releasing the patch but this doesn't always happen. Typically I wouldn't worry about this. It can be fixed in TES5Edit by resorting the master plugins for the esp file, but I don't usually like to make changes to someone else's plugin.

The guide has been updated with pointers to the download file containing the batch files used with the DDSopt guide. The DDSopt.ini has also been edited.

z, you make several excellent points. I'll put an archive with all the batch files on Dropbox (they are really tiny), and I'll add the url to the guide.I'll leave the text version but add a comment not to use a document text editor.I'll add the interface directory to ddsopt.ini I'll also add a comment about making sure that the Working directory is not in a Program Files or Program Files (x86) directory. It's mentioned early in the guide, but not in the batch files. I'll add a comment about using alternate directory names. I wanted the names to be consistent with the directory names used in the guide to avoid any confusion, and I expected that those who wanted to use these would be familiar enough with how to change them with an editor. There were a lot of comments from brand new STEP users that I interpreted to imply that we may have included too many choices in previous versions of the guide. The version I uploaded yesterday had two additions For almost every copy operation it checks to see whether the related vanilla BSA folder in "Vanilla Extracted" is present. This allows the batch to be used incrementally. For example, if a new DLC is added the batch file can be run, and then DDSopt on each of the intermediate folders. The output folder in "Vanilla Optimized" can then be archived and added it to the game. This can now be done with any of vanilla BSAs.It now adds large (2Kx2K) tangent space normal maps from the STD and DLC to the "Vanilla Normal Maps" folder so they can be reduced in size when run through DDSopt. The rest of the DLC and STD compressed normal maps are handled like ordinary textures. There aren't very many, but there are more of these than I would have guessed.If you want to use the version with these features make sure to get the one I put in the guide late yesterday (there were some bugs in the previous versions I uploaded yesterday), or wait an hour or so when I'll have the Dropbox url in the guide. hellanios, you should try the version from Dropbox once I get it setup.