Kelmych

I moved the STEP mod texture table into the body of the DDSopt guide so it is easier to read the notes while viewing the table. I put the table and notes in a new tab. I also took some of recent messages on this thread and used them to edit the Introduction and Background section of STEP Mod Optimization.

I'll add appropriate Notes annotation to these three; sorry I missed them. If you need to resize them to 1kx1K go ahead, but first read the rest of this reply. DDSopt isn't always able to resize some of the non-square textures. I've noticed this particularly with some of the landscape textures. When it can't it does note this in the log it creates. When this happens there is nothing you can do; it isn't a problem with how you setup the run. Across a large set of mods the total number of textures that can't be optimized is quite small, so it is probably not something to worry about. The hardest question to answer is which textures to select when reducing texture sizes to improve performance. We don't have a table that describes the performance gains and graphic quality loss when reducing the size of textures. I expect that reducing the size of the textures that affect large portions of the screen, such as architecture and landscape textures, provide the most performance gain with reduced size. However, most of the architecture, landscape, dungeon, and interior textures textures in STEP that affect large portions of the screen (vs. clutter textures, for example) are typically high quality textures that have already been optimized by the mod developer. Reducing the size of these can sometimes cause noticeable graphic quality loss. I'm not sure what the performance and quality effects are for reducing texture sizes on weapons, armor, clothing, and textures used for LOD, effects, sky, etc. Perhaps other such as z or Ethatron or some of the mod authors like Cabal and Vurt can comment on this. We have found with recent experimentation that reducing the size of just the normal maps (files ending in *_.dds) provides significant performance improvements without a lot of graphic quality loss. I would suggest trying this first to see if you can get enough performance improvement, especially with mods that have very high quality textures like Book of Silence and Elven Weapons for Silence. Of course, as mentioned above, we don't have any quantitative data on how much performance gain results from reducing armor and weapons textures.

They are just before the STEP Mod Texture Properties Table on the main page . Very soon I'll move the table, which is currently on another page, onto the same page as the mods and then you will be able to use the notes more easily.

I think Skyrim Coin Replacer is using the UDRs since it is the only way the mod author could find to change some inherent behavior of Skyrim. You might want to check before we assume otherwise. I also looked at the mod in TES5Edit and it looked like the changes that cause UDR reports might be intentional in order to change the coins from Septims to what this mod uses, but I'm not positive.

The description page mentions version 1.4 of RaceMenu which has fixes for the weapon disappearing and, it looks like, the problems with Apachii Hair and switching between male and female races that Neovalen mentioned as well as other improvements and fixes. It says the updated version is written but awaits SKSE 1.6.7 .I seen that but there's no news on when that will be released on the SKSE website.Yes, that's why I mentioned that the fix to RaceMenu depends upon the new SKSE which has not been officially announced yet (as opposed to an independent RaceMenu fix that might be released very soon). I haven't seen anything on forums that suggests when the new SKSE will be released.

I was hoping there was a much simpler way, so perhaps some kind but capable person will build Refscope for Skyrim. It probably wouldn't be nearly as hard as it was to update TES4Edit to TES5Edit since you probably don't need to know the entire data structure. Even if you did the TES5Edit/TESdump team already did determine the data structures. Even then you still have to go to nifscope. By the way, can nifscope tell you without a lot of detective work how the alpha channel of the texture is being used?

I've been trying to avoid learning Nifscope, hoping that there was a simpler tool that could tell me just the texture names. I chose an example that was a Skyrim.esm owned object. It is similar but a little harder for objects that mods create.

As I reported in another post today, BOSS is having problems. One symptom of the problems is that it doesn't get the correct masterlist.txt and thinks all the mod files including skyrim.esm are bad. The solution to the problem is in my post.

On your third question I give you a little bit of information, but not how to do all you want to do. Hopefully someone with a lot more experience with meshes can provide more and/or better answers. If you click on an item in the game using console mode an 8 digit hex number is shown. I clicked on a snow covered rock near Helgen and the number was 0008f51a. That number is called the ref id. It is the identifier for that particular rock. Now you need to get the form id (also called base id). This is the identifier of the base object that was used to make the object I clicked. To get this you open TES5Edit, select only the Bethesda esm files, and wait until it finishes. I entered "0008f51a" in the filter.and hit return. In the right window it said RockM01Snow [sTAT:0002695A]. "0002695A" is the form id. Now you can go into the creation kit, select data, double click skyrim.esm and make it active. enter the form id in the filter window and click *All at the bottom of the windows on the left. In the right part of the window you will see RockM01Snow and under Model it says (unsurprisingly) this uses the mesh \landscape\rocks\rockM01.nif. This is a nif in Skyrim - Meshes.bsa. I'm not sure how to now get the right texture(s) that the mesh uses other than looking in the texture folder for textures with similar names. There are tools for working with meshes but I don't know how to use them. As you can see, it is not a simple process (to the best of my knowledge).

Do we need to make any changes to DDSopt.ini, or is it alright for a while?

The link to the full masterlist still works for me. I clicked the URL and then saved the page from the browser as masterlist.txt . I also tried copying the text into Notepad++ and then saving it but that doesn't work.

The description page mentions version 1.4 of RaceMenu which has fixes for the weapon disappearing and, it looks like, the problems with Apachii Hair and switching between male and female races that Neovalen mentioned as well as other improvements and fixes. It says the updated version is written but awaits SKSE 1.6.7 .

