Kelmych

For Skyrim with a 2GB graphics card i was typically reducing all exterior textures to 1K. With a 4GB card I have been reducing only the exterior normal map textures to 1K. I've had fewer problems with FNV. I used Ojo Nueno textures without much problem with a 2GB card. Textures like NMC, Ojo Bueno, and Paco Bueno are likely to be sufficiently optimized as SRB mentioned. The batch files allow using different resolution versions of a mod for exterior textures and the rest of the textures to reduce the need for unnecessary optimization and size reduction with DDSopt.

This has been in the SR:LE mod list for a long time. so it hasn't been completely ignored.

I also view the articles for mods, but I don't think a lot of Nexus users read many of the articles.

Mod Organizer never installs anything directly in the Data folder; it has a much better approach that avoids many of the problems that happen when mods are directly put in to the data folder.

A lot of updates have already been done on the pages for each individual mod that may answer some of your questions, but as mentioned above it may be easier to wait a day or two since 2.2.9 should be out very shortly.

1) Make sure you use the latest version of LOOT 2) You can come back later and optimize textures if you want to. It provides some VRAM and GPU use reduction, some texture quality improvements, and in some cases a small amount of additional stability. 3) the bashed patch is used to automatically take care of conflict resolution for some of the records in the plugin. The installation instructions for WB are in the MO guide, and in the forums you will see the Mod Organizer support pages which should have more on this. 4) We should add this to the Skyrim Installation guide. Parts of this may already be described in the some of the guides. I'll look. 5) The 2.2.9 guide that will be released shortly has a little better description of cleaning mods, and there are additional instructions being developed to make this better. Meanwhile the same instructions can be look at the Dawnguard page on the wiki. It has cleaning instructions for Dawnguard.esm, and the same instructions apply to any plugin (.esm or .esp) being cleaned. Yes it is important to clean plugins that BOSS or LOOT (whichever you use) say need cleaning. 6)It depends on whether you just want the memory management capability (ENBoost) or a full ENB. The regular ENBs already include the ENBoost capability.

I've always felt that magic use was never designed properly in any of the TES games, so for me having something that's only a little better and more balanced than vanilla isn't enough. You can see some of my ideas here that I've been assembling as I plan to introduce a Magic-related Pack for Skyrim (although it needs some updating). I haven't looked yet at TheThirdRaceOverhaul ; I'll look and and see how it seems. It primarily bothers me that archers and magic users need to also be fairly good at melee fighting to survive. I'm not saying they shouldn't need to be somewhat versatile, but I want any magic overhauls I use to better address survivability. As an example, In the old gold box D&D games, when you (or an enemy) got hit by a spell (or arrow) they certainly became very alert and they might know roughly the direction (but not range) where it came from but unlike Skyrim they didn't know exactly where the spell came from. I always though of magic as being in the category of "action at a distance". Gandalf's magic isn't accompanied by a ray of light and loud sounds sufficient to wake the dead.

The vendors that accept stolen goods typically have them.

Version 2.75 of the DDSopt guide batch files have been added to the guide. This is a small change; most of the changes were in the readme files and in the remarks in the batch files to provide better documentation. The only notable change is that the archive batch file for vanilla textures now works the same as the batch file used with mod files; it adds "_opt" to the end of each folder name and moves the archived files to "Vanilla Optimized Archive". In addition to being useful, it helps prevent filenames for the optimized textures from addon DLC be the same as the filename for the associated BSA. These changes doesn't affect any optimizations done using the batch files; there is no need to redo any existing optimizations. Some small text additions were made to the recommendations of which quality settings to use based on the capabilities of the graphics card.

The small optional fix for USKP is needed only if you previously used the Skyrim Misc Patches Collection, which is not part of USKP itself. This is discussed in the description section of the Unofficial Skyrim Patch page on the Nexus.

In the STEP thread on this mod MannyGT said it isn't since the bookstore in Solitude is in the same place as some of Nernies buildings that REGS includes. Hopefully CJ can resolve this (by moving or removing some of the Nernies buildings or by moving the Book Store (since Nernies buildings were there first.))

I remember compatibility problems between New Vegas Redesigned 2 and some of the other large FNV mods; hopefully there aren't as many with NVR 3.

