Kelmych

Thanks for the comment, we appreciate it .

Great. I'm glad it worked out well for you. Once STEP determines how to accommodate small user mods like this it might be possible to have a host where it can be provided to other users.

You could make a manual patch to take care of all the 3 objects that have changed audio values. This should be a fairly straightforward patch with FO3Edit.

Try leaving the Blackened after the bashed patch. No matter what you do, without a large manual patch, nothing will be perfect. You will lose part, but not all, of the Impact mod effects.

Unfortunately Impact is a cool mod but has compatibility problems. A manual patch is needed since the ones on the Impact page fix some problems but break some things. You can try moving Impact lower in the load order, leaving it out, or building a manual patch for the weapons of interest to you

I've merged the Etac patches into s single merged file previously. I haven't done it for the most recent patches yet, it I don't anticipate any problems. When I do this I'll also check the bash tags to make sure they seem correct.

I'm not sure. I think MMM, if you are using it, affects the raider bodies. You might want to check using FO3Edit to see what mods affect that body. I'll look when I am at my computer.

Death items should be included in the bashed patch. The NMC patch should be added to the guide; I guess I forgot to do this.

The bashed patch doesn't solve all problems, and manual patches are likely needed with some weapons.

The Laser Rifle EVE version, Laser Pistol EVE version, Plasma Rifle EVE version, and Gauss Rifle EVE version mods include glow maps (*_g.dds) and metallic reflection modifiers (*_m.dds) that overwrite textures from EVE. The WEP mod does not include any of these replacements for EVE textures. I've left these 4 mods in the Fallout 3 guide for these EVE replacer textures.

Did you use LOOT to sort the plugins. Did you use the "userlist.yaml" referenced in the "Run LOOT" section of the guide. The main problem I see is that 2 Blackened plugins should be closer to the end of the load order than the WeaponModKits plugins. You can investigate the problem yourself by using FO3Edit. After it has started look at these weapons and see which mods make the last changes to these weapons and whether they have the Don't show 1st person animation flag; if this flag is present Ironsights won't work.

The configuration setup values for DDSopt are in several places in the guide. Here is the place I use for this. There was a comment a little while ago that the gamma value might be 1 step too high, but there hasn't been any testing of this yet. For the Constraints tab settings it depends on what you are optimizing. If the textures are already DirectX compressed then either the "constraints" screenshot figure or the "DXTx Constraints tab settings" can be used; the resolution limit values would of course be changed to the desired values. For rectangular (vs. square) textures the standard settings handle up to a 2x1 difference in the size of the two axes. If you want to reduce textures with a 4x difference in the two axes use the percentage reduction settings. For uncompressed settings the format settings depends on the type of textures (e.g., body textures, face textures, architectural textures, landscape textures). The R5G5B5 or A4R4G4B4 setting (e.g., see the "Alternate Constraints tab settings" figure) often works well even with body textures; this provides a 50% size reduction vs. the 75% reduction when the size of both axes is reduced by 2. Facial textures are always tricky whether they are compressed or uncompressed; you have to try them after compression. The settings (other than the resolution limit which needs to change) from the "Constraints" figure generally work well with a mixed set of compressed or uncompressed textures, and typically work well even with compressed textures. DDSopt will generally flatten Monocolor textures to 1x1. This rarely causes problems in the game but many graphics editors including the Creation Kit don't like flattened textures.

You should also try some of the profiles you created with smaller numbers of mods (such as the profile with just the vanilla files, core fixes, and initial UI mods) to see if there still problems.

If body textures are optimized we usually look at the result in the game. Occasionally there are problems. Face textures are more problematic. Textures with abrupt changes cause problems. Other than that you have to optimize and then look at some sampling of the resulting textures.

It will have some effect on performance, but makes the grass better

I added AI problems to the Troubleshooting section of the guide. I didn't add the details for the more complex problems, but feel free to add these if you think it would be useful.

I revised and simplified the instructions for the compatibility patches for 20th century weapons. Several users found the previous version confusing.

There aren't any mods in the guides that currently have the bas tag for this, but for future use it can be checked.

The batch files for optimizing vanilla Fallout textures exclude facial textures because of potential problems when optimizing these.

The textures provided by UUOF3P have the same resolution as the vanilla ones they replace. The texture replacers in the guide provide higher resolution versions of these textures, and we expect that they don't have the problems that were present in the vanilla textures. If there was a known issue with ones in the higher resolution replacers we would have mentioned it. Go ahead and use the guide recommendations for the textures you list for which the UUOF3P textures are replaced by other mods in the guide.

The difference among the packs is the resolution of the textures. The maximum has a lot more 2kx2k textures, for example, than the performance pack. I remember seeing a comparison of the texture resolution in the packs once, but I don't remember where.

What do you mean by optimized? I wouldn't expect that any of the NMC textures need to be processed with DDSopt.

A new mod was posted to the Fallout 3 Nexus, FalloutLauncher Replacer for Steam, which at least for me allows hooking Mod Organizer and Steam while running Fallout 3. I've included it in the Fallout 3 guide on STEP (see my signature block).

The small guide on merging mods I wrote a while ago has short versions of some of the material needed for this new guide as well as pointers to some relevant information.