The network that hosts the BOSS masterlist has been having problems lately. The masterlist updates the local BOSS program receives take a long time to download and aren't always correct, and BOSS then doesn't correctly sort mods (if it completes at all). If you want to use BOSS, this page on the Bethesda forum says you can directly access the full masterlist, and then "Replace the BOSS/Skyrim/masterlist.txt with the one you just downloaded. Then make the following change in BOSS.ini: bUpdateMasterlist = false This will force BOSS to use the masterlist.txt that you just downloaded manually instead of trying to retrieve it itself. You can later undo this change to allow BOSS to automatically update itself, but this is a fix for now."

My approach, which I will continue with TPC 1.9, is to use TPC to help select textures across multiple mods in a few specific texture subset areas (e.g., portions of the architecture tree). Then I follow the interesting discussions on STEP about some of the details, after which I can then change some of the texture selections when the community comes to some conclusions (or when there isn't consensus I can pick the reasonable conclusion from my viewpoint).

Congratulations on the new job. We certainly appreciate all the work you've spent on DDSopt and BSAopt, and hopefully you'll have some time to work on them again after you finish creating a good initial impression. The new Skyrim Texture Viewer does a reasonable job of supporting quickly moving between textures. If we could get the author to add views of primary and alpha channels it would be even more useful.

Cestral has updated Texture Pack Combiner to version 1.9. It includes some interesting changes, some of which he has already discussed on the STEP forums. In case you haven't read all of his recent comments here are a few of the changes; full details are on the TPC Nexus description page: replacement of Soul Gems Differ with HD Soul Gems (fewer gem color choices but better texture quality and no esp file)replacement of Insanity's Spider Webs with Hectrol Spider Webs (no esp file needed)addition of textures from Hectrol Caves Deluxe and The Beauty of Skyrim - Caves and Mines

There seems to be some consistency in some of these problems. The rocks that didn't get transformed properly also had an area that was much smoother and a different color than the rest of the rock; the primary channel for those textures turned black in the smooth area when processed in DDSopt. I haven't updated the DDSop.ini since Ethatron released DDSopt pre-release 4 today. I was waiting if there was an answer to z about the best way to hande the problematic rock textures (and now the plaster decals texture you noticed). If I don't hear I'll add them to DDSopt.ini .

I saw them but I've been using fixed maximum sizes for each dimension (e.g., 1024x1024) when I wanted to reduce normal map resolution. If there happened to be a small normal map in a set of textures I wan't sure I wanted to reduce the size of the existing one as it wouldn't save very much processing and might cause problems with the graphic quality.

It would be helpful if you would post these issues on the DDSopt and Texture Overhauls thread in Guides. Ethatron follows this thread and will often check out the problems and might respond directly to the issue. He always looks at the issue and tries to have it solved in the next release, or he will explain if he can't fix it why this can't be done (e.g., poorly created texture with some specific problems that he can't fix). Ethatron released a new update to DDSopt today and has been responding to questions and issues in the thread on the problem textures we have been discussing for the past few weeks. He has previously mentioned problems with body-related textures, but I don't remember him discussing problems with the model space normal maps for these.

I was a regular user of TES4Gecko for Oblivion which created merged patches. It looks like it will be a while before TES5Gecko adds this capability; there hasn't been a lot of activity on the associated Dark Creations forum for TES5Gecko. In the meantime the only tool for merging patches is TES5Edit, and alivedlife provided some pointers to guidance on how to do this.

Skyrim DDS Image Viewer provides a list of textures in a folder with the sizes of the image, and has a preview pane that show the texture. It can also show full images. The main advantage I see for this tool as compared to tools like DDSopt Preview mode and Compressonator is that it allows quick scanning through a folder of textures.

Is this with pre-release update 3 or with pre-release update 4 that was posted today by Ethatron?

Thanks for updating the .ini and the executable . Did you also address the processing for the Riverwood Trader sign we were discussing a while ago? I edited the DDSopt guide with information about the new DDSopt pre-release update 4 and associated ini file.

I added it to DDSopt.ini in the DDSopt guide.Great, thank you ... I could also use some help isolating exactly which of the effects textures are borked by DDSopt defaults. Right now the whole directory is in there, but it really shouldn't be, as only about a third of the textures should be. I have begun looking at the primary and alpha channels of source/destination starting alphabetically in the effects root. If someone wants to begin looking at efects\gradients, that would be awesome ...The file I posted earlier on the effects\gradients problem had a list of all the files I was sure were borked; it was over 80% of the textures in that folder. I used DDSopt Preview mode to view the primary and alpha channels of all textures in that folder. There were 30+ files where I wasn't sure there was a problem. You might want to look at the ones I didn't include just to make sure. There were a few I didn't report because the primary texture was very dark and if there were any problems it was hard to tell. There were also a number of textures that seemed perfectly fine after DDSopt processing.

Open the ESP in TES5EDIT and go to the "File Header" entry. If in the "HEDR - Header" record the reported version is 1.7000, then its in 1.8 patch format. If its something else, load the ESP in the Creation Kit and save.I checked the mods I have, and a large percentage of the STEP mods and a number of the non-STEP mods in Skyrim Revisited have version numbers of 0.94 . I also noticed that the patches created by TES5Edit (e.g., AS-GDO.esp) show version 0.94. By the way, a while ago I checked my Creation Kit and found it was an old version even through I had recently used Steam to verify the integrity of the local game files. I had to open the Tools menu in Steam and run "verify integrity of tool cache" to get Steam to update the Creation Kit.