Kelmych

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DDSopt can be run to reduce texture sizes, but for most mods the primary use is to change the formats or fix small errors of a few textures when appropriate and to improve graphic quality by replacing all the mipmaps with better quality versions. It also changes the normal map textures to versions that provide higher quality when decompressed.

When I took over maintenance of the guide I wanted to see what the user community felt before making any significant changes. There hasn't been much comment thus far, especially about any mods that should be removed. A small number of mods that seemed appropriate for the pack were already added, and a Google Docs spreadsheet of the ideas that have been mentioned over the past few years was provided to get user comments. I don't expect there will be any major changes. Of the large location mods Legendary Cities - Tes Arena - Skyrim Frontier Fortress is being evolved, and as the modular locations change to version 3 most of the updated locations seem like good candidates to be added; CJ was previously looking into these. Beyond Skyrim: Bruma looks like a good candidate; the biggest patch I'm working on is one for BSB and CACO v2 since I expect CACO will be added to STEP once it is out of beta. A few other mods on the spreadsheet might get added. Any of these should be able to be added mid game (vs. only at the beginning of the game). The most significant changes were those already made to make the pack reasonably compatible with ICAIO. I hope at some point to get permission to host some of the modified files like an ETaC plugin that includes only the locations in REGS; this would make it a lot easier for users.

Yes, I meant Skyrim Performance Monitor. It also works with Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas.

There a number of good quest mods that can be used in addition to the mods to the pack. The SRLE Extended LOTD guide has a few including (of course) LOTD. Lately I have been looking at adding Beyond Slyrim: Bruma, and creating some patches so it will work well with STEP Extended.

Optimizing the vanilla textures generally has only a small effect on game performance unless you are doing it to reduce the size of the textures. With your system texture size reduction should not be needed. Moreover, the optimization tool isn't especially easy to use. The FNV game engine itself can have some lag no matter how good a CPU and GPU are used; it was built a long time ago and was not designed for 4K monitors or a lot of 4K textures. Have you used Performance Monitor or GPU-Z to look at your VRAM usage; with 4K (and sometimes with a lot of 2K textures with FNV) textures you might be using more VRAM than the game engine can handle? You might try seeing whether the High (vs. Ultra) settings make a difference; in some of the Bethesda games the Ultra settings might some small performance issues. Did you use BethINI to set the Fallout INI configurations, by the way?

I have a few floating lanterns also; if I ever get any good at using the Creation Kit I'll try to fix this.

When the REGS merges were being tested I noticed that the Merge Plugins tool combined the SEQ files from the individual mods and created a composite SEQ file for the merged plugin. Merge Plugins didn't remove the individual SEQ files from the mods being merged, so the REGS guide suggested removing them if copied to the merged folder since they won't be used. It doesn't hurt to leave them in the merged folder, of course.

I use most but not all of LOTD so I'm not sure how much of REGS can be added to a full LOTD build without adding too much VRAM or script loading. If there are questions about adding particular mods in the REGS guide I can try to help. The REGS guide mentions some of the main potential issues that I am aware of, but without some reports from users who are trying this it is hard to provide additional specific guidance. I had some FPS problems with my game with the previous graphics card being used, but with the newer graphics card installed recently there haven't been many such problems. i don't think this is primarily due to the REGS mods; the LOTD mods being used certainly had a large effect on the FPS rate.

This page on the LOOT site explains how load order is determined in Bethesda TES and Fallout games. Until Skyrim the Bethesda game engines used the plugin file date, and the older TES and Fallout games still use date to determine load order. Wrye Bash/Flash can be used to manually change the plugin file date for TES and Fallout files as needed. Mod Managers typically take care of load order for the game engine, but not for the Creation Kit. The CK was never updated to use the "plugins.txt" file and still uses plugin file date.

Thanks for putting together an organized summary that made it easy to understand the results and, of course, for the previous and ongoing efforts on zEdit.

Getting to Megaton after leaving Vault 101 seems to be one of the most resource usage intensive parts of the game. After that you shouldn't find the area close to Megaton causing many resource use problems. I haven't seen many VRAM use problems in FO3 on systems with at least 2 Gb of VRAM.

The first time you leave Vault 101 cell the game needs to load a lot of resources for the next cell, so there might not be enough availble memory. The "Core Fixes and Base UI" profile needs a lot less resources since it only includes a few of the mods. As you are installing it's always a good idea to make several profiles after the "Core Fixes and Base UI" and the completed installation so you can check for problems like this. I assume you installed the Anti-crash, Stutter remover and ENBoost which help with this. Post your system specs to help diagnose the issue. By the way, all of the TWPC patches and the CPD Ingestibles patch should be after the bashed patch in the load order.

The changes in CACO v2 require starting a new game.

If there are conflicts among the masters it will likely matter, but it might not matter otherwise.

There are several ways to do this when using MO. One way is to use a single folder for a mod and use the "Hide" function to temporarily hide or unhide selected folders or even individual resources in a folder. Another way is to use several different folders for a mod each with a separate and potentially different version of a mod. Profiles don't help you very much directly for this since all profiles use the same set of mod folders; profiles allow you to select which mods to use but each mod folder is the same across all profiles. You might even want to use combination of the two methods. If you use the CK you will want at least two copies of the mod, the original unedited version and one or more edited versions in different mod folders for your testing.

The REGS pack (see my signature) also mentions that the farmhouse chimneys - CRF patch currently seems to be missing in the STEP Extended patch. The REGS-STEP patch in this archive also contains a few patch records for compatibility between STEP Extended mods. I find your comments on additional patch records useful. There are also a few patches for compatibility between STEP Extended mods in this conflict resolution guide that are not in the STEP Extended patch; some of them are also in the STEP-REGS patch.

In some cases, perhaps many, you will have to choose which mods navmesh records (in cells) you want to use. Whichever plugin is closer to the bottom (higher plugin number) wins when merging. In most cases it probably doesn't matter a lot. Using the procedure above is very tedious and should not be needed very often, and certainly not for the mods in the REGS pack. The navmesh records don't need to be perfect; I've been able to ignore small navmesh conflicts wtih several mods I've used.

If there is an actual navmesh conflict (vs. NAVI) then it's harder to fix. This article by Arthmoor discusses how to fix it using TES5Edit, but it isn't easy to read or do it. I haven't done this myself yet; I've tried to avoid needing to do this.

Usually only location mods and quest mods have NAVI records, and even compatibility mods for these usually don't usually have NAVI records. The guide covers merging only the patches. Merging mods themself is more likely to have two or more plugins with NAVI records. The creation kit step after plugin merging is only needed if two or more of the plugins included a NAVI record. That is the criteria.