GUIDE [WIP] DDSopt & Texture Overhauls

[z929669]

Discussion thread:
DDSopt Guide by STEP
Wiki Link

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GET DDSopt:
Github Pre-release versions
Official Nexus versions (select pre-release update 4)

[Kelmych]

There is an option to use or not use them. It looks like if you want them unpacked you need to package them so they are treated as a mod. EssArrBee mentioned some problems he had with unpacking some of the vanilla BSAs when he tried this.

[Octopuss]

After all textures are extracted, optimized and repacked, is it safe to simply delete (but keep a backup of course) all HRDLC files from data folder? Similarly, is it ok to delete textures.bsa? I was thinking those files wouldn't serve any purpose at all if I have the optimized stuff loaded. Plus, since the optimization process removes some redundant files from the BSAs, wouldn't keeping the original files basically negate that?

Edited March 29, 2014 by Octopuss

[phazer11]

For the HRDLC and textures.bsa the answer is yes you can move them somewhere else. For other bsa's such as the Dawnguard, Dragonborn and Hearthfires bsas it is recommended you keep them and only extract their textures.

[Kelmych]

As phazer said, the HRDLC and Skyrim - textures BSAs can be moved. You'll need to move them back to SkyrimData before using Steam to refresh the local cache, if you find that you need to do this.

[Octopuss]

Yea that's what I understood.

Is it possible that textures are loading slower when textures.bsa is "missing"? I am doing the vurt test, and it feels like it's significantly slower now.

[EssArrBee]

Is there a way to spot textures that DDSOpt shouldn't touch like the monochromatic stuff? Can I search the logs for something specific?

 

I'm hoping that trial and error isn't the only method.

[Kelmych]

It's primarily trial and error. For example, collapsing mono color textures is desirable and generally seems to work almost all the time. It's certainly not something that should be turned off for all textures according to Ethatron (see Q2 in the DDSopt technical FAQ tab). There are situations when it doesn't work. Many of the cases where DDSopt needs to ignore a texture are related to complexity in a model (mesh) where an alpha channel is used for an unusual purpose or for textures that have some artifacts or unusual large changes in a small area (these two cases cover most of what I've seen happening when DDSopt doesn't optimize properly).

[DoubleYou]

Is there some reason why the highslide plugin doesn't work on this guide, except in preview mode?

[Kelmych]

What is the highslide plugin supposed to do?

[DoubleYou]

Ok, I found the reason why it wasn't working. Evidently using the

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italics coding with image captions on even one instance will cause the highslide plugin to fail for the entire page. Maybe S4N could look into fixing that. Bold

'''

works fine.

 

If you don't know what the highslide plugin is, go and click on any photo now and you'll see what it does, especially the DDSopt settings gallery. This will make initial setup of DDSopt so much more user-friendly!

[Vulgar1]

Question: In the DDSOPT Quick Guide it says both resolution fields can remain 8192x8192, however in the figures for High Quality and Very High Quality under the DDSOPT Optimization tab all are set to 2048x2048. Should it be 8192 or 2048, or does it even matter as no vanilla textures are more than 2048 anyway?

Edited April 16, 2014 by Vulgar1

[Kelmych]

The largest vanilla files are 2Kx2K so for vanilla files it doesn't matter. The 8Kx8K is just the default when DDSopt is installed. Some users with graphics cards with 3 or Gb VRAM and large monitors may be able to use the 4Kx4K textures provided by some mods; for most users 2Kx2K is as large as they will find useful.

[Vulgar1]

Thanks!

EDIT: solved.

Edited April 17, 2014 by Vulgar1

[thommaal]

Also, has anyone else tried using MO to extract the vanilla textures? EssArrBee mentioned a problem with this a while ago, but only DoubleYou responded. This would save some time in optimizing the vanilla textures since MO seems quicker than BSAopt/DDSopt in doing this.

Is this still under scrutiny? Frankly, I hadn't even considered that MO could be unreliable; after all, I let it extract bsas all the time and so, when it was time to ddsopt the vanilla files, I simply right-clicked them under Archives and clicked "extract".

 

After reading about EssArrBee's experience, I extracted all the bsas again with MO and DDSopt and the folders had the same number of files, the same size and a sample comparison of the HR1 folder with Beyond Compare showed no deviations at all.

 

I don't doubt his experience, but I can't confirm it.

 

I don't know if it is already mentioned in the guide, but antivirus tools or other programs that delay such copy intensive processes are better deactivated.

[Kelmych]

The Bethesda vanilla BSAs have a lot of duplicates and the internal structure of the files in these BSAs doesn't seem as cleanly done as ones with BSAopt or DDSopt. Perhaps this affected MO while SRB was extracting the vanilla BSAs.