Kelmych

I have been working my way through setting up Skyrim to use MO. Like Z I also use the Bash Installers folder as the equivalent of a download folder, especially since I already had a lot of mods there that I had already filtered and/or optimized with DDSopt. I do have two questions: - I have Skyrim itself on an SSD (using the new Steam capability for multiple install directories). I have the Mod Organizer\Mods directory on the SSD. Is there any advantage/disadvantage to have MO itself on the SSD vs. on an HDD? - I'd like to use some BCF files (e.g., the Visible Windows BCF) to prepare some mods before I optimize them and then install them into MO. I know MO has a BCF plugin, but does it put the output into the Mods directory or somewhere else? I need to take the output and move it elsewhere so I can optimize the mod and/or make any other changes needed. Can I do this with the file resulting from using the MO BCF plugin? or should I move this question to another thread?

I've certainly had problems with dead dragon bodies blocking things (especially near the Hearthfire house close to Riverwood), but I haven't recommended the spell version of the mod since it doesn't seem appropriate to a near-vanilla game experience. The spell also hasn't worked especially well for me.

Is Nitpick completely obsolete or only partially? See below.

I recently assembled a new computer (I do still have the old one) and, like Z, I'm starting the process to setup Skyrim to use MO as it should make it easier to test and work with the various STEP mod and pack options. I'm still working on tasks like the DDSopt guide and various troubleshooting questions, but it will be a while before I can do useful mod testing with the new setup for mods like the one in this thread.

The changes recently in that batch file have been to improve how it handles skin. eyes, etc. Almost all of these textures should now be moved by "4_Mod_Sorting&Pre-optimization-beta.bat" to the Mod Mixed Uncompressed Textures folder so they can be optimized separately from the rest of the textures. The recommended constraints tab parameters in the Optimizing the STEP mods section of the guide should be fine, but for the Mod Mixed Uncompressed Textures folder I'd suggest having the model space normal map compression parameter set to lossless. There will be some compressed textures in this folder, but when DDSopt is optimizing the uncompressed textures using these parameters it will still automatically handle the compressed textures properly (it won't convert them to uncompressed). Note that the part of the guide you reference is just for initial setup of DDSopt. The constraints tab parameters for use in optimizing mods are covered in the Optimizing the STEP mods section of the guide. There are different parameter sets for each of the 3-5 folders created by the batch file; of course, only a few of the parameters are actually changed when optimizing a different folder.Â

You're running an older version of the batch files. The newer version, available on the DDSopt guide, made a few small changes for clarity. "Vanilla Textures" was renamed since it could be interpreted as all of the textures, and the uncompressed tint/tone maps were added to the folder with Uncompressed textures so the name was changed (it isn't just normal maps). With vanilla textures the uncompressed tint/tone maps end up getting the same optimization treatment before and after the change, but with the (related) batch files that sort the uncompressed tint/tone maps with STEP mods this would not have been true and we wanted to have consistency with how the different texture types were sorted prior to optimization. You can continue if you want as these batch file changes don't actually affect the results with vanilla textures after optimization.

Optimized textures will overwrite the original textures in Skyrim\Data\textures; Skyrim itself keeps only one set of textures. You can do this manually, but maintenance is a lot of work. Mod managers (Mod Organizer and Wrye Bash) make this much easier since they keep track of any textures and other resources you add, and when you remove or update a mod they update the appropriate resources or remove the resources you added and replace them with the ones that were present before you added the mod.

Textures can be loaded by a mod manager into Skyrim. You don't really need a BSA. If you put the textures into BSAs it would take a lot of work, and plugins, to get them loaded in the proper order; mod managers do this quite well. You don't need ini files to load textures.

The Bash Installers folder, where WB stores mods, doesn't have to be on the same drive as the Skyrim game.

If you get a Haswell CPU make sure to get a power supply rated for Haswell. Most PSU manufacturers have only list a subset of their PSUs for compatibility with some of the power demands in the new hibernate states that Haswell introduced.

If the path name gets too long there could be a problem, but this is unusual since it would only happen with extremely long path names. What is the working directory name that is printed on the screen at the beginning of the batch file? If you can, try running the batch file with the rename command removed (put "rem" without the quotes at the beginning of the line that starts with ren) and see if it is still a problem. There will not be an _opt in the name, but see if the folder name is correct. I did some searching but couldn't find information on problems like the one you are having.

I tested the batch file with a large set of mods. Here is the version that adds quotes around the files for the renaming step. Let me know if it doesn't work and I'll do more searching with google to see if there are other reports with similar problems with the rename command. You can also try the following in a command window in the directory that contains the existing misnamed files. rename "*.7z_opt.7z" "*_opt.7z" This should fix any misnamed files. You can try it with or without the quotes; I put the quotes there in case they were needed on your system.

