DDSopt settings

[dreadflopp]

I'm trying to follow the DDsopt guide. The page "Using DDSopt", the page "DDSopt Optimization" and the page "Optimizing the Step mods" all have different setting on the DDSopt constraints tab. I know that the resolution-limit is supposed to be different and how it works, but the settings above resolution-limit are all different on the three pages in the DDSopt guide. Is it intentional and if so, when should the settings on the fist page, "Using DDSopt", be used?

[Nearox]

Yep this has confused me for long (and I've actually reported it some time ago) as well. In the end, I just went with DXTx for everything and have not encountered an issue so far. There's a bit more quality loss on the few _msn.dds textures that are in the game, but if you use any body mod then it doesn't matter anyways. 

[Kelmych]

The different texture format settings for the Constraint tab are intentional. The default values on "Using DDSopt"are just a starting point, and for much use of DDSopt on large texture sets I've found that the uncompressed lossless format settings are more appropriate. The DXTx values are appropriate if you are sure that the textures you are converting are all already compressed, or if you want to convert all uncompressed textures to compressed. Using uncompressed lossless format settings will provide the same optimization for compressed textures as using DXTx, without changing all the uncompressed textures to compressed (as I discovered very recently).

 

If you use the vanilla and mod optimization processes in the DDSopt guide the recommended Constraints tab values provided in the guide should provide a better tradeoff of texture file size and graphic quality than when all textures were converted to compressed. Yes, in most cases the new recommendations are using uncompressed lossless formats. Some of the vanilla textures will iindeed be overwritten by other non-STEP mods, but not all. For example, there were previously some comments about the vanilla optimization causing problems with the character asset textures in STD. These are uncompressed textures and in the current vanilla texture optimization process they remain uncompressed. These textures are not typically overwritten by other mods.

 

Without using these revised Constraints tab settings it would not have been possible to create the general purpose process for optimizing textures from Skyrim mods that is now in the guide.

 

Of course, in some cases it is a better tradeoff to convert the uncompressed textures to compressed; as an example the vanilla texture optimization process does this for a large set of terrain color map textures in HRDLC2. There are also some uncompressed textures for which R5G6B5 format might be a better tradeoff between quality and textures size, but lossless is more conservative when optimizing large numbers of textures.

 

Some new text and a new figure have been added to the "Using DDSopt" tab of the guide to (hopefully) make this clearer for those reading the guide. Almost all the DDSopt settings are set once and then rarely changed, but the Constraints tab settings are changed frequently.

[dreadflopp]

@Kelmych thanks for your very informative answer. It's nice here in the steps forum where people take their time to kindly answer questions. Cheers!

 

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk