Kelmych

English Strings for Skyrim now has strings for Dawnguard and Hearthfire as well as the vanilla Skyrim, and has been updated for Skyrim 1.8.151. As mentioned previously in this thread, the mod has many text changes that improve consistency and lore friendliness of the dialog. It also includes a version of "Translate_ENGLISH.txt" intended for British English vs. the default translation for American English. This file is installed in the data\interface folder. When installed it will override the default American English translation and all text in Skyrim will use British English versions. If you want to keep the default translation (American English) make sure you remove the "Translate_ENGLISH.txt" file from the mod BEFORE installing it. While it is possible to revert back to the default translation after installing this file, it is not easy. Managers like Wrye Bash and Mod Manager cannot revert the translation back to default when uninstalling.

In previous TES games it was usually possible to find alchemical ingredients from many parts of Tamriel in addition to the region for that particular game. I was surprised that the vanilla Skyrim game didn't have ingredients that didn't grow in Skyrim itself since traders would certainly bring them to Skyrim.  Ingredients of Tamriel provides 227 ingredients found in previous TES games. It has been available on Nexus for a long time and has been mentioned in some STEP forum posts. It isn't being maintained but I haven't had any problems with it; I did clean it with TES5Edit to remove some ITMs. The ingredients are found in stores and in loot, but are not especially common.

I agree that we're using the USKP fix. There are some differences, but on the whole the using the USKP fix seems better.

I processed the uncompressed LOD using DDSopt v080 update 1 from Nexus, and looked the LOD texture with several texture viewers (Irfanview, Paint.net, Windows Texture Viewer, and the preview mode in DDSopt; I haven't been successful installing Compressonator on my system). It looks different in each viewer, and I can't decide which one I should post here. There seem to be two layers, the tree LODs from the original LOD texture and "in front" of that is another partly transparent texture. The partially transparent layer is the part that looks different in each view. I then repeated the optimization using DDSopt v080 pre5b, the version prior to the update 1 posted on Nexus. The LOD texture looks fine; there is no partially transparent layer "in front" of the texture.

I looked in more detail at the inn sign texture I was using (from Bumpy Inn and Shop Signs) and found that it had been optimized using DDSopt 0.8 pre5b, the version before the new update (DDSopt 0.8 update 1) on Nexus. When I run the texture file through the newest release from Nexus the texture also turns black for me when viewed in DDSopt preview mode and ingame. The normal map is fine, but the texture isn't.

I looked at the vanilla texture sleeping giant sign and the one produced by DDSopt (edit: as it turns out, using DDSopt v080 pre5b, prior to the most recent version on nexus). I don't see much difference using a texture viewer such as the preview mode in DDSopt. If I look at it with IrfanView, however, it looks black as Irfanview isn't a true DDS viewer. Ingame the sign doesn't seem that dark to me. I looked at night with some mage light and in the morning (7am) and it didn't seem very dark. It is a little darker that some other signs, but it isn't hard to read at least in my game the way it is setup.

Most of my textures have been run through DDSopt including the sign textures. I'll look at some of the sign textures ingame and see what they look like. I've been looking a the new AOF HD Tree LODs that are being considered for STEP. I got the 2K compressed LOD and the uncompressed LOD. When I ran DDSopt using the default parameters on the DXT5-compressed 2K LOD. DDSopt fixed the mipmaps but didn't change the texture itself. I also ran it on the uncompressed 4K texture to see if DDSopt might produce a better texture than the 2K one provided in the mod. The resulting texture looks very different than both the original uncompressed and the 2K compressed LOD (which are quite similar). If useful I can post screenshots, but since it is only one texture it might be easier for you to simply recreate it.

My biggest issue with Nuska in the screenshots is the lighting; it didn't seem realistic to me to have some parts of the face be so reflective. It isn't just that that they are too bright overall for light-skinned races - that could be due to the lighting environment rather than the face mod - but that the facial smoothness it would take to have the highlights I'm seeing doesn't seem realistic (at least for me). If this is actually an issue with the normal maps then I'd be interested to see what these faces would look like with more appropriate normal maps.

Like techangel, I prefer the third shot (All in one face UNP) for these faces.

Better Quest Objectives hasn't been updated since March 2012, so unlike The Choice is Yours there are many USKP-added quest data and script changes, and a few script changes added by Dawnguard, that have not not been accounted for with BQO. In a few of these quests USKP made changes to the quest stages. When I looked using TES5Edit at the conflicts between USKP & Dawnguard with BQO, there are 60 quests whose quest data will need to be updated in BQO using TES5Edit. For each quest there isn't typically much data that needs to be changed. The NNAM Quest Objective Display Text that BQO changed needs to be preserved, of course and the display text might need a little expansion for the new quest stages that USKP added to make it consistent with the rest of the BQO changes. The BQO mod author said that there are a few quests in which script changes were made to allow creating better objective display text for radiant quests; if these scripts are also ones that USKP changed then the BQO author will need to add the BQO changes into the USKP scripts. I also don't know which quests have these BQO script changes.

In TES5Edit it looks like the DSI esp adds 11 additional impacts to get different effects when magic is used on snow (vs. vanilla which doesn't have these differences), adds some impact decals, and changes some of the parameters on the impacts from vanilla skyrim.esm

fortunately it's easy to add those tags after it has been initially posted

I can't say that the Riften textures of any of the large mods was very impressive to me. I'm not wild about the vanilla wood-related textures, but none of the others are uniformly much improvement and sometimes are noticeably worse. I looked at Texture Pack Combiner and saw that Cestral chose SRO for almost all the architectural textures in Riften, Riften HQ for the almost all of the wood and rope textures, and Langleys Wood Metal and Stone Textures Workshop for the small set of roof and stone textures in Riften. In a future version of STEP when it will be more straightforward to mix textures from multiple packages we might get a reasonably good set of textures for Riften. Since we can only choose one now, Serious HD seems reasonable to me since both Riften HQ and Skyrim HD have at least a few textures that seem strikingly bad and I didn't see much in Serious HD that seemed that bad.

