Kelmych

Moderator Edit: Just getting the whole conversation together. kryptopyr asked a question about economy mods. I've used the ACE speech mod and Economics of Skyrim. I like almost all of what Economics of Skyrim does and recommend it, especially with the concept of region specialization. It doesn't seem to change basic prices a lot and seems to be compatible a number of other economy mods (but not all). I have one small nit that I feel the Workstation rental addition concept isn't realistic (I think there are other ways to do this, admittedly there are more complex) and the cost is very high (easy to change with TES5Edit, of course). ACE speech, much like Skyrim itself, covers economics along with follower relations and is reasonable. I play a mage character, and with the cost of spell books going from moderately expensive to really expensive the mods that try to redo Skyrim economics by just increasing costs and reducing what you receive for items are non-starters for me.

This thread actually belongs in Skyrim-related as it's a bit off topic for a support thread. I'll add a post in the Skyrim-related thread on economy mods.

This is discussed in more detail in the DDSopt and Texture Overhaul guide . The author of that mod seems to have already done adequate texture optimization. I don't run DDSopt on mods that don't seem to need further optimization. The guide also discusses reduced resolution normal maps for performance improvement; if you need additional performance improvement this is one of the mods for which reduced resolution normal maps can be useful. Answers about whether or not to run DDSopt or not on particular mods is typically not simple since it depends on your system and other mods that are used. The guide tries to provide some guidance on this, but most of us need still to experiment to get the right mix.

You also need to have the addon DLC BSA names in an additional list in SkyrimEditor.ini . Here is what I have in my version of the additional line(s) [Archive] SResourceArchiveList=Skyrim - Meshes.bsa, Skyrim - Animations.bsa, Skyrim - Voices.bsa, Skyrim - Interface.bsa, Skyrim - Misc.bsa, Skyrim - Sounds.bsa, Skyrim - VoicesExtra.bsa SResourceArchiveList2=Skyrim - Shaders.bsa, Update.bsa, Dawnguard.bsa, Hearthfires.bsa, Dragonborn.bsa

The file paths are created by commands inside the batch file, you don't need to create them manually. At the end of the processing the virtual drive assignments are removed by the batch file. There might be a problem, I suppose, with administrative privilege but I didn't have a problem with this on my system so I'm not sure how it might affect the batch file running.

I'm using the Sneak portion of Stealth Skills Rebalanced and I recommend it. It adds a lot more to stealth than the mods that just change NPCs light, sound, or distance sensitivity without changing the game as significantly as Path of Shadows does. I play a character that is primarily a mage and I also use Spell Sneak Attacks which I load after Stealth Skills Rebalanced. I built a patch that allows these two to work together. I don't use the Stealth Skills Rebalanced ACE patch since I prefer improving stamina regeneration to adding carrying capacity. I'd like to see a way to add the Camouflaged perk to the Sneak portion of Stealth Rebalanced without using the full version that changes three skills; I also use Lock Overhaul which is being considered as an addition to STEP. I'd be interested what you come up with as an Alchemy mod.

I am able to load Dawnguard.esm with the Creation Kit (of course, there are always popup error windows when starting up the creation kit to which I reply "yes to all" and ignore). In case you haven't done this, using the creation kit with addon DLCs requires adding the associated BSAs in SkyrimEditor.ini. Here is the line I have in mine; note that Skyrim - textures.bsa isn't included since I have this as loose files and I happen to have all three addon DLCs. [Archive] SArchiveList=Skyrim - Meshes.bsa, Skyrim - Animations.bsa, Skyrim - Voices.bsa, Skyrim - Interface.bsa, Skyrim - Misc.bsa, Skyrim - Sounds.bsa, Skyrim - VoicesExtra.bsa, Skyrim - Shaders.bsa, Update.bsa, Dawnguard.bsa, Hearthfires.bsa, Dragonborn.bsa

Open a command window and type " dir r: " with the enter key instead of . This is to check whether the drive r: is already assigned. If it says "The system cannot find the path specified" then the drive is not currently assigned.

You should have 3 HRDLC folders plus two batch files in the Working Folder. The drive substitution happens in the HRDLC_Removal_Fix-START.bat batch file. This batch file needs to run as an administrator, as do a lot of other tasks in the STEP guides. You can change the paths for drive substitution to whatever letters your system will support; it is hard to know which drive letters your system already uses. What did it say in the command window when you ran the batch file?

