Kelmych

When you include a large list in a post please use spoiler tags. I put them into your post.

When I looked with TES5Edit at the AOS DLC patch I didn't see any unique FormIds; perhaps I missed something.

What is the highslide plugin supposed to do?

Yes. I find the suggestions in Neo's Skyrim Revisited guide very useful, and I expect having your MCM suggestions would also be quite useful for FNV.

If you do want to use AWOP along with the mods in this guide, you might want to look at two mods by Drithius, one of which provides some quest/NPC fixes as well as rebalancing of the weapons introduced by AWOP (which would be otherwise be overpowered if used anywhere else in FNV) and another mod to provide compatibility between the weapons in AWOP, WMX, and EVE. The AWOP compatibility mod assumes the WMXUE mod is used, but I looked in detail with FNVEdit at the differences between WMXUE and the new WMX DLC patch (which is used in this guide) and since WMXUE preserved the original WMX FormIDs it should be fairly straightforward with FNVEdit to change the compatibility mod to use WMX and the new WMX DLC patch.

I think the 2012 version is the one to use. There are links to it in the DDSopt guide (look near the beginning of the Quickstart tab or near the beginning of the Using DDSopt tab). As others mentioned, it's best to install both the 32 and 64 bit versions.

When the problem with references to previous forum posts was mentioned a while ago, I went through several guides (DDSopt, Skyrim Installation, BSA extraction and optimization) and hopefully fixed/updated the links in these to other guides as well as posts.

Did you use BOSS to set the plugin load ordering?

Druid's Den seems particularly interesting for multiple reasons. Saerileth is a particularly talented graphic artist, and the decoration evolution seems rather intriguing. That and, well, ... you did notice my icon didn't you! It also seems unique enough that an Explorer might want to have it.

There weren't enough exterior textures in the HRDLC to justify separating them into,a separate folder, so the vanilla textures use three categories. The mods optimization discussions and the batch file for sorting mod textures have either 3 or 5 categories (the batch file has a user entered choice). Mods can have many exterior textures. The STEP mod optimization examples tab has an example of mods with many exterior textures. Normal maps (bump maps) are responsible for 3d effects, but without them items are "blocky" which can be perceived as blurry. Often 2k exterior color maps with 1k normal maps is a good choice; I've found I sometimes need to use 1k for both to control VRAM Usage.

Yes, the Hires DLC Optimized works but it's goal is VRAM reduction. Do you need this? If you optimized any resources other than textures (the Skyrim - x.bsa files except for the texture BSA) the cart ride will crash. Neo's instructions for optimizing the vanilla textures don't include this but I though I'd mention it. I'd also suggest leaving the textures as loose files (I think Neo's instructions suggest this) or at least make sure if they are BSAs that MO is used to extract them. There is an alternate, but more complex, set of optimization instructions in the DDSopt guide, by the way.

It's primarily trial and error. For example, collapsing mono color textures is desirable and generally seems to work almost all the time. It's certainly not something that should be turned off for all textures according to Ethatron (see Q2 in the DDSopt technical FAQ tab). There are situations when it doesn't work. Many of the cases where DDSopt needs to ignore a texture are related to complexity in a model (mesh) where an alpha channel is used for an unusual purpose or for textures that have some artifacts or unusual large changes in a small area (these two cases cover most of what I've seen happening when DDSopt doesn't optimize properly).

Since REGS -Patches includes a revised version of the plugin for More Immersive Dawnguard Entrance, you might want to mention that anyone using your revised plugin doesn't need to download the mod (just endorse it).

reasons for not including Moonpath were mentioned in this post.

Yes, but the AOS nexus page says that patches built for the previous version of AOS might revert AOS 2.0 behavior to that of the previous version. Is the STEP patch compatible with AOS 2.0?

At very least you should enter this as a bug on the Unofficial Skyrim Patch bugfix website so they can try to fix it, in addition to looking for a nearterm fix.

As phazer said, the HRDLC and Skyrim - textures BSAs can be moved. You'll need to move them back to SkyrimData before using Steam to refresh the local cache, if you find that you need to do this.

As part of the new layout of the REGS guide, the REGS - Cities patch (which includes the 2 plugins you mentioned) was moved to an earlier part of the guide. It's in the Foundation subsection.

Better Males has two pieces, a body mod (with 2 textures per race, a body texture and a model space normal map for the body) and a head mod (one model space normal map). For constraints tab settings I'd suggest starting with the alternate constraints tab settings here. For the model space normal maps (the uppermost constraint tab setting) choose R8G8B8 or R5G6B5 (if you you want some size reduction of the texture), and choose 2048x2048 or 1024x1024 for uncompressed textures depending on whether you want reduced resolution. For the male body texture set the compressed value in "resolution limit" to 2048x2048 or 1024x1024" depending on whether you want texture size reduction. None of these choices should result in black textures.

+1

It's an excellent addition to STEP, and I feel some of the very useful additions it provides make it a better candidate for STEP:Extended than STEP:Core.

If you are still having a problem let us know. I wasn't sure whether you did or not. The guide was edited a little to try to better cover the questions you mentioned.

The "Batch_Files_for_DDSopt_guide.7z" is an old version. The references to it were supposed to be removed but apparently one remained; it's been fixed. The correct version is "Batch_Files_for_DDSopt_guide_v2.74.7z".