Kelmych

Sounds of Skyrim has a lot of conflicts with other mods including lighting mods, as well as some other problems. You can find discussion of it in some older threads on this site.

The map in "Better High Detail Map and Icons " is bigger than the space on the pipboy map screen. You can move the map around the pipboy screen with the mouse (hold left mouse key down and move map around). There are other maps with less detail and simpler icons, and these maps fits inside the normal pipboy map space. If you prefer I can provide another map mod which does this.

This mod has been in the Real Explorers Guide to Skyrim pack for a long time, and users of that pack (including me) have found the mod useful. There haven't been many reported problems with it in the REGS thread.

This STEP guide on merging plugins has a concise overview of the capabilities of different tools. It might be helpful for you. The Merged patch and the bashed patch are completely different and provide very different functionality. Merged patches are primarily used when you are combining records from plugins that don't have conflicts, or have conflicts that can be easily handled. Wrye Bash/Flash has logic to decide which records from which plugin to use when there are conflicts between one or more plugins. It doesn't handle all conflicts but it handles some of them. Bash tags are used to help in this process by indicating which record types in a particular plugin are more important.

The versions of the mods in the STEP compilation do not include any optimization. I'll check the mods in the list to see if any have been updated since the list was created.

The link to the batch files is at the top of the quick start guide. The font size for this link was changed when the guide was reformatted. As Tech points out, the guide mentions several alternatives with existing optimized vanilla textures. Most of the mods in the STEP Skyrim guide are adequately optimized. If desired, DDSopt and the batch tools can be used to,optimize mods that benefit from optimization.

The Big Town Overhaul mod has been changed to optional because of the issues it creates.

The guide was revised to mention the later installation of the Omnipatch, and the version of the FO3 Pack was updated (which also changes the link).

Step 4 is why Mod Organizer is used. Instead of actually installing the files during installation it uses a virtual file system and provides the files at runtime. There is no actual overwriting, it just selects the correct file. If you change the order of mods and that changes which files should be loaded Mod Organizer handles it easily since it didn't put the files into the Data folder itself earlier. There are a few guides and threads on merging plugins. Read the posts on Merging Plugins Standalone; Mator has written a tool to simplify plugin merging. There is also a small overview guide in the Advanced guides on the STEP wiki, and it provides some references to other material. Mator's tools, however, are the main ones used for plugin merging.

The problem is maintenance. If you never have to remove a mod or replace a mod with an updated version the the capabilities of the mod manager aren't necessarily very important. Take a look at the changelog for the FO3 guide referenced in my signature (the changelog reference is very near the beginning of the guide), and note how often at least some of the mods get updated. You will find with editing plugins (files ending in .esp and .esm), as an example, that you will want to try different versions of the plugins you edited, and mod managers are helpful in making this easier

After you run DDSopt you will have several folders of textures. You then use an archiver to create one archive file for each folder. This is done because it's usually easier to work with a few archive files than a large number of individual texture files. If you are using FOMM or Wrye Bash (other mod manager programs) you would then use one of them to install the textures into the game; the individual texture files will be copied from the archive file(s) by the mod manager and put in a folder within "Fallout 3 GOTY\Data\textures". The mod manager should also be able to perform an "undo" when needed; otherwise if you needed to remove a mod you would manually locate each file and delete it manually. FOMM will do what you want for right now, but if you start adding mods it will become tedious to use as the number of mods grow, especially since mods change and you may want to install an updated version of a mod. Mod Organizer does this in a much cleaner and more flexible way.

Having a different file count might indicate there was a problem when you extracted the files from the various Fallout BSAs. If you still have the folder with the extracted textures you could determine how many files were extracted from each folder. I've been using WinDirStat to do this. I would not suggest creating a new BSA with the optimized textures replacing the original ones. It's a lot safer to leave the original BSAs alone and create new archive files with the optimized textures as discussed in the guide. The optimized textures will replace the original ones in the game itself since textures that are not in BSAs (called loose textures) have precedence over equivalent ones in BSAs. Replacing the vanilla Fallout BSAs themself can potentially cause problems. You might want to read more about Mod Organizer and what it provides. If you are not using a mod manager and loading more than a handful of mods you will find that maintenance is very time consuming and error prone. Mod Organizer allows creating multiple sets of installed mods (called profiles) that allow quickly debugging problems when you use mods, as well as providing other useful capabilities.

For those who might have missed it, as part of the 1.11 update the CACO plugin now includes the plugin records for Wiseman303's Flora Fixes. The resources from the Flora Fixes mod are still needed, so install the mod but disable its plugin when using CACO.

I like the movie theme also, and also I agree that the name choice should be based on how the game feels.

It's here in STEP Current Release Development under Tamriel Townships.

I'd certainly like to have us create a Fallout 4 guide. Like the Fallout 3 and Fallout NV guides I feel it should include some of the same kinds of mods as are included in these guides. The format used for many of the guides on the STEP site other than the main Skyrim guide seems to be flexible enough to handle the mods that are useful as a base set of mods for the Fallout games. I'd prefer it were a group activity vs. a single guide author both because creating/maintaining a guide is a lot of work and also to get some diversity of opinion on what to include and how to evaluate the mods.

You will get a lot better answer if you post your question in the STEP 2.2.9.2 thread. I expect this has already been asked there, by the way.

I think it might be related to the STEP web software. Whenever I use my phone to access STEP the response is always asking (annoyingly) whether I want to download Tapa talk (I don't), and it's recognizing the device as a smartphone. When I look at the Google response to the query mentioned above, in the resulting search page the first entry with the STEP page starts with "Mobile Friendly". Perhaps the web software is adding some unwanted text (in addition to the unwanted request to use Tapa talk) that causes problems with the browser on the phone.

The Nexus page for the Mage Outfit Texture Overhaul mod credits Rafuel for the original retexture, and based on this I installed the Dragonborn Mages Robes Retexture a while ago. I like the retextures, and I don't see any other mods in STEP that replace the same textures.

It's safer to use the mod as is and only merge the patches; I rarely merge a mod and its patches. The mod and its patches often have conflicts.

Other than the base UI mods you can usually disable mods at least temporarily.

I also installed it a while ago and I haven't played Skyrim a lot lately except for testing but I do like these Giants. I don't see other high resolution retextures of the Giant on Nexus, by the way.

I agree with SRB that they are better than vanilla, and that it is hard to tell the differences excpet fairly close up. This seems to me to be closer to vanilla than the retexture by Rengel that was evaluated previously.

I also prefer these Draugrs. When discussing the skeleton mod SRB mentioned that grey isn't a typical color for bones, and I like that this one uses more realistic colors plus has the armor.

I think this is how FO3Edit works now. I'll check when I'm at my computer