Kelmych

Yes, TES5Edit can only clean one file at a time.

I ran a test with the optimized vanilla textures and a portion of the STEP mods and and I haven't found a problem yet, but I'll keep adding mods and seeing if there are problems.

I'll keep trying, but so far I haven't found this problem with the DDSopt-optimized HRDLC3 textures. I added RaceMenu and I still didn't have a problem. You're not the only one reporting the problem, but I haven't been able to duplicate it yet. It might be affected by some other mods that I'm not loading. When I get further along with testing I'll report the results, and perhaps others will also check to see if they have this problem.

What value did you use for the Constraint tab resolution limit parameter when you did the optimization? The textures in Vanilla Uncompressed\HRDLC3\textures\actors\character are all model space normal maps.

Are you using Mod Organizer or Wrye Bash? MO doesn't directly add files to Skyrim\Data, and if you want to change a file you shouldn't add it directly to Skyrim\Data. It's possible with MO to see what mod it is using for this texture, but you can't just look in Skyrim\Data.

Did you get the BAIN wizard version from Nexus, then get the STEP Fomod from the STEP wiki, and add (copy) the FOMOD folder from the the STEP Fomod into the BAIN Wizard version archive file (open the archive file and copy the Fomod folder into the file)? Then install with MO using the Fomod.

The description of the constraints settings in the guide has been expanded to describe the recommended default uncompressed settings which use the lossless uncompressed parameters except for tangent space normal maps which use lossy settings. The most recent posts in this thread are also discussing the male body texture problem. What settings did you use when optimizing the vanilla textures? What mod management program are you using? Are you using all the STEP mods including RaceMenu, and what other mods are you using that affect male bodies? I loaded a game with the vanilla textures and no mods (e.g., RaceMenu) that affect the male body. I had no problems with the display of the male body with either the 1Kx1K uncompressed malebody textures produced by DDSopt when optimizing HRDLC3 or the original 2Kx2K malebody textures from HRDLC3. The HRDLC3 textures overwrite those from Skyrim-textures (STD) so the game will use the ones from HRDLC3 when they are installed.

Since the texture is in both Skyrim-textures.bsa and HRDLC3, the version used in Skyrim will the one from HRDLC3 . The version extracted from Skyrim-textures.bsa and then processed in DDSopt will be overwritten. The HRDLC3 one is uncompressed so the file size is much larger. The file that ends up in the optimized output will be the HRDLC3 one at the resolution you chose when optimizing uncompressed textures in DDsopt. I'm not sure which version gives you a black texture. The 683Kb version is the 1Kx1K DXT1 produced by DDSopt from the file extracted from Skyrim-textures.bsa when the DDSopt max resolution limit parameter is 1Kx1K. It would nottypically be used in the game since the version from HRDLC3 will overwrite it. By the way, I can't see any problems with it but I haven't tried this version in the game since it is overwriten. Are you using the STEP mods (including RaceMenu) and do you have any other mods that affect this texture?

We always make use of comments on how to improve the guide. The guide has evolved based on comments and inputs from a lot of users. A lot of the material in the guide was originally shorter, but was expanded because of user comments on problems they had when performing optimization. If there are some useful ways to provide a shorter approach which provides the same graphic quality and that users find easier to follow than the main guide sections, the Quickstart section would be a good place for such changes. The intent of the quickstart section of the guide is to provide a brief overview and a simplified path through the optimization process. Currently there isn't an especially short path in this section. With most mods, using DDSopt on an individual mod is often fairly straightforward. The approach in the guide tries to deals with how to handle a hundred or so mods some of which aren't necessarily easy to optimize. Originally the guide had users make use of the filtering capabilities built into DDSopt. The guide was noticeably shorter, but the steps were tedious and prone to error and most users didn't successfully complete the optimization. In addition, the steps didn't take care of some the quality problems that optimization was introducing in a few of the textures. The optimization steps in the guide are currently aimed at getting as much texture size reduction as possible without noticeably change in graphic quality. If your goal for using DDSopt is different (e.g., reduce the size of textures for VRAM use reduction with an emphasis on simplicity of steps vs. best possible graphic quality) then it's certainly possible to have a simpler set of steps toward this goal.