Looks like a great addition. Oblivion had book stores in all the main cities, and they were part of various quests in the game. Hopefully adding this doesn't require changes in the REGS pack patches. Now if we can just get some woodworker's shops, since there is a lot of wood furniture and buildings in Skyrim, Skyrim might have a reasonably complete set of shops.

On this page of the guide there are recommendations in the sidebox titled "Selecting the DDSopt Constraints tab Parameters for Vanilla textures" . The recommendation is for the Standard Quality settings for 1 Gb cards with a comment that with the new memory management utilities many users with such cards find they can use the High quality settings. I'd suggest using the High quality settings and then test to see how much VRAM is being used. The vanilla textures don't include many textures that yield high VRAM usage. The exterior textures in the Conflicting Graphics portion of the STEP guide have a much greater effect on VRAM use.

Is the error message a single line or did you leave some text out? If there is an unrecognizable character in Skyrim.ini or SkyrimPrefs.ini this will cause Wrye Bash to crash; you might check this. Are you using Wrye Bash through MO or standalone?

Did you create BSAs from the optimized textures, and for the DLC did you create a BSA from the optimized textures plus other resources or just the optimized textures. If you created new BSAs how did you do this? The general recommendation is not to create new BSAs from the optimized textures (vs. using loose files in a folder or archive file) , although it can be done if you are careful, and not to create optimized DLC BSAs with the non-texture resources plus optimized textures (this can also be done, but you have to be especially careful how it is done).

Don't use a folder name for the optimized textures that has the exact same name as that of the BSA from which they were extracted. Instead use a name that is at least a little different. If the batch files are used this is already true except for the 3 addon DLCs, and if the textures are archived using the associated batch file the new version will also add "_opt" to all the archive file names.

The DDSopt guide was updated with a comment on this.

Unlike using Terrain Bump with a lot of other textures, it made the icicles look strange.

At one point I thought there were some mods for Nightingale Prime that STEP hadn't used.

The Thief version in the AMD options is the recent version of Thief that, as CJ mentions, isn't getting nearly as good reviews as the original versions.

I got similar choices when I got a new AMD card a few months ago. Murdered: Soul Suspect seemed pretty good based on forums and reviews, and since it's a recent game it isn't available at a low cost anywhere. Several of the choices on the list are available at fairly low prices at Steam or GOG on a regular basis so I eliminated those. I took Company of Heroes 2 since the reviews were very positive, and it is also fairly recent and expensive if you buy it.

For Skyrim textures optimization there will be a new version of the batch files very soon. It's mostly small updates to the documentation in the files. For vanilla textures the compression batch file will now add "_opt" to the end of each file name, as is already done with the optimized mod files, and the archived files will be stored in "Vanilla Optimized Archives". There still need to be a lot of additions to the table of mods; this is being worked on but there have been other priorities. There are now beta batch files for processing the Fallout New Vegas vanilla textures and mods. These are currently in the Fear and Loathing in New Vegas feedback thread, but they will soon be in the DDSopt guide soon along with a new associated Quickstart guide tab for Fallout New Vegas texture optimization. The main difference is that FNV has a lot of textures used in interfaces (e.g., in the Pipboy3000) and these are 2D textures for which there is no value in texture optimization. These are excluded from optimization by the FNV version of the batch files. These FNV batch files are being tested by users, so if you are interested please try them and report on any problems you see. The potential problems would be: there were errors in the command window when running the batch files, there were errors in the log file other than the ones that can be ignored, the textures were not sorted into the proper folders, or there were problems in game with one or more of the optimized textures (e.g., purple or black textures, artifacts introduced by the optimization).The initial testing on the current batch files for FNV did not show any of the (1) - (3) errors. There is no automated BSA file creation for the optimized textures with FNV or Skyrim since we're not aware of programs that can be used in command line mode (since this is the way batch files work) capable of properly adding to or extracting files from BSAs. For both Skyrim and FNV the mod batch files can currently be used to add exterior textures from one version of a mod (typically lower resolution) and another version for the rest of the files. If there is any interest another option could be added where only the exterior normal maps are taken from the lower resolution version of the mod.

The good news is that with Nexus being so slow today, most MO users never had a chance to get 1.2.7 so they won't need to download the updates twice