When Ethatron looked at this issue with DDSopt 0.8.8 release 3 he made changes in DDSopt itself (DDSopt 0.8.8 release 4) and removed the sky textures from the DDSopt.ini. We haven't checked all the previous issues, such as the sky issue, yet to see whether they were solved by his changes in DDSopt release 4.

I have only seen these redundancies in the vanilla BSAs.

The mod page says this issue was reported to the USKP. I notice that USKP has meshes that conflict with this patch. Are the ones from this patch better, or should we just use the USKP ones?

For BSAs like the addon DLC BSAs the DDSopt guide says to use DDSopt to "optimize" the entire BSA. DDSopt will optimize the textures using the DDSopt algorithms. Since it uses the same code as in BSAopt for handling BSAs, it will also fix redundancies in BSAs for all resource types (and the vanilla BSAs ofen have a lot of extra copies of resources) and, if the files are reassembled into a BSA as the guide recommends for the DLC BSAs, optimize the compression used for the BSA.

Put BCFs in the Bash Installers/Converters folder, and then the WB menu for the associated file that you want to convert will no longer be grayed out.

To me some of the other sounds that the mod can eliminate are also ones that reduce immersion. In particular the level up noise, nordic screaming, and quest objective noises are ones I would prefer to be silent.

I edited the SIG HRDLC page and added a succinct set of options based on VRAM. I wanted to add another sidebox with "advanced options", but first I need to add material on use of reduced size normal maps in the DDSopt guide that these would specifically reference (this is discussed in the guide but I need to add specific examples)

I've been looking for something that makes traps more challenging; this and Deadly traps look like a good combination. I made a BCF to combine the two optional RLO files with the basic mod file. You need all three files to create the resulting output BAIN file which allows selecting whichever combination of tripwire and pressure plate you want. There is an NMM file for the mod but it doesn't include the RLO files.

Loose files load more quickly, but for a mod with a small number of resources the difference is negligible. SkyUI comes with a BSA. I don't think it is worth the extra effort to unpack it; none of the scripts will ever be overwritten.

I created a BCF for this to move the sound files into folders for each of the sound categories on the mod description page. Now all you have to do is to check which categories of sounds you want to eliminate.

MTichenor, the author of the SkyRealism mods, has written an excellent short tutorial with screenshots on using TES5Edit to merge multiple mods including mods with Form IDs. Now that TES5Edit supports VMAD records (Papyrus scripts), most of the mods that make sense to merge can be merged. The procedures in this tutorial allow merging of many of the less complex mods that would be useful to merge when you need to to reduce the number of esps to add a new mod or two. We might want to ask if we could include this tutorial in one of the STEP guides. Note that there can be some complexities if you are merging mods with complex large data structures as discussed a bit in the official forum here. This should probably be split to a different thread, but I think should add a section in one of the guides to list useful videos. Many users (but not all) absorb information better when it is in a video. There are many excellent videos about using the tools created by the Skyrim mod community. The one referenced by alividlife is one such video as is the well-known Gopher video on cleaning mods with TES5Edit. The videos by Sharlikran listed here are also very useful.

The note you quoted above was only about the vanilla texture BSAs. The esp files with the 3 HRDLC files are there only to load the associated BSA. When you convert these 3 BSAs to loose files you can safely eliminate the esp files. This is not true for addon DLCs; those esps have a lot of information in the esp. With most mods there is important data in the esp file, if the mod has one. A few mods have esp files only for loading of an associated BSA file. You can't tell whether an esp file actually has important data without looking at it in TES5Edit. If it is removable the esp has only a file header and no other records. You should extract the data from the Unofficial High Resolution Patch BSA and then eliminate the associated esp. For the other USKP mods you can extract the BSA into loose files if you want (it doesn't change loading times by much), but if you do the esps are still needed. We recommend extracting the BSAs into loose files for the mods in the STEP list; this helps make sure that the overwrites of textures, meshes, etc. happens correctly. Typically you still keep the esp files. For the 3 addon DLCs we recommend that if you optimize the textures with DDSopt that you then repack the loose files from each BSA back into BSA format. It isn't critical to do this, but there isn't any real advantage of having the non-texture resources in loose files and these BSAs are mostly non-textures.