I think we can mention some the of texture mods that reduce VRAM use even more than baseline STEP; the issue for me (and likely tech) is testing. Currently we do testing that covers systems with 1Gb VRAM cards and ones with 2Gb or greater VRAM. If we need to test texture quality and quality/VRAM tradeoffs for low end systems, and not just mention possibilities for additional VRAM reduction, it would be a lot of extra work.

In addition to an LOD texture it includes a large set of terrain textures with much higher resolution than vanilla. The other mods mentioned have only the LOD texture.

It wouldn't be unreasonable, I suppose, for the percentages of old and young looking elves to be similar to those for humans. The actual ages would, of course, be much greater than for humans. Makes sense to me to exclude "no elves".

Renaming uses the rename command. You can use it in a command windows to see what it does to mods. I also notice that the mod example you showed wasn't renamed correctly at all. You showed Serious HD Retexture RIFTEN 1024px-2146.7z_opt.7z but it should have been Serious HD Retexture RIFTEN 1024px-2146_opt.7z . The batch file uses the command rename *.7z *_opt.7z which would not have "7z" twice in the name I'm also assuming you are using the batch file from the most recent set of batch files. The rename command is next command after the echo off and line that does the archiving.

You might want the x86 version for other programs; I think both can be present but I'm not positive.

The game will always use the loose textures. Loose textures are loaded after all the textures from all BSAs. Thus even though there are two copies of the texture, it will always use the optimized ones. The primary contents of the DLC BSAs are resource types other than textures. These are loaded faster from a BSA than they would be if they were all extracted and loaded as loose files, even when the additional texture resources in the BSA that are no longer used are left in the BSA. The ideal approach would be to optimize the textures and replace them in the DLC BSAs; unfortunately Skyrim has problems when that is done (e.g., CTDs in various places in Skyrim).

I don't think anyone has checked to make sure that there aren't any problems, but I don't see why there would be problems with reoptimizing if the optimization parameters are correct. This column does indicate that if optimization of the mod is done some additional care in choosing the right DDSopt parameters might be needed. For example, Consistent Older People is on the list because it has small uncompressed textures and if it is optimized it should be done with different DDSopt parameters than those typically used. The column also helps select which mods to include when using the batch files to assist in optimization. The batch files and DDSopt optimization take less time when the mods that don't need further optimization are excluded. Uncompressed textures present some problems in optimization. If a mod has a mix of compressed and uncompressed textures, the standard constraints tab parameters which expect compressed files convert all the uncompressed textures to compressed; however, uncompressed normal maps yield noticeably better graphic quality than the equivalent size compressed normal maps. The DDSopt GUI filtering doesn't allow selecting only uncompressed textures (except for manually selecting them individually), so there is no easy way using just the DDSopt GUI to process compressed textures in a mod with one set of parameters and the uncompressed textures with another (except for model space normal maps).

I tried the archiving batch file on that file and others with dashes and spaces and underlines and there were no problems renaming. I'll add quotes around the file names in the batch file in case they are needed on some systems.

The batch file moves Better Shadowmarks uncompressed textures, which are small, directly to the output. Better Bones uncompressed textures (which are larger) are put in the Mod Mixed Uncompressed Textures folder so they can be optimized. I'm not getting an access error with Mod DDS (or any other serious errors); I made several runs including a single mod and a large set of mods. Before you ran the batch did you remove the old temporary folders? Mod Optimized Archive is OK but the rest aren't.

DDSopt replaces the mipmaps in textures with higher quality versions which is useful even for textures that are not resized or reformatted, so in general running DDSopt helps. There are some exceptions. The DDSopt Recommended column was revised a few months ago in the STEP Mod Texture table to indicate which mods shouldn't be optimized, either because they were already optimized (e.g., Terrain Bump and Soul Gems Differ) or because optimization wouldn't actually help (e.g., Consistent Older People which has 256x256 uncompressed textures that are already good enough; if it is optimized the parameters need to be chosen carefully so it isn't converted to compressed textures). This is mentioned in the guide in the "Organizing the Mod Textures for Simpler Optimization" subsection. If DDSopt was used for the original optimization it will recognize that textures are already optimized and bypass them, but it best (but not critical) to not reoptimize them. The installer for Real Ice shouldn't be optimized in a large batch run since if optimized it should be done with a 4Kx4K maximum size setting; it allows selection of textures during installation.

DDSopt needs the Visual C++ redistributable. The most recent version (2012) is available from here for 32 bit or 64 bit Windows OS versions. I have MSVCP110.dll in "Windows\SysWOW64" with a modified date of 11/6/2012 . If you don't have this you might try reinstalling the Visual C++ redistributable.