Octopuss

Lots of mods have patches released for them, and tons of optional files. How do I install those? Is there any specific procedure, or do I just install them like a new mod and give them appropriate name, and manually set load order?

I was just about to grab this mod, but then found this thread. What the heck is up with only being able to install one animation? That totally kills the purpose.

Well I am glad I ended up here! And allright, sorry, I am used to relatively language-free forums.

I wish normal users uploaded more screenshots then. Just look at this: HD Ore And Ingots: Super Realistic Ore: What in the holy f is the fuzzy thing in the 2nd picture?! That's like a screenshot taken in motion with 1% jpg quality or something. How am I supposed to choose based on that?

I guess the screenshots on Nexus are not the best quality then, because the ore in the other mod looks quite poor compared to this.

Aha. I thought STEP was made so that mods generally don't conflict, with the exception of the graphics section. But after staring at screenshots again I decided to go with this one. Seems like the superior one after all :D

Does this conflict with Super realistic ore? I assume it does, but both mods are listed in STEP, so I am a bit unsure.

seriously

Well, I am mostly picking mods up from STEP list, with a few additions from Neovalen's list, so I guess I am fairly safe? But looking at the instructions for the patches, I still don't quite understand. Example: It says to disable DiversePriests_BringOutYourDeadPatch.esp, but neither of those mods have any such patch listed. Can you explain that? Maybe I will finally understand how it works then.

Ahh. Don't those patches eventually need updating if the appropriate mod is updated as well though? I am building my selection of mods these days, and lots of them have all kinds of patches available for them, and I have to say it's extremely confusing.

Uh, ok. I am reading the detailed instructions again and am still not sure I understand. The patches mentioned there, which I am supposed to disable, are extra standalone patches released for specific mods, typically showing under "optional" category on Nexus? Or do I still get it completely wrong?

Either I had enough coffee, or the changes to the wiki made my brain able to chew through all the informations. I THINK I managed to do it, and have - original vanilla textures and hi-res textures saved somewhere - deleted the above from Skyrim's data folder - the original DLC .bsa files still in data folder - apparently optimized and compressed textures files saved where rest of the mods will go That right? I guess what I do now is to add these optimized textures as new mods and manually moving them right below skyrim.esm and update.esm by using BUM. Right?

I meant something else. Let me try to put it in another way. I am not sure what's the purpose of STEP patches, what they actually do. Are they parts of specific mods or what? If I install every mod listed in the STEP guide, wouldn't I get those changes anyway?

I don't think I am in a position to make any suggestions when I don't even understand what half of the stuff means :) I am not even sure what I want to accomplish, but the main guide says "consider texture optimization", so I thought sure, why not, the possibility of better performance and cleaner data is always good. Unfortunately the way the guide is written (at least as of yesterday afternoon). It's very unclear what is its purpose. There seems to be several things mixed together in very confusing way. Anyway, from random dude who tries to understand the whole thing's point of view, I would suggest: 1) Go through all the links and make sure they are not dead or partially broken. Lots of them point to nonexistant parts of pages. Few examples: Consider texture optimization link from the main guide is broken in that it opens the initial DDSOpt guide. DDSopt instructions in the "repair vanilla HRDLC textures" part. There are LOTS of these across the entire Wiki, and it makes already confusing pages even worse, because key informations are essentially missing. 2) Simplify the guide. A lot. There are several parts that look almost identical to each other and seem to overlap. I would suggest to add some sort of content index to the top of the page and to unify the format of individual sections, which despite being closely related to the main theme (texture optimization in general) talk about different things. I can imagine very brief explanation of the problem and goal, potential prerequisities, and clearly marked steps. The guide often seems to be going into unnecessary depths when in fact it could be few relatively simple sentences (maybe I am exaggerating here a little). There is nothing wrong with explaining stuff in detail, but do not bloat the main steps leading to the goal (careful font formatting, bold and italics is really helpful here) 3) Confusing instructions and/or inconsistencies. I thought ok, I don't need to mess with everything, but if you say the hi-res textures have problems, I can optimize at least those. But that part of the guide suddenly starts talking about extracting everything without explaining why, and suddenly points me to somewhere at bottom of the page. IMO, this is not good, and if you insist, make a link that will take me to the exact spot. Repair the Vanilla HRDLC Textures section seems to abruptly end without any clear indication whether additional steps should be taken or what's supposed to happen, or whether I am supposed to continue to the next section, which looks to be unrelated (if I ended up on the page only with optimizing the hi-res textures in mind). lol, I actually produced a wall of text without knowing what was I talking about. I think I would make a good manager.

