Kelmych

It would help if you provided a little more detail about how you are installing it and what the error messages said. I don't know what you mean by debug mode; depending on which mod manager you are using for installation there are some functions in the mod manager that can help you understand what is happening in the installation. Is that what you mean?

I could certainly see adding Bookshelf Script SKSE to STEP:Extended. Its adds useful functionality, but it seems to me that it goes past the limits of what vanilla intended and adds an additional script so I don't feel it is appropriate for STEP:Core. It isn't really a true fix, but a reasonable expansion of the vanilla capability.

A number of mods edit worldspace records and since the Skyrim engine uses only the last loaded record, a number of mods that added unique/different subrecord content lose some of edits they made. Unfortunately the TES5Edit Merge Patch doesn't fix worldspace records. Even without UNR present a patch is usually needed to add back content added by various mods that gets overwritten, and the patch needs to be built manually (although the conflict filter in TES5Edit can be useful in identifying these records). I don't know of any simple solution; you'll need to build a patch that includes any subrecords from RWT (and other mods) that are get eliminated. I use WATER which doesn't have this particular conflict, but even for me there are issues with the Sounds of Skyrim mods, Birds HF Clean, USKP, DLC esm plugins, and some other mods .

I spent some time looking at what was done in medieval times, but I don't think that will be a good guideline. The Romans made long-lasting road makers (vs. directional signs) with carved stone. Wood signs, such as those for pubs, in the middle ages were almost all painted and pictorial since few people could read. Directional signs with arrows seem to be much more recent (on Earth) and some were painted and some (but not as many) seemed to be carved.

If the mod provides all three fixes without introducing new problems and reduces the number of plugins needed to provide these, then it would be useful. The comments above, however, suggest that it may introduce new problems.

Tech, you can answer the questions about some of the other LODs that STEP will use, at least in core, that are different than the ones in Neovalen's list. I don't think that Vivid Landscape or Rocking Stones are used at all, right? I'm not sure what provides the LODs that these do, and with all the other changes recently; I sorta understand the mod list but not everything about what is being used/excluded from some of the mods.

Detailed Terrain and Tree LoD replaces HD Enhanced Terrain to provide the noise map; none of the LODs are used.

Half Icecube-Half Dull is 1024x1024

It's best to redo the optimization from the original texture if you want to use a different resolution or make any other change in optimization parameters. You can just create multiple sets, each at a different resolution, and then swap them in and out fairly quickly using a mod manager. Not that for most textures that are 2Kx2K or less there isn't any difference in what DDSopt does with 8K, 4K, or 2K resolution limits.

To me the picture from the recent movie Troy fits the "end of a long day of battle" hair that I agreed would look like vanilla hair. There aren't many examples of pictures and history of peasant hair (or anything else about peasants) in medieval time. The hair examples in the pictures from this article and this one that could be peasant hair don't seem quite as extremely unkempt, and supposedly hair was important especially among the upper classes and I assume then at least somewhat among the peasants. Â

I agree the AOF and vanilla hair is clumpier, but I'm not sure that this is necessarily more believable. Combs were available and used, especially by upper class people, in the middle ages. For me the vanilla Jarl's hair doesn't seem very believable for someone of his stature as I find it too clumpy. I agree that the Superior hair is sometimes too parallel. Some paintings from the middle ages show hair that must have been carefully combed; many show hair that is more clumpy than Superior but much less clumpy than vanilla. Some of the vanilla hair looks like the person just took off a battle helmet at the end of a long day; that might be realistic for some of the NPCs but not all.

By the way, whenever I see comments and questions about DDSopt I look at the DDSopt guide to determine changes to make the guide clearer about the question being asked. If other users find parts that are incomplete or confusing they can also make changes to the guide on the Wiki. The SR mods haven't been added yet to the table in the guide with DDSopt recommendations for mods since the old SR guide is frozen and Neovalen hasn't finished the initial version of the new SR guide. Since this thread is about DDSopt it should be moved to the DDSopt guide thread.

