Kelmych

I used Dimon99's body replacer in Fallout 3 and Fallout NV, so it already has a lot of history and development. In the mods for both Fallout versions these were finalized fairly early, which allowed a lot of clothing/armor development to be developed that used it.

In addition to some general slowness, lately I frequently get errors when using the file tab that no file has been uploaded or the author hid the file. I also get the error for recent files that the file hasn't propagated across the Nexus network yet; this is a little better today.

Sorry, I must have made an error when I searched for it.

I agree, I prefer the grimy version of this to the human skeletons in Better Bones.

83Willows - 1 EYE OPEN - creepy Nightmother and Coffins is a potential replacement for Sweet Mother - the Night Mother Improvement in the current STEP list. It has multiple options for the coffin and nightmother including ones that that are gorier and more intense than the vanilla or Sweet Mother ones. I personally like the creepy and stitches nightmother versions, but others might like different ones. The coffin and nightmother textures are high resolution.

I also consider it essential. It hadn't been updated to work with Skyrim 1.6 until fairly recently, but was updated to 1.7 shortly after it was released :).

Discussion thread: Fuz Ro D-oh by shadeMe Wiki Link Based on an Oblivion mod by Elys, Fuz Ro D-oh - Silent Voice provides a short silent voice segment for use with mods that have unvoiced dialog. It has been updated for Skyrim 1.7.7.0 .

The author posted an update (Nitpick 40) for Skyrim 1.7.7.0

Discussion thread: Tobe's Hi-Res Textures by Tobe Wiki Link Tobes Highres Textures, one of the mods in STEP, recently posted an update with some additional textures that replace some of the SMIM-specific furniture textures. I looked at Tobes new textures and the replaced textures from SMIM to see which seemed more realistic. To me, the difference is in the type of wood used in the texture. SMIM assumes a relatively coarse grained, soft wood like aspen. Tobes assumes a finer grained, harder wood. There are almost no hardwood trees specifically included in Skyrim, but it is likely that in a Skyrim-like geography there would be some. Furniture in homes in Oblivion cities used fairly high quality wood. Personally I think that the new Tobes textures are more realistic for better homes while the SMIM ones might be more realistic for much simpler homes outside the major cities. The Tobes textures certainly look nicer.

2K Road Snow Footprints is another very small texture mod; this one just replaces the texture with stones and snow used in the vanilla snowy road with High res footprints in snow. It's from the author of Real Effect Candle (in STEP mods). It bothers me that even through there is a lot of snow in Skyrim, particularly at higher elevations and in north Skyrim, rocks manage to poke through the snow everywhere. This texture seems at least a little more realistic. I suppose I could further argue that walking around in deep snow with ordinary boots vs. snowshoes doesn't seem very sensible or realistic, but perhaps Bethesda considered that to be too complicated.

Diverse Enhanced Rocks description says it does not provide 2048x2048 resolution or higher resolution texture files; it only provides 1024x1024 and perhaps lower. The author says he is working on creating his own higher resolution texture files.

Skyrim performance and crash prevention mod does periodic buffer cell clearing. It is based on a mod used in Fallout New Vegas. I haven't tried it yet but I will be looking at it.

Thanks. That's what I thought. It means I'll need to do 2 passes with DDSopt, one using the parameters that were posted earlier that remove the lowest mip level on all textures and a second pass with just the non-1:1 textures with DDSopt configured to keep the lowest mip level. The I'll copy the results of the second pass over the results of the first. At this point I don't know how to identify the non-1:1 textures other than manually (i.e., I don't think I can configure DDSopt to do it automatically).

The bonus clutter pack seems to have some items that aren't included in the big high res texture packs.

Does that mean I don't have to worry about not having the lowest mip level for textures with non-1:1 dimensions? I wan't positive about the conclusion of the discussion in May about this.

Someday TESVGecko will be available; for Oblivion the only way I got down to the esp/esm limit was by using TES4Gecko to combine mods (much easier than using the Construction Set). With Skyrim there are already a lot of interesting armor and weapon mods, and some quest mods that are more interesting than many of the "radiant" Fedex quests.

I didn't list all the potentially useful mods since I wasn't sure whether to list in my post, for example, the mods that change meshes or provide small fixes since there aren't a lot of these in the current STEP. I found a number of mods that I was already using, and in some cases that I am now trying, that are not in STEP and have not been discussed in the Mod Suggestions posts. I'm also leery of listing mods that provide only small benefit (e.g., race description info) or are similar to a number of other mods or don't seem to be the mainstay of STEP (e.g., weapon and armor mods mentioned in the list) whenever they add yet another esp or esm file. In the Bethesda games (Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout NV) I have always run up against the limit of the number of mods that can be added and I've had to eliminate a number of useful mods.

Skyrim Improvement Guide - Best Mods and Tweaks is another guide that provides suggested mods and configuration parameters for Skyrim. It is inspired by STEP and includes a lot of mods that are in the current STEP guide. An updated version was released a few days ago.  It does have some mods that are not in STEP that might interest this group. Among these are some small texture mods that add high resolution versions of a few textures. These are higher resolution than those in vanilla, the Bethesda HiRes DLC,  or the STEP B1 mods: Target re-texture (archery targets) Chopper AXE - HD 2048x1024  Pick Axe HD 2048x2048  Better Shadowmarks Â

I ran a test case with the "Don't eliminate lower mip levels" parameter checked and a texture with dimension 2048:4096. All 13 mip levels were saved by DDSopt and there was no apparent difference between the input and output texture file. If the "Don't eliminate lower mip levels" parameter is unchecked one mip level is eliminated.