I've just realized TES5Edit creates the new files with the same timestamps, which confused me. The other thing that majorly confused me was Neovalen's guide, which is apparently slightly wrong about some things, but also is not meant for noobs at all. I still have to do one file at a time though, right?

I tried to follow the guide and gave up after about an hour of staring at it. For a completely new user like myself, it's pure hell. I got as far as extracting some of the .bsa files in the suggested folder structure, but unfortunately the guide is so horribly overcomplicated I really have no idea what to do (like, what do I extract into the STD folder? where do I extract the non-DLC files?). At first it seemed like a guide for optimizing the hi-res textures because there were some errors in them, but then it progressed into extracting absolutely everything, and then started about compressing textures in general which looks like lowering the quality for the sake of performance (I don't need that, my PC is powerful enough). Now, I might either sound like an ass or an idiot (or both), but I completely fail to understand what is it about (I am sure it's very useful and even more if one isn't just a normal player but rather a modder). Honestly, the guide could use radical simplifying process.

This thread confused the hell out of me. But I ended up here after being confused by the wiki's article about cleaning. I think there really should be a section about cleaning the base game files, because there seem to be some specifics, as described here. Being new to all this, I had no idea what to select and how to "incrementally" move down the list while selecting everything from before. I am not sure I understand what are you saying here about the voodoo with moving files, but is it ok to just rename the stuff from overwrite folder and replace the original files with that? The purpose is to optimize the files, right? And there's probably no point in keeping backups of these at this point.

I was getting afraid Vivid Landscapes won't be mentioned :D Imo, these two guys are a good competition to each other. They should merge and work together.

Yea I saw all that, but got completely confused. So the most popular one listed in Neoval's guide is actually not the highest quality one? Good. I'll give this one a shot. It seems massively bigger, too.

Could someone point me to the torrent for the highest quality SRO textures please? I noticed a "lite" version was mentioned by author himself somewhere, I think a mixture of 1k and 2k textures. There are also several different torrents out there, which makes it even more confusing.

Oh jesus. Allright, thanks. Very unusual :P

Am I completely and hopelessly blind, or is this the first forum where I can't subscribe to threads in any other way than by replying?

As for the ultra-sized textures, I was asking what that part of SMIM actually does, because if I understand it correctly, it's supposed to improve game's meshes, but not textures, so I am pretty confused. Looking forward to more comments :)

Hi there. This is probably going to be a little unusual thread, so please bear with me. Now, I haven't played Skyrim. YET. But I decided to finally give it a try, having time for a new game in my free time schedule :P I immediatelly started looking into the modding business, because that's another thing (besides the base game) people praised and after digging into graphical mods I got pretty confused (and no, I won't play vanilla first, which is exacly why I am posting this). First thing I found was SRO. It looks really awesome, and I immediatelly decided to go with it no matter what. But there are other mods I like as well, but I have no idea if they are compatible with SRO, and I don't want to pointlessly overwrite stuff and possibly bloat the installation. Perhaps someone who saw most of the popular mods million times could give me his opinion. I am well aware this sort of stuff is extremely subjective, but you usually can't tell differences in quality until you saw that particular thing enough times. That's why I think I could benefit from someone else's opinion. Anyway, this is what I also found and liked a lot: WATER - super awesome Vivid Lands "series" - very interesting. but it looks like SRO does all of that (maybe minus some minor things like the rocks and meshes). aMidianBorn mods Enhanced Light and FX Flora Overhaul TreesHD (...not listing the minor ones) Then comes the SMIM, which I thought was only improving meshes, but apparently does something to textures as well. What exactly is the ultra-sized component then? The STEP guide almost makes it seem like an antichrist option that will universally kill the performance of any PC, but how bad it really is? I am getting AMD 280x card very soon, and am naturally curious what is it supposed to handle. I guess this is all had in mind. All comments appreciated.