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The OP condenses most of the userful info in this thread as doe sthe DDSopt guide. I just finished a detailed optimization of all vanilla textures. I treated terrain normals and MSN as special cases. Attached are my logs (named according to treatment). I think that it makes good sense to constrain all vanilla normals to 1k and to ensure that the mip algorithms be applied for all using moderate settings. I omit the foliage mip algorithm for all but vanilla textures though. The gamma correction and contrast enhancements are key though.

Thanks Kelmych. I'll check it out.Works great. I added a few missing placeholder.txt files that were iin dlc01.

Changing the version 'instance' is too much of a maintenance overhead. Please see my previous post on changes. This works for every single page on the wiki.

Yes, the numbers exist only for sorting effect, because the sorting order defines the heirarchy of the overrides. BAIN sorts the subfolders alphanumerically, so 1, 2, 3, ... n will sort as expected from 0 - 9. However, once there are ten or more subdirectories, then you have a problem if this is not accounted for by the labels and taking into account the alphanumeric sorting behavior. So, ... 1 10 100 2 20 21 200 201 ... is not intuitive or desired. Adding in the leading zeros solves the problem. When a mod is created, the creator needs to determine if there will ever be more than 10 or even 100 options and account for that in the numbering scheme. Sadly, there is no written "standard", but most people use an intuitive method, and you should only be concerned with the end result of the sort order. Then you can renumber yourself, or in some cases, you don't even need numbers.

Mod dropped from current and future releases. Thanks all.

I assume so, but will defer to one of the others that are more up-to-date on this. I am in texture optimization mode right now.

All wikis have this inherently. Just go to "Page Tools" > History and look at the diff ;)

Yes, he is around and should be back on board this weekend I am hoping.

I mean, if there was some path i could use to point it to the "virtual" ..data\textures\ directory then that would be great and would probably work. however i dont think there is an actual path for this. I could point it to \ModOrganizer\InstalledMods but that wouldnt do any good because all the mods there are installed individually and are separate from each other. I guess when i need to use nifskope i can just copy and paste the assets into the real skyrim data directory, then do my work, then move the stuff out. There must be a way to use the MO symbolic link. S4n has a lot of knowledge about this stuff. Look at his posts in this thread to see about how you might create a symbolic pointer to the MO virtual data directory.

JPG does wash out some detail, but it is almost imperceptible (try fast-switching same image between the formats. Mostly just slight tint difs). Also, posting uncompressed images into the forums causes extremely slow thread load times, so that is shy I converted them.

phazer11's shots in the OP are the better compares for this one (thanks to Wormheart though), so please base judgements on the OP.

This is not the case. Many users are crashing at closer to 2.5GB, and I suspect that they are on 32-bit systems for the most part. See the following as a possible explanation: Also, rolandito somewhat accounts for this:

Yes, I had read that article, so it made sense to me about the LAA linker under 32-bit Win. It also makes sense that the fault is likely TESV.exe and not Windows (as Monty seemed to suspect), based on your reasoning. OK, so what role does DX9 play as far as you know? What are your thoughts on the OP of the adjacent thread on memory optimizers (also see prev post by scribble) Thanks for confirming ... assuming that you are a .Net developer or game developer yourself?

Great post. Thanks. Could you expound a bit on this? The EXE is inherently limited by the amount of memory that it itself can address, is it not? Are you referring to a call made by the EXE or a call made by WMM? Is it likely that a pattern of crashes at or near 2.5-ish GB may be related to LAA in a 32-bit Windows env? Would you care to contribute some wisdom or at least content-edit the article we are preparing on the wiki?

@tech I am treating this thread as temporary and allowing phazer to handle it this way this time, as we could use the extra help. I'll be moving everything around once it is resolved. You are right that it would be best to do it formally though. @phazer Let us know if/when you ever want to help out formally ans an MT. If you use MO, it should be pretty easy to set up vanilla and STEP:Core configs (as I hear it anyway).

Thanks Kelmych. I'll check it out.

The vanilla-EDT-HDET compares are great. From these, I think that 1k HD Enhanced Terrain provides the most visual interest; however, I'd like to see 1k EDT Octave, Cell, Earth & Grass to call it good. Thanks for doing this ... & no hurry with the shots. I will post the results on the MT thread once we have everything.

So what Kelmych is saying is that you should not convert any uncompressed normals to DXT format (but if you do that using DDSopt, the result will be slightly higher quality than with other compression formats). If they are very large already, they can be reduced in size, so 2k can be reduced to 1k, saving you 75% of the original 'cost' (usually, 2k and above can be considered "large" for most applications ... but Sparrow has already done that with this mod). Furthermore, the 8-bit, uncompressed format can be reduced to approximately '5.34'-bit, which saves yet another 1/3 of performance cost at minimal quality cost. So the goal is to compare 565 uncompressed to 888 original uncompressed for this mod. Sparrow's comments indicate that we should pay particular attention to the vertical object models that use these textures (rocks & mountains) and get some close-up screens for comparison.

Yes, I'll fix that

For Enhanced Terrain Detail, the ideal place might be on the high ground to the Southwest overlooking Whiterun. Just create a save at that point and load/screen with each mod variant and vanilla. It would be great if you could use Fraps or something that will also capture your frame rate. Preferably, this would be done in the pure vanilla background, but we'll take what we can get ;)