Kelmych

I like AMB with SRO floors. The stones in medieval buildings with stone floors tend to be larger than ones Cabal used. Personally I have problems with the stone floors having random sized stone vs. rectangular; to me places important enough to have stone floors would likely have rectangular floor stones but maybe I'm the only one that feels this way. I agree with SRB about the retaining walls. The irregularities on the AMB wall stones don't look right to me.

English has adopted words from many languages and as a result often has multiple words for the same thing, often each with a slightly different meaning. I think you mean the metal stands that are holding fires, and they are called braziers.

When I looked that seems to be the case.

Based on the log files it seems to use a CRC check.

Thanks. It helps explain why BSAopt/DDSopt has had problems for the past 2 years or so when packing BSAs (compression needs to be set manually in BSAopt/DDSopt), why Archive.exe is sometimes so fast when archiving, and perhaps what the resource type checkboxes in Archive.exe are used for.

Some of the posts from earlier this year in the Nexsus forum for this mod discuss removing the Ragged Flagon change. I wonder if we should contact the author and mention the interest in including this in STEP, but that we have a concern since this change is not optional and STEP tries to not change vanilla content unless it is an actual fix. By the way, did the changes mentioned in the description for version 1.7 reduce the problem with the entrance change?

In the Explorers Guide page it mentions that More Immersive Dawnguard Entrance mod should load below the Oblivion Gates mod in STEP. By below I assume this means below in the Mod Organizer GUI, so it would have a larger mod index and load after Oblivion Gates, right? Otherwise Fort Dawnguard and Daysprings Canyon aren't moved.

A lot of the vanilla replacement textures in STEP are in mods with loose resources, and plugin order (vs. MO priority) doesn't have a large effect on which texture "wins". I'm not saying it doesn't affect any textures, but that this isn't where the effect is greatest. LOOT (vs. BOSS) potentially has a bigger effect on resources like sounds and some models (meshes) that are often assigned to an object in plugins. SRB has been working to make sure that the STEP patches will work properly with LOOT when STEP moves to recommending LOOT in the STEP guide. I recently began testing using LOOT to order plugins, and looking with TES5Edit at possible impacts. I haven't seen very many, in part because I previously had a lot of BOSS Userlist rules that manually did what some of the automated analyses in LOOT do. LOOT is certainly not perfect or complete; for example I use the World Map Min_Max Height Pitch Tweak mod which changes a few Worldspace records, and many mods often copy the default values for these records from Skyrim.esm. LOOT doesn't seem to notice this and puts it much lower in the plugin order than it needs to be.

I've used it for a long time and found it useful since my character sneaks a lot. In dungeons and other dangerous places characters that are primarily magic users don't live long if they openly advertise their presence.

One user reported a problem with DDSopt/BSAopt BSAs even with low compression values. These were not with textures, however.

Changing the compression level makes the file smaller and for most compression algorithms typically increases the processor cycles needed to decompress the file. Higher compression typically requires a lot more processing to create the compressed file.

Archive.exe seems a lot quicker to me also. I haven't compared the resulting file sizes, but I expect that DDSopt will produce smaller files.

Using BSAopt/DDSopt to repack the vanilla BSAs worked for early versions of Skyrim, but after version 1.6.89 there have been reports of problems when doing this. Bethesda might have made some changes to the BSA structure, or perhaps began using some features of the BSA file structure they had not been using previously. The file structure is proprietary and isn't published. Ethatron hasn't been actively working on BSAopt/DDSopt for a while so he hasn't investigated this issue. Lately we started recommending the use of Archive.exe to pack/repack BSAs. It is a standalone program with a GUI that is installed in the Skyrim directory when the Creation Kit is installed. I still use BSAopt/DDSopt to unpack BSAs since I haven't had any problems with this.

The discussion on how MO handles BSAs is still ongoing, so I haven't been looking at this much myself except thinking abut the possibilities. It's likely at this point that archive files will still be able to be used for the optimized textures, but if not BSAs can be created. It's certainly safest to use Archive.exe to create BSAs. You don't need to be running the CK to use Archive.exe, it has a GUI and can be run standalone.

I expect it could be done with TES5Edit scripts. There is a script for exporting and importing weapon statistics (Skyrim - Export and import weapons stats from spreadsheet file.pas), and it could likely be expanded for what you want.

Thanks! Now I have two more games to put in my sadly evergrowing list of games I never seem to have time to get to

If you need the 10.0 Complete ETAC Patches I have those (I also have the 10.2 version). It should be up on Droplink in a few minutes.

That is true for many, but not all, subrecords of the LCTN records. There are also other record types with location in the name (e.g., XLCN) that are not forwarded, so some care must be used.

I was looking at the CRF patch for Inconsequential NPCs with TES5Edit and I don't understand the purpose of a lot of what it edits. It reverts a lot of records added by CRF back to the Skyrim.esm version (e.g., XLSR Location Reference records, some faction ownership records, some object bounds records) for the temporary item and militia objects it edits. It changes a Navmesh record from the CRF version back to a USKP version. The plugin has the right date but the file name is version 1.0 vs. 1.1 (which could be inadvertent, of course).

The order (alphabetical or other) of the folders in the screenshot doesn't matter, I was just suggesting a comparison of the contents. What matters is what DoubleYou mentioned. Delete all the folders in STD except "textures".

I have related but slightly different questions. How does MO handle a mod with a BSA but no plugin, or a mod with a BSA and a plugin but the plugin is unchecked in the plugins tab. I expect MO can provide the BSA to Skyrim with the VFS, but what order does this BSA get in Skyrim? If I have two mods each with a plugin and an unextracted BSA, and if mod A has lower installation priority in MO but the associated plugin is higher in mod order, which BSA would have higher priority when loaded into Skyrim? By the way, with Wrye Bash the answer to the first question would be that the BSA is loaded into Data but is not loaded into Skyrim for either alternative since there is no associated active plugin. For the second question with WB the answer is that BSA order in Skyrim depends only on mod load order (plugin order).

STD is the name of a folder of loose files which contains optimized versions of textures from Skyrim - textures.bsa. It can be archived and installed or can be installed without archiving first. I've never heard of anyone having SkyUI problems when using these textures. Was the folder of optimized textures compared with the screenshot in the DDSopt guide that shows the number of files, number of folders, and size of the folder that should result from the optimization? Here is a more detailed view of the contents of the STD folder:

For some valid reasons the USP team introduced false-flagged plugins that load before some of the DLC plugins. This is a challenge for all mod managers if optimized vanilla textures are used. It's even more difficult to do this with Wrye Bash than with MO. As I commented above, the USP mods provide fixes only for the associated Bethesda esm. If a DLC breaks something in vanilla then USP expects that the DLC BSA/plugin includes the fix for what was broken in vanilla; the USP DLC-specific mod does not include this. It the fix in the DLC was bad I expect the USP mod would fix it since it's part of that DLC.

We could take the approach that the new meshes make the textures look even better and not redo the texture comparison

Yup