Kelmych

I'm starting a new game shortly and I have it my mod load.

I added it to DDSopt.ini in the DDSopt guide.

I really like the idea of getting some small rewards for achievements. While many of the rewards in Achieve That seem reasonable, a few seem a bit too generous.

I ran the 2Kx2K textures rock*.dds and *rock01.dds textures in Skyrim HD, Serious HD, and SRO through DDSopt. Whenever there was a large "smooth" area, be it smooth rock or or tundra, among the otherwise jagged rocks DDSopt didn't get the smoother area into the optimized primary channel image - it was black. The worst was SRO textures\landscape\rocksedgetrim01.dds, with Serious HD textures\landscape\rocksedgetrim01.dds and textures\landscape\tundrarocks01.dds a close second. Serious HD textures\landscape\rocks01.dds also had problems. All the others were OK. The alpha channels on all textures I processed were fine.

Please feel free to update it or anything else where it is obvious ;)I edited the guide and put an additional reference to the updated DDSopt.ini in the first page where the nexus download is mentioned. I also expanded the description in the appendix covering it. I also expanded the DDSopt Preview mode description mentioning that it separates the textures into channels and because of this will give a different view of them than what is seen in Compressonator and IrfanView.

A new version of this mod is now available. It has been cleaned up so no errors will show up in TES5Edit, and many small errors have been removed. A new patrol has been added, factions, which adds Witchhunters and Dragon Cultists. Thalmor have been added to the Civil War patrols.

Discussion thread: Lantern Caretakers by MannyGT Wiki Link The Lantern Caretakers mod adds 5 NPCs who are caretakers for the lanterns in the STEP mod Lanterns in Skyrim - All in One. It was built to improve immersion. If you pass by one of 5 selected places in Skyrim (one for each NPC) between 7-11 pm you will see the NPC lighting the lantern. I'll provide a more detailed review when I've used it.

Yes, both of them are signs. The Riverwood Trader sign doesn't seem to be processed correctly as has been mentioned before. I haven't had a problem with the blacksmith sign, which is fairly dark to begin with, but I'll check it.

I've started using it recently when I installed the new Sky Realism ENB and ENB 139. I'm finding it very helpful in letting me compare alternate configurations (ENB mods, parameter sets). I feel it is worth adding to the Utilities discussed in the STEP ENB Wiki pages.

Realistic Lighting Overhaul is the new lighting mod that replaces Realistic Lighting with Customization. It is usable now but not complete. It currently provides interior lighting, some lighting for spells, and a preliminary version of lighting for weather. Updates to provide exterior lighting will be available shortly. This mods goal is to provide all the lighting fixes needed including flickering and elimination of shadow striping, and to do so without the use of post processing such as ENB. It would eliminate the need for mods such as Relighting Skyrim, Volrath's various lighting fixes, and Enhanced lights and FX. It is intended to be compatible with any Weather mod such as Climates of Tamriel. It includes the Particle Patch by Mindflux. Now that this replacement of RLwC is finally available, more extensive comparisons among lighting mods and lighting fixes, and combinations of these, can be accomplished. A lot of detail is available in the description page; this is just a summary of some key features.

I'm not sure why Wrye Bash writes this error (I think someone on the forum explained it a while ago), but typically it has properly written the output file and you can ignore the error. Just check the output file and see if it is OK.

Skyrim Performance Monitor Testing Hall was created by jet4571 to provide a fairly short, highly varied, repeatable testing enviroment for Skyrim. It was primarily build for testing Skyrim Performance Monitor, but it could also be very useful in testing STEP mod baselines and the effects of mod changes and additions. It has a beginning and an end, and you go through 7 different environments during the test each with different groups of enemies. It is intended to create stress on the system. I haven't tried it yet but I plan to do so shortly.

