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The other side of the argument: Mages are not the brutish, armor-wearing types that warriors are (neither are thieves for that matter). mages don't go seeking battle but rather devising ways to defeat their enemies in more eloquent fashion. There is just an natural clash between mage and warrior. This is why battlemages are decent at both but not great at either. It takes time and discipline to master any craft, so spreading oneself thin across more than one should lessen the mastery of both. this is the rationale for penalizing mages when wearing armor ... they either don't know how to handle themselves while wearing it, or they do, and have sacrificed some of their time learning learning one craft for the other. I am all for the class penlites established long ago by the wisdom of Dungeons and Dragons, which is based on the nature of men ... alchemists are almost never warriors or the inverse ;)

@Ethatron Q.2: In the DDSopt output, there are several lines that make up the Final Report. Ex: Final report "D:\Skyrim Mods\Mod_Working\DDSopt\out":  processed files: 48  modified textures: 27  skipped textures: 0  fixed textures: 0  fixed files: 0  broken files: 0 (0 without fixed ones)  planar (1x1) textures: 0  changed texture formats: 16  i/o delta: -36413610 bytes  tex delta: -21670756 bytes The information contained in certain of these is pretty obvious; however, a couple of variables are somewhat unclear as to what can be gleaned (highlighted). Could you briefly describe these and provide an example or two of values that might raise and eyebrow versus those you would expect (e.g., a previously "optimized" texture set might yield a very different result than an "un-optimized" texture set or even a result from applying constraints). I have seen very large positive bytes for i/o as an example. EDIT: also want to know if the following resources will help us to understand some of the basics of texture compression (in order to better equip us to maximize our comprehension of your responses :P ): https://mines.lumpylumpy.com/Electronics/Computers/Software/Cpp/Graphics/index.php https://doc.spatial.com/index.php/Texture_Mapping https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2496/texture_compression_techniques_and_.php

Happy new year ... we were watching a movie, then spent some tome looking at the nonsense on TV. Got tired of that, the wife fell asleep, and I am back at it :P

Got it, thanks for the detail ... more to come, but in the meantime, Happy New Year! (toss one back for me) OP updated

The blade itself looks good but could maybe use a tinge more blue to get a bit closer to the armor, but that is honestly my only criticism and it's small. Nice job. RE the diff in blade/armor color: realistically, blades will look a bit different and usually whiter, as they are forged more exhaustively than armor and also tempered more and generally polished more. A small difference is realistic I think.

Good sound mods are essential, will check it out

Avidly, relentlessly, inexorably, ridiculously so

Please do (and let us know the result)

A1: Well, lower mip-levels are selected by the filtering-hardware on your graphics-card, when surface angles are very steep, or when the total scale of the texture becomes smaller. Just think about when it happens for 1x1: you got some object on screen which is so tiny that the entire texture is displayed at less than 1 pixel screen-space! If you have tri-linear filtering enabled, sadly this happens already when the smaller extent (x or y) hits 1 px (width or height), with anisotropic filtering this basically only happens when the entire texture-size falls below 1 px² area. Now it is not obviously clear to me if Skyrim would even display any objects below 1 px size. The probability of it to happen appears rather low.Anyway, if the situation occurs then the graphics-card hammers only on a single texel, but (!) compressed textures have a minimum block-size of 4x4, damn. Regardless that only one texel is requested, 16 are decompressed - well, not really, but the memory of the block is read completely, no memory-system reads bits from the chips, mostly entire 64bit lines as smallest unit. Performance-wise there is very little difference if you tri-linearly filter 1 texel or 4, as the bottle-neck is the memory-latency, and the block is already in on-chip cache - you probably even pay a penalty for having 3 full blocks for the lowest mips (1x1 expanded to 4x4, 2x2 expended to 4x4 and then 4x4), as you hit the memory thrice (800 clocks + 800 clocks + 800 clocks) and you clutter the cache a bit with it. That's why I just prefer to throw all mips below 4x4 blocksize out. It sounds like you are suggesting that these very small mip-levels (below 4x4) do not supply any significant quality information to the rendered image in-game and that eliminating these 3 lower levels will provide some measure of performance gain with no perceptible cost of quality. If so ...Q1.1:  Why does DDSopt only strip the one (1x1 only) and not the three lower mip-levels from the compressed output?

@Ethatron / stoppingby4now Thanks for the feedback ... very helpful. @Herrdoctor Thanks for submitting this level of detail ... very helpful I'm sure to Ethatron (and all)

Hmm, works great, but I prefer FT DeepDark (The scroll bar is perfectly visible to me). Main reason is that the config backgrounds (like the addons tab itself) is dark using FT DeepDark, but un-themed using Ultimo. Otherwise, they are pretty much the same.

It seems like this mod would add a lot of chaotic lighting behavior and potentially mess things up. I don't like the idea of flickering lights. Maybe keep an eye on this until it develops further (and the rest of the community comments/vets)?

@EthatronMany compressed rectangular textures (e.g., 2048x1024) have bottom mipmaps of 1x1 where we expect to see a minimum of 2x1. When such textures are processed by DDSopt, sure enough, the lowest 1x1 mip is dropped. DDSopt now also has a setting to prevent this behavior. Q1: Do these lower 1x1 mips play any role on what we see in game, and if not, why is there a DDSopt setting to retain them?

DDSopt remembers the settings used from the previous instance; however, I think that you are asking if settings can be saved into custom "profiles"? Maybe so that you can save the settings you used for a particular run under a particular profile name?

Yep, I have modded Oblivion to about 350 before by merging into the BP and ghosting. My current setup has over 270 mods included (not fully tested yet though)

OK, will address as I update. Thanks ;)

You can save yourself a bunch of time and copy all of your mods and plugins from Wrye Bash using the context menu... right click on the header bar and select "List Installers" or "List Mods". This includes both XML and spoiler tags for posting into forums and web pages alike.

The only issue is that this creates two resources to upkeep .... that seems more inefficient to meI'm saying use the Wiki instead. Previously you recommended to add some to the Wiki rather than the Nexus, and that in fact requires more upkeep. Since anything we are doing should be STEP specific (and temporary), it makes the most sense to put them on the Wiki.Except for files that pertain to the general modding community that are already on the Nexus ;) Soul Gems DifferSkill Interface RetextureGolden Gods ShrinesVisible WindowsThat's Iceetc... all of them accept for Skyrim Redesigned. If they are already on the Nexus, we may as well handle from there (especially since we control all of those Nexus 'mods' anyway)

Not available for Firefox 17 :(Â Can you just go in and edit the version to make it work or will it break? I like the NASA one but the buttons are a little too big IMO. FT DeepDark works for v17. Try it!FT DeepDark is indeed a nice theme. My only beef with it is the scroolbar. It's far too difficult to see when I have surrounding windows that are bright. I'm switching back to NasaNightLaunch (always my fallback) until 8Ultimo is hopefully updated, or a better dark theme pops up. I'll have to look at that one as well ...

Not available for Firefox 17 :(Â Can you just go in and edit the version to make it work or will it break? I like the NASA one but the buttons are a little too big IMO. FT DeepDark works for v17. Try it!

Also, be sure to use the image post function here on the forums (i.e., not as attachments). It is an icon on far right of second row in the enhanced post editor.

Yep, I am still working on that. lots more to do. Feel free to add as you see fit.

The only issue is that this creates two resources to upkeep .... that seems more inefficient to me