1. That's what I thought would happen in DDSopt, but I wanted to make sure. Optimizer Textures, however, says it resizes such textures. Does it use another algorithm to extend the texture vs. stretching it? 2. The newest version of DDSopt has a configuration parameter "Don't eliminate lower mip levels". I thought Ethatron added this to support DDSopt processing of non 1:1 textures, or was it for some other purpose? I was wondering whether the right way to process texture files was to use the configuration that z929669 posted for all of the 1:1 textures and then do a separate run for non 1:1 textures with the new mip level parameter checked (leaving the border related parameter unchecked)? In the run that z929669 published June 8 on a DDSopt run with Skyrim textures (vanilla log file) there are a number of non 1:1 textures, and with the configuration parameters used in the run 1 mip level was removed from these textures. This surprised me; based on the previous discussion I thought these textures would be skipped or processed separately with DDSopt preserving the lowest mip levels. Perhaps it was the highest mip level that was removed and the lowest level was actually retained. I'm certainly not an expert on windows texture files so that's why I asked. 3. I was primarily commenting on handling files that had already run through DDSopt, but if multiple DDSopt runs are needed to handle png files and perhaps non 1:1 textures then some automation of the DDSopt runs might also be useful.

I have a few questions on using DDSopt (v80pre3) using the most recent DDSopt processing parameters from this thread based on some of the discussion in this and other threads: 1. With textures whose dimensions are not a power of 2 (e.g.,  Soul Gems Differ in the STEP package) should I use DDSopt or not, and if so would I process it differently? 2. With  textures that have 2:1 dimensions (or any non 1:1) there was a discussion in this thread in May about some issues when the lowest mipmap was removed by DDSopt. Do such textures need to be processed the same, use different processing parameters, or should they not be processed by DDSopt? 3. When you create the new STEP I expect there will be BAIN converters or some other mechanism for at least some files to allow getting the right textures, etc. for STEP. If I use DDSopt on each mod the way z929669 suggests (which I like at least when STEP doesn't want every texture in the mod) then I'll likely have a problem since the file sizes in the recompressed mod file won't be the same as for the original version and any BAIN converters won't work. Have you thought how you accommodate the use of DDSopt prior to adding a mod to Skyrim in the automation you are considering for simplifying installation of the next version of STEP (vs. running DDSopt on the Texture folder after the mods are already added to take care of any textures that were not already processed)?

Version 1.2 of Texture Pack Combiner has been released. This version add textures and meshes from Project Parallax - Markarth ,   Project Parallax - Solitude , Project Parallax - Whiterun , and Project Parallax - Windhelm . All of these require ENB. The Texture Pack Combiner description page includes a list of textures and meshes from Project Parallax that are not included because the Texture Pack Combiner author felt these had too much distortion. Even by itself that is very useful information for those planning to use Project Parallax textures and meshes.

Real landscape coloring seems more complex, so you could almost say that a number of the choices are correct about at least part of what is visible.. I'm looking at the sunset as I read this, and indeed near the horizon it is pinkish. At higher elevations it becomes more blue and gray and, at least right now, the clouds are quite gray (they are likely to be storm clouds). What is difficult for me is coming up with a consensus choice among the ENB choices since even the ones I feel are most realistic have some striking flaws in one or more of the pictures. To me Akimbo has too much strong (vs. muted) red, although I agree reds will be the dominant color when the light source is at a low temperature. I don't feel the pictures that show a lot of intense yellow in the fire pits are very realistic; they seem more like what I would expect from an incandescent light vs. what you see from a bed of hot coals.

MadeOfGlass Project - Soulgems and Clutter includes a set of meshes with transparency. I use Soul_Gems_Differ (in STEP list), Radiant_and_Unique_Potions_and_Poisons, and Unique Booze Bottles HD so many of the meshes aren't useful for me. However, I like the remaining ones especially the mesh for the Frost atronach (which is why is added it to my mod list). Even if you don't find any of the other meshes useful I feel this mesh is worth using.

To date STEP has used fairly coarse-grained selection criteria for the large texture mods, particularly those in STEP B1. The batch file approach allows more fine grained selection, such as Texture Pack Combiner does with textures from Serious HD Retexture Skyrim. If the fine-grained selection approach isn't really needed then the batch file is overkill, but if fine-grained selection is useful then batch files are one of the ways to do this. I don't think there is lot of textures overlap in the three mods recently added in version 1.1 of Texture Pack Combiner, and there isn't any overlap I don't see a significant need for a batch file to select textures for those mods particularly as updates for each mod are likely to occur at different times. One advantage of the batch file for the first three mods in Texture Pack Combiner, at least for me, is that it is then quite easy to process the combined folder with DDSopt to create an optimized set of textures across all three of the large texture replacement mods.