The files with ampersands were supposed to have been removed, as mentioned in another thread, but apparently they weren't. A new version of the batch files (2.63) was uploaded with the erroneous files removed. The change to "2_Pre-optimization.bat" was minor and doesn't affect the output. The only changes was that message about administrative privilege was changed; the same message was also changed in the 4_Mod_Sorting_Pre-optimization-beta.bat".

malebody_1_msn.dds is available in Skyrim-Textures.bsa as a 2Kx2K DXT1 texture and in HRDLC3 as a 2Kx2K uncompressed texture. If the S1 - S3 (lowest quality) settings are used the resolution will be changed to 1Kx1K. There is a comment in the DDSopt Optimization section of the guide just below the screenshots of the constraints tab parameters such as S1-S3 that says "some users may prefer to keep full precision for the uncompressed model space normal maps since these can affect display quality of bodies and faces". There are very few 2Kx2K uncompressed textures in the vanilla Skyrim BSAs, so for most of the rest of the uncompressed files the S1-S3 settings are typically fine. By the way, the version in HRDLC3 is uncompressed and should provide better quality than the one in Skyrim-textures. It will overwrite the one from Skyrim-textures. You shouldn't have gotten a black texture in any case; I'm not sure why this happened but I haven't seen any previous testing results of lowering the resolution of this texture. If this uncompressed texture had been optimized along with the compressed color maps it would have been converted to a compressed texture. This was one of the reasons for separating the uncompressed textures from the rest of the textures in the vanilla BSA texture optimization.

The issue is that this can cause problems. There is no guarantee that the recompressed BSA will work in Skyrim, and a few users have reported CTD problems with recompressed versions of vanilla resources. If you use MO that extracts all BSAs to loose files, it's OK of course. But using the actual BSA in Skyrim could be problematic (or might not cause any problems). There are issues in getting out-of-desired-order resources using BSAs when using some of the non-STEP mods. A number of users have mods that have conflicting resources (e.g., quest scripts which have been changed from the vanilla versions), and if BSAs are kept it can be challenging to debug the resultant problems (not when MO is used, of course).

If you optimize the vanilla textures, then you need to extract at least the textures from the Unofficial patches. Otherwise the USKP textures are overwritten by the optimized vanilla textures.

Some recommendations for SSD use during optimization were added to the DDSopt guide, and additional notes were added on use of the directory tree figure to ensure that files are in the right place for the batch files (this is one of the main causes of problems with the batch file processing). Some older figures were replaced with ones that better match the text, including the figures with recommended constraints settings when optimizing uncompressed textures.

There is a new version 2.62 of the batch files. "Run as administrator" objected to the ampersand in the file name. The administrative privilege test output is changed to a comment. I don't need to run the sorting batch files as an administrator when I use them, but it's possible some users might need to do this.

There is also an example of selecting the tangent space normal maps and optimizing them in the Appendix of the DDSopt guide. You can use a variant of this for what you want.

A test for administrative privilege was added to version 2.61. I'll test it again this evening to make sure it works properly. It worked in the initial test, but it's always possible there could be a problem with it.

GECK is the Fallout New Vegas equivalent of the Skyrim Creation Kit.

That certainly applies when using Wrye Bash. With MO, I'm expect (but I'm not sure) that leaving them in them in the Skyrim\Data folder causes Skyrim to load these BSAs and then MO overrides them. I'm not sure what MO suggests; I think it prefers that you leave them so the Data folder itself looks that same as when Steam installed it originally. It does save space, as you point out, by moving them out of the Data folder. I don't know whether this causes any problems with MO.

I can certainly see why not having a smelter in every city (especially those not close to mines) seems plausible and not having one in Riften seems reasonable, but it's still hard to see why there wouldn't be one in the city that should be the main source of the Imperial weapons and armor.