I'll look at it

UNR Dragonborn is a independent program that assigns region names in Solstheim based on the regions used by weather programs. It's load order, and that of the associated CoT patch, is not affected by the main Unique Regions program. Unique Region Names is loaded late so the changes it makes to region/location names are not overwritten by programs like Sounds of Skyrim and Birds HF Clean. Of course, any patches like the Merge Patch from TES5Edit, or patches that fix the Hearthfire location names (to fix the unfortunate absence of the regions names for the 3 Hearthfire homes) and any other region/location name changes from Dawnguard not fixed in the Dawnguard version of UNR, need to load after the UNR plugin.

The STEP recommendations are compatible with Wet and Cold bags, while the Skyrim Revisited recommendations are compatible with Frostfall. They are not compatible with each other.

XP32 includes multiple skeleton mesh options, and some of these put the back hip dagger (and other weapons) in slightly different places (attachment points) on the skelton. Unfortunately there is no universal agreement across mods on which attachment points are used. If you use a mod that assumes a different attachment point than the one expected for the skeleton variant you have installed, there can be floating. You can try different assumptions in the installer to see if you can get a variant that works with the mods you are using. Skyrim Revisited uses a different set of installation selections, perhaps these might work better for you (or they might still have the same problem).

Only check "core" if you don't have either of the two DLC. The esp for the DLC replaces the one from "core".

I'm getting it also

This version of SRO has the redundancies removed; SRO has a few hundred HRDLC and low res vanilla files that were accidentally not removed. It removes several hundred Mb of redundant files and includes 1k textures for all landscape and most-probable worldspace textures, whilst retaining 2k for all most-probable interior textures, including dungeons and caves.

The batch files for optimizing vanilla textures have been changed to support bypassing optimization for the vanilla textures discussed in the previous posts. As mentioned in the last post, Terrain Bump replaces all these normal map textures, so this won't affect what STEP users see on screen. For those who have already finished the optimization of the vanilla textures using the batch files, it is fairly easy to achieve what this new change achieves without rerunning the optimization. Copy the following files from the textures\landscape directory in the extracted version of Skyrim - textures (the STD folder in Vanilla Extracted in the DDSopt guide) to overwrite the equivalent textures in the textures\landscape directory in the archive file of the optimized version of these vanilla textures: coastbeach01_n.dds coastbeach02_n.dds dirt01_n.dds dirt02_n.dds dirtpath01_n.dds dirtsnowpath01_n.dds snow01_n.dds snow02_n.dds tundra01_n.dds tundra02_n.dds

The one issue with the bags is that the Maximum Skeleton option that is compatible with these bags isn't the option that is compatible with the bags and sheaths from Frostfall, so if you use Skyrim Revisited you'll find the Maximum Skeleton options there aren't compatible with the Wet and Cold bags.

If you're getting SRO from a torrent we suggest getting the file SRO+DG_v1.6_Optimal_(1k-2k).7z .

I expect Terrain Bump will be last mod loaded with these textures so it's textures will be the ones actually used in the game. Nonetheless, I'll have the batch file provide the unaltered vanilla textures in case Terrain Bump is not in use. I've modified the batch file and I'm testing it.

Since z suggested using the original Winterhold view here are screenshots of this view with different versions of the snow01_n.dds normal map.    Vanilla      Optimized vanilla      SRO     Optimized SRO  Unoptimized Serious HD      Terrain Bump The striping in the snow in the midground with Vanilla optimized and Serious HD was surprising, so I did these twice to make sure they were correct. I got a similar bad result with the original snow01_n.dds texture from Skyrim HD, by the way. The optimized version of this texture for Skyrim HD and Serious HD showed a very similar tiling effect to the unoptimized texture from these mods. My very tentative conclusion is that for this one normal map texture optimizing with DDSopt introduces new problems only with the vanilla texture. It would probably be more accurate to say that DDSopt makes the small "rippling" effect present in vanilla much worse. This would suggest that we should keep DDSopt from optimizing the vanilla landscape normal map textures for tiled, smooth ground textures using exclusions in the batch files, but not necessarily change DDSopt.ini to skip these textures for all mods. I've tentatively identified 8 normal map textures to exclude in the batch processing in textures\landscape .