Thanks for the clarifications

A while ago I grabbed the text for the DDSopt guide and started to edit and expand it based on the posts on STEP and some of the forum posts referenced by Ethatron in the Nexus description. Partway through this process I found that I had some questions whose answers I wanted to include, but I didn't have enough information. I wanted to provide draft guide updates that reduced confusion vs. increasing it. If it would be useful I could continue the editing, if I had suggestions on the following: 1. There has been a lot of discussion on using DDSopt on textures beyond the vanilla Skyrim and HDDLC textures that obviously benefit from DDSopt processing. There are a few mod authors, e.g., Millenia and Cabal, whose textures are already recognized as being of sufficiently high quality that they shouldn't be run through DDSopt. There are some other mod authors who feel that their texture compression is already sufficiently optimized (there was an initial list in a STEP post recently). My approach for the latter group is to recommend running their textures through DDSopt and see if there are errors (as there were for many of the mods in the list) and if they are clean assume the mod doesn't need DDSopt. 2. Ethatron mentioned in this thread that body textures are not used in the same way as other textures, so these textures should not be run through DDSopt to improve the compression. It didn't sound like DDSopt recognizes these automatically, so I assume text needs to be added to DDSopt.ini so they are skipped (SKP). Does the texture file name need to include the path (e.g., actors\character\female\femalebody_1.dds) or is it sufficient to have only the texture name? Or should we just ignore the whole issue of special handling for body textures? 3. In the forum discussions referenced by Ethatron there was a lot of discussion on how to handle compression (if any) for normal maps. There are places in the DDSopt.ini file where text can be added to specify how to handle specific normal map textures, and the .ini file says that tangent and model space normal maps are handled differently in DDSopt than other texture files. Does DDSopt already recognize that a texture file whose name ends in _n.dds or _msn.dds are normal maps, in which case the .ini file entries are needed only for exceptions to the standard processing of normal maps? When I look at the DDSopt logs there are comments when it recognizes an alpha channel in a texture file, but there are no comments that indicate that DDSopt automatically recognizes textures as being normal maps.

The description for the Dark Brotherhood mod says it is now part of The Choice is Yours - Fewer Forced Quests - Improved Dialogue Options .

I think the selections of textures from the mods that Cestral just added, since he has already compared these with other possible choices, will help the STEP community as we move toward 2.3.

The authors of Relighting Skyrim and Overhauling light source for ENB and vanilla are merging their apps. They released Relighting Skyrim - Dawnguard Edition ,which only includes new areas added by Dawnguard, as the first mod from their collaboration. Future releases of Relighting Skyrim will include the efforts of both authors. They didn't say what is likely to change in the future with Relighting Skyrim now that they are working together.

The current version of STEP includes three mods by shademe.

There are some mods (e.g., English Strings for Skyrim , a mod I use to replace files in the \Strings folder ) which replace the interface\translate_ENGLISH.txt file and/or the strings in the \Strings folder. You'll want a backup of these files if you want to unload these mods at a later date.

I've tried this both ways, one time with a single file in Wrye Bash for both the combined High Res DLC and another time I kept them separate. It seemed to work fine whichever way I did it. My only concern is your step 8, deleting the BSA and esp for the high res DLC. Whenever you use the vanilla Skyrim launcher (vs., for example, the SKSE launcher) it will reinstall these unless you are also using Skyrim Unplugged and it is set to disable updates. I don't think it is possible to unsubscribe the high res DLC itself once you subscribe to it (at least I don't know how to do so), so Skyrim Unplugged is needed.

I find it difficult at times to decide what is lore friendly and what isn't since some of the previous TES games, notably Oblivion, sometimes went beyond what would be available in the medieval timeframe. Nonetheless, as several posters have mentioned, this mod seems to have technology well past that included in previous TES games.

I've been using it also for a while and I like it. Note that it includes frostbite spider foot sounds as does Quieter spider footsteps, but doesn't include the small spider footstep sounds that are in Quieter spider footsteps.

Basically the answer is yes. Skyrim Installation Swapper, for example, copies the various directories that have key information for each "profile" so it can save and restore a particular setup. You can look at what it saves and make sure you save that information (or perhaps use it to save this information). The key data you might have lost for Wrye Bash is in the Bash Mod Data folder, primarily table.dat. You will also need the load order and some related data (the folder that BOSS and other programs use), which is typically in YourUserName/AppData/Local/Skyrim on the system drive (with YourUserName being your Windows login name). I'm assuming you also save the Skyrim folder that is in Steam/steamapps/common and the saves, ini files, etc. in YourUserName/My Documents/My Games/Skyrim. If you happen to have a recent backup that has the Skyrim Mods folder (which includes the Bash Mod Data folder as well as the Bash Installers folder where the actual mods are stored) you may be able to recover the mod order in Wrye Bash. Of course, starting from scratch is also an opportunity to use the procedures discussed in the STEP Wiki to make sure you have a clean installation. If you are using a texture compression mod like DDSopt, it is an opportunity to use the most recent guidance and processing parameters discussed in the STEP forums; there have been some notable changes recently in this guidance.