Here is a list of files in /textures/effect/gradient that I'm fairly convinced are not properly processed by DDSopt

The only thing I would qualify is that, for Wrye Bash users, when packing up into the archive, use non-solid compression. This may slightly decrease the compression ratio, but the benefit is huge when you are (un)installing upstream packages, re-unpacking from the huge vanilla archive ... extraction goes much faster.If this isn't in the WB guide, it needs to be. I'll re-archive mods even with no changes for this very reason.Steps 1-4 are in the revised (as of today) DDSopt guide. We are still discussing how to handle the incorrect textures mentioned in step 5; z and Ethatron prefer to handle this via the ddsopt.ini file. Does STEP want to recommend specific compression to use for Skyrim files as in step 6? If so some users might appreciate it especially if we provide some rationale and perhaps a few quantitative comparisons with representative Skyrim data. Should step 7 be in WB guide or the installation guide? By the way, now that a number of corrections have been made (and are ongoing) to the DDSOpt guide, there are a couple of inconsistencies in the Skyrim Installation guide in the part that mentions the HR DLC.

What I've been doing is to run Wrye Bash first using the BCF to convert it before I do anything more with the mod. I often optimize the textures using DDSopt (whenever it makes enough difference that it is worthwhile) which also changes the checksums, so I use the BCF converted version of the mod to do this and then rearchive the mod using 7z before installing the mod in Wrye Bash.

Ethatron basically said that this is a tradeoff for correcting certain other issues with Pre5b. We will need to note these custom textures (that incidentally don't obey the unsaid "rules" I think), and list them in the INI. Ethatron said it is all about looking at the alpha channel.There seem to be enough of these problems in the gradients directory that an alternate approach would be to suggest overwriting the contents of the effects/gradients directory in the DDSopt output with either the equivalent files from the gradients directory in the vanilla textures (similar to what is done for the .png files in the books directory as described in the DDSopt guide) or, for more adventuresome users, equivalent files from just the gradients directory in an optimization using pre5b (the latter is the approach I'm using). I don't want to lose the many DDSopt improvements that are present in DDSopt prelease update 3 (vs. v080pre5b), and this seems like a useful way to do so at least for now especially since there are code tradeoffs involved.

I did some further investigation on the problem with all of the black textures on the various gradient textures that have been mentioned recently. I went through the DDSopt output for the overall textures/effects/gradients directory and found that a large percentage of the textures seem to have a corrupted primary layer when processed using the DDSopt prerelease from Nexus (I tried both updates 2 and 3); the alpha layer seems to be fine. I also ran the same textures through DDSopt v080pre5b. I did not see any problems with the textures when optimized using this version of DDSopt. I suspect there might be a small code bug in the newer version causing this.

When I started writing it we wanted to see it before deciding where to put it, and z provided a pointer in an existing page in the DDSopt guide to be able to access it. Now that it is reasonably complete I agree it should be a new tab on the DDSopt guide. I'll do so as I help z with improving the guide.

This information could be and would be best placed on the DDSopt Guide as a tab. Of course, disregard if you're planning on doing that after getting it more updated.It is a part of the DDSopt guide accessible on the DDS Optimization tab. I mentioned it here because z and I were not sure that others knew this had been added to the DDSopt guide.

I didn't look at all the *diss.dss ones yet. I was looking at the steam ones that Neo and others mentioned seeing with breath turning black vs. white.

The initial version of the updated Mod Optimization portion of the DDSopt guide is now available. The purpose is to allow users to decide which STEP mods to process with DDSopt. This version has, for each STEP mod that contains textures: - indicators on whether DDSopt provided noticeable improvements in the textures - the maximum resolution of the textures in the mod. More details are in the introductory portion.

I looked at the primary and alpha channel views in DDSopt for the set of 11 textures: textures/effects/gradients/gradsteamthin*.dds and textures/effects/gradients/gradsteamthick*.dds . It looks like they all have the same problem as with gradsmokediss.dds. The alpha channels look the same before and after DDSopt processing but the primary channel is corrupted. I assume this set of 11 textures should be added to the same INI change, but we'll need to check and see if this works properly of course.

I didn't suggest an INI change for the horn candle since it might affect DDSopt processing of the (better) Tobes version of this candle which DDSopt handles properly. I thought that the Riverwood Trader sign was mentioned before.

Using the preview viewer in DDSopt, the alpha channel looks the same in the vanilla and optimized texture but the primary channel doesn't. The DDSopt logs for that texture has a note that says "Automatic greyscale conversion.".