Kelmych

I'm not sure what happened. The file was uploaded again and the new reference inserted. It seems to work now. Sorry about that. When optimizing the vanilla textures I suggest using the instructions in the QuickStart guide tab. They are simpler and work for almost all users.

The Quickstart guide tab has been revised. It now has step-by-step instructions for optimizing vanilla textures that can be used by most users; excluding the more unusual cases makes the instructions in the Quickstart tab much shorter than those in the main guide sections. The main guide sections still cover all of the situations including systems with limited VRAM.

I expect the SKSE-based solution will be the longterm approach for the memory patch, but it's a little early to recommend it in STEP. They are including other fixes in the new version, so everyone will be using it anyway.

The method in the DDSopt guide is more selective about which textures are changed, and it has more detailed instructions for those who aren't as familiar with textures and DDSopt and for systems that aren't as capable as those typically used with SR:LE. As mentioned above, the SR:LE instructions are shorter and simpler. The SR:LE approach converts all vanilla textures to compressed versions, the DDSopt guide approach keeps all of the vanilla uncompressed textures as uncompressed ones (better quality). For many users, the simplified version of the vanilla texture optimization instructions now available in the DDSopt Quick Start guide tab are adequate.

I found it annoying that two of the quests aimed at mages, the coral dragon claw and the apprentices, weren't finished. As you mentioned, there are so few mage quests.

I really like having some purpose for the lunar forge; it always seemed like something fairly elaborate that was added in Skyrim but never finished. I also like the idea of health-related enhancements. From my viewpoint - I don't play as a werewolf or vampire - it would be useful to have 2 enhancement set choices for the special capabilities, one for normal characters and one for vampire/werewolf characters (as mentioned in one of the possibilities).

Should we mention that the enblocal.ini changes in the new guide should be used vs. the ones in ENBoost 5.0 on Nexus?

Since you already ran an older version of the HRDLC clean batch files, all or almost all the duplicate files are gone. These aren't really errors. Make sure you delete the folders in "Working" created by the old Pre-optimization batch file; leave "Vanilla Extracted" of course. When you run the Pre-optimization batch file it will recreate all the ones it needs. Version numbers have been added to the batch files, so the guide will now include the version numbers of the individual batch files. This should help eliminate problems with using outdated batch files. Most of the batch files don't change frequently, but for consistency the version numbers will all change when one of the batch files is updated.

There was a long and extensive comparison of LOD mods. There were a few who preferred HD Detailed Terrain at that time, but the consensus when the comparisons were done that the EDT and EDT 2 were better. You can search for the thread and posts if you want to see them. It will be a while before another extensive comparison for selecting which LOD mods to include in STEP is made since it's so time consuming, in part because there is never complete agreement on LOD texture choices. Of course, new versions of mods come out often making any current choices more difficult since there are always some users who prefer the new textures.

Creating folders doesn't really help; having it do them automatically allows checking whether the batch file runs properly. There should not be a "Vanilla Textures" folder at all. There should be a "Vanilla Ordinary Textures" folder. Do you have the most recent version of the batch files? For example, "2_Pre-optimization.bat" should have a modified date of January 13, 2014 and it has 12,184 bytes. There was a previous version of the batch files that used "Vanilla Textures", but it was updated quite a while ago.

Did you try running the batch program with "Run as administrator"? I'm not sure it will affect the result but it's worth trying.

Did you compare your Vanilla Extracted folder, that you created following the steps in the Vanilla Texture Preparation section, to the file and folder counts in the screenshots of the "Working folder file Screenshot with Repaired Files" figure at the bottom of the page in the Vanilla Texture Preparation tab? They should be the same. In case it wasn't clear, vanilla texture optimization starts in the "Vanilla Texture Preparation" section and finishes in the "DDSopt Optimization" section.

Minimal HUD Lite version is compatible with NACMIM (which I use). Less Intrusive HUD II is incompatible with any mod that provides colored markers on the compass (e.g., NACMIM). This was discussed in a previous thread.

