User:Z929669/Sandbox/HeaderTabs Functionality

WIP

This guide is currently under heavy revision. The information in some sections is accurate, but linked information may be out of 'order' or out of context with the current guide format.

A simplified guide to using DDSopt to improve texture quality & performance -- by z929669 & Kelmych & S.T.E.P. Team

Updated: 4:12:39 26 August 2024 (UTC)

GUIDE FORUM THREAD

[edit]

Textures are game assets that wrap around object models in games like Skyrim. These textures provide the colors and details of all objects. Think of textures as the paint and models (meshes) as the canvas. In short, textures play a major and fundamental role in making games like Skyrim aesthetically enjoyable. Textures can be quite large, however, and they are often primarily responsible for performance limits. Unfortunately, many of the fantastic textures produced by Bethesda artists and modders for Skyrim do not exist in an optimal format. There are trade-offs for quality and performance, and there is quite a lot of room for improvement in this area. Thankfully, we have DDSopt to rectify these issues.

What is DDSopt?

DDSopt (created by Ethatron) offers optimization of texture files by eliminating redundancies, ensuring proper compression format, and recalculating scale-corrected mipmaps using a variety of custom algorithms. Several different types of texture files are used in object modeling in Skyrim, and DDSopt can recognize most types and be told how to treat unknowns using a configuration file.

Although powerful and useful, DDSopt (and its little brother BSAopt) is a beta program that is no longer under development. As such, it lacks some bells and whistles and is not so simple to use without some instruction. Nevertheless, no other application exists with the functionality of DDSopt, and it is simply the best application for optimizing, compressing and packaging texture assets for Skyrim, Oblivion and Fallout, period.

Modded texture packs are often composed of textures saved in an inefficient compression format in relation to the texture function. This translates into textures often being 2x larger than necessary or worse due to inclusion of redundancies that add no useful information. Like unnecessary white space in this guide, the net effect is that more graphic memory (VRAM) is required to render these 'bloated' textures, which in turn costs valuable resources and hampers performance. In addition to bloat, improperly-formatted textures may also lack important information in the form of mipmap levels (see Q1) required for scaling the textures in game. Visit the DDSopt page on the OBGE Wiki to learn more about texture compression and technical details of DDSopt, and the DDSopt Nexus page for more information on DDSopt functionality.

Purpose of this Guide

The available web documentation on DDSopt is highly technical and not very extensive. This guide provides the bulk of available documentation on how to use DDSopt. The guide includes information aimed at users across a wide range of backgrounds from mod developers with significant experience with Solid Modeling and the associated tools for creating and editing these models to new users with limited understanding of these models. For much of the material in the guide it is currently the only available source. The guide includes some step-by-step instructions along with explanations. This fulfills one of the goals of the guide which is to provide insight in using DDSopt so it can also be used for situations not described in detail in the specific steps listed in the guide.

As suggested by Martigen, it is hoped that mod authors will adopt "best practices" that are put forth in this guide as standard procedure when creating textures for the modding community. The main goal is to facilitate proper implementation of DDSopt for modders and mod authors without requiring too much pain or need for hours of research and preparation. This guide's authors are not graphics experts or artists. The STEP community has modders with enough experience to recognize that DDSopt is quite useful for the purpose of improving performance and quality, and empirical evidence is presented here to support this claim. Thus, aside from being a practical guide to using DDSopt and some effective benefits of doing so, this guide also serves as a review and "DDSopt-imization" of some of the major texture overhauls including Bethesda's Hi-Res Texture Pack DLC, Vano89's Hi_Res DLC Optimized, Nebula's Skyrim HD, Starac's Skyrim Realistic Overhaul, Z4G4's Serious HD Retexture Skyrim and Insanity's Texture Pack.

[edit]

Initial Configuration

To reduce potential issues on Windows OS, the following should be considered:

The user must be in the Administrators group on the system so that DDSopt GUI settings changes will be preserved upon exit.
Applications installed within User Access Controlled (UAC) directories (e.g., Program Files, Program Files (x86)) may not behave as expected, so consider installing DDSopt and "Steam" into other directory locations (e.g., D:\Games\DDSopt and D:\Games\Steam).

Before using DDSopt for the first time, launch the game at least once so all the game configuration settings and some important registry values are initialized.
Make sure the 2012 Visual C++ redistributable from Microsoft is installed on the system; the current 32 bit and 64 bit versions are available. When using a 64 bit version of windows installing both the 32 and 64 bit versions is recommended.
Download DDSopt 0.8 - pre-release - update 4 from the Nexus, and create a shortcut to the executable.
Right click on the shortcut, go to the "Compatibility" tab, and check the box labeled "Run this program as an administrator", then click "Apply" and "OK". This ensures that DDSopt is run with administrative privileges so the chosen settings will "stick" between sessions. NOTE: If an error occurs stating that "d3dx9_43.dll is missing" when launching for the first time, then install or reinstall DirectX to resolve.
Be sure to update to the latest version of DDSopt.ini, and place it into the same folder as the executable, overwriting the older version of this file. The DDSopt.ini file, described in more detail in the Appendix, is used to configure texture-specific processing. Unlike some INI files, it does not affect the GUI or default GUI settings.

The Interface

The GUI settings for DDSopt control aspects of texture optimization, and settings presented here are based on Ethatron's recommendations, being an expert in texture compression and optimization in general. When first installing DDSopt, the GUI settings need to be updated. The screens below show the recommended settings based on experience with the vanilla Skyrim textures, but custom modded textures may require alterations from the "vanilla baseline" settings presented here.

Main Menu Settings