I Never ran DDSopt before...results ?

[Quahogs]

I'm following the SR manual and I have a few questions 

 

1) In a nutshell what does this process do ?

 

2) The first file Skyrim - textures.bsa took 4+ hours to complete.  Is it supposed to take THAT long ?  I have a feeling I fouled somewhere.  What are the contents supposed to be in the working/vanilla folder ?  All I have are maybe 8 or .bsa files.   By contrast HRDLC1 took but a couple of minutes and that working directory shows a whole bunch of dir structure.  I have no idea if it's doing what it's supposed to .  

 

3) In the IGNORE tab I selected "Don't process any of the known file-types at all.   This now show all 4 options in that tab selected.  Is this correct ?  I didn't change ANYTHING in DDSopt after I installed it yesterday

 

4) If for some reason I ran something incorrectly would this foul the game in same way ?   

 

thanks all...

[Quahogs]

Wow ok I just saw the wiki file as per DDSopt. It looks like I have alot of reading to do. I thought it was more of a plug and go tool. I was wrong lol. Looks like I'm going to have my hands full with this one. My above questions still stand and any newbie helpful hints would be greatly appreciated. I'm ok with good enough but I DO want to take advantage of what this tool has to offer

[Jormungand24]

One of your settings was incorrect. You misread somewhere. I remember I did the same thing, my first attempt took hours, but then I realized I didn't set everything up properly and next time it was MUCH shorter. Read the Wiki file. I'm going to say you missed a setting.

[Quahogs]

Thanks. I'm confused with the IGNORE tab though. DDSopt freshly installed has options (from top to bottom 4 of them) 1,2 and 4 checked. Neovalen notes to check 3. Does that mean the others remain checked or now ALL 4 are checked ? Also the Wiki detail for DDSopt IGNORE tab graphic show 2 and 4 checked. ?????

[Aiyen]

1. It alters and fixes textures of the DDS type based on input.

 

2. Yes it is. If it does not take that long then you have done something wrong. You are asking it to open and compress several GB´s worth of data.

 

3. The ignore tap is mainly there if you want to just move textures about to new locations, or if you want to extract them from bsa archives.

 

4. It is likely that the process can fail on one or more textures. This is why you should NEVER just do it on your entire mod lib.

The main error is faulty compression, or wrong compression for that particular texture type (There are more then one yes).

If you see some purple models running around ingame then that is most likely what happened.

[Kelmych]

The first step in the Skyrim Revisited guide is to extract textures from Skyrim - textures.bsa . For that processing the [Don't process any of the known file types] is checked in DDSopt (this is also described in the DDSopt guide ; step 5 in Extracting Textures says the same thing.). When you are optimizing textures, the Skyrim Revisited guide mentions that you uncheck this option.

 

The DDSopt guide has more detailed instructions since many users haven't used the tool previously; it includes screenshots of the DDSopt parameters and the reminder to download and install the most recent update of DDSopt.ini from the wiki. It also includes a few additional steps not explicitly mentioned in the Skyrim Revisited guide. If you are already quite familiar with DDSopt you might prefer a different process to optimize the textures.

[Quahogs]

Thank you. I think I finally get the concept. Extract and optimize are two different functions. Check is so you can extract, uncheck so you can optimize. I hope this is all worth it in the end. I'm starting to doubt my ability to get thru SR properly ! Just need to concentrate and comprehend a weeee bit better ....