The recommendation changes were made to avoid potential problems for many of the users, not to discourage people from using more aggressive optimization parameters. There is limited information on the effect of optimization on body-related textures since these are not the typical focus of the STEP guide, and many of the users of SR:LE which does use some alternative body textures have fairly powerful systems and don't always need much texture size reduction especially with the advent of ENBoost and Skyrim Memory patch.

The descriptions of the process have changed to try and make them clearer, but the processes themselves haven't really changed. Recommendations for Constraint menu settings have been edited a bit so the default values don't change very many textures, but most of the changes don't affect any textures in the vanilla set of uncompressed textures. The current recommendations would still produce the same texture you are using (1Kx1K uncompressed texture). If that isn't the best choice the recommendations can be changed once we have enough information to do so. For users with enough VRAM, 2Kx2K for a model space normal map is likely better.

A new section has been added to the DDSopt guide for examples of optimizing sets of mods. The first example is now available. It describes two approaches for using the batch files to sort a set of mods with exterior textures and then optimize the textures using DDSopt. The example includes all of the mods in the STEP guide that have exterior textures. The result is that in a single processing session all the STEP mods with exterior textures, which are the ones with the greatest effect on VRAM use, can optimized and rearchived.

Thanks for the additional information, it should help isolate the problem. By the way, are you currently using an ENB or lighting mod; these might affect this problem?

Yes the link is bad, but I didn't find that link in the guide text. Where is it?

I tried the one currently on the wiki and it doesn't include the fomod or wizard in the output file when it runs. For the one you just posted the BCF.dat is dated 1/16/2013 and is 7259 bytes. I have another one that I got on 9/5/2013 that works properly. The data of the BCF.dat inside this one is 9/5/13 and the size is 7950 bytes. Both include the wizard and the Fomod in the BCF. There were two Real Ice BCFs posted on 9/5; the later one that doesn't work and a slightly earlier one that does work. The older one from 9/5/2013 works fine. It is still on the wiki in the file history if you want it (as I mentioned above).

A number of small changes were made and one large one (the new examples) based on these and comments from other STEP forum participants

Indeed, BUM can only be used for the mods with plugins (esp or esm files). The vanilla textures go early in the installation order (low priority value). The optimized STD and any optimized DLC texture archives should have lower priority than the optimized HRDLC archives. Previously the only optimization examples in the DDSopt guide were those associated with the vanilla textures, and there were some comments about confusion in using DDSopt for some small optimization tasks. Three short examples have been added to the Using DDSopt tab that cover some of the common uses. The vanilla texture set is quite large and the optimization is fairly long, and isn't necessarily a good example for those who have not used DDSopt previously and want to do some simple optimization on a few mods.

You can do it using BUM or manually change the priority of the files in MO.

The instructions on the Wiki are to get the BAIN package from Nexus, download the file with the FOMOD from the wiki, and then copy the FOMOD folder into the BAIN file. I tried installing this in MO and it worked fine. Other than manual installation the only other choice is to install the STEP version, which I did.

When I asked about this s4n said you can't link to a subsection within a tab.

I tried to follow the guide and gave up after about an hour of staring at it. For a completely new user like myself, it's pure hell. I got as far as extracting some of the .bsa files in the suggested folder structure, but unfortunately the guide is so horribly overcomplicated I really have no idea what to do (like, what do I extract into the STD folder? where do I extract the non-DLC files?). At first it seemed like a guide for optimizing the hi-res textures because there were some errors in them, but then it progressed into extracting absolutely everything, and then started about compressing textures in general which looks like lowering the quality for the sake of performance (I don't need that, my PC is powerful enough). Now, I might either sound like an ass or an idiot (or both), but I completely fail to understand what is it about (I am sure it's very useful and even more if one isn't just a normal player but rather a modder). Honestly, the guide could use radical simplifying process. Some reorganization and editing was done today to make the guide a little easier to use, so any comments on portions that seemed particularly confusing would be useful. The first question I ask someone who wants to use a guide like this is "What do you want to accomplish". The guide. like most of the guides I've read or helped build, doesn't start with a map that says which parts to use depending on the answer to the first question. User comments have asked for a wide variety of information and the way this is accommodated is to add material so we don't have to frequently answer the same questions. If you have some concrete suggestions (especially ones that are fairly specific) or examples please post them so we can make progress on improving the guide.