DDSopt, MO & the ESMs & BSAs

[xExekut3x]

After completing the DDSopt guide and adding the packaged files to Mod Organizer, what else needs to be done? Specifically, what .esm(s) and .bsa(s) need to be deactivated (unchecked), if any?

 

 

[oqhansoloqo]

OK - I added a note in the introduction to DDSopt about the disk space issues with the program, and specifically while processing the vanilla BSAs.  Someone with more technical data could refine my note with more precise GB amounts (I left that part blank). 

[Kelmych]

DoubleYou - was/am not sure if the game will fail after not being able to locate a file listed in the skyrim.ini while trying to load up, which is why I was thinking of removing Skyrim - Textures.bsa from that .ini file if I am going to remove it from the Data directory where that .ini file would have expected to find it. I guess you are implying that I don't have to do it then?

 

Kelmych - I did follow the guide (at least I think I did) and got one .7z file per BSA (STD.7z, HRDLC1.7z, HRDLC2.7z, HRDLC3.7z, Dawnguard.7z, Hearthfires.7z, and Dragonborn.7z). Problem is, they don't include all of the files necessary to run the game - just the texture files that were optimized.

The addon DLC BSAs are still needed. The 3 HRDLC BSAs and Skyrim - textures.bsa are not.

I tried just deleting their original vanilla BSAs from the data directory to conserve on storage space but the game will not run due to those necessary files that the optimization process seemed to have not transferred into the optimized archive files. Apparently, the game still needs the original BSAs to be in the data directory after following the DDSopt instructions in the STEP wiki because of files included in them that are not in the optimized archive files. This is why I am trying to modify the DDSopt instructions in the STEP wiki.

Step 14 in "Optimize the Vanilla textures" says to leave the DLC BSAs in the Skyrim\Data folder, and the other 4 can be moved out of this folder (I'm not sure whether  Mod Organizer will have a problem when this is done). This will leave some redundancies between some high res files in the HRDLC and lower res versions on the addon DLC BSAs.

I don't have the storage space on my SSD to spare for the instructions as given in the STEP DDSopt wiki. That is why I am considering trying to extract everything from the original BSAs first all together, then overwriting that mix of loose files with the loose files from the archived files (.7z files) produced from the optimization process described in the DDSopt guide. I don't see how I can keep the data from each BSA separate - they have to be mixed together in order to ensure that redundancies between them are eliminated. Or maybe there is an alternative that I'm not seeing - that's why I am asking. I don't see any other way to do it. I'm wondering if things will work properly after doing it this way. The only alternative I could see would be to know exactly which files were left out of each of the optimized archive files (not including the redundancies that were removed by the batch files, but rather the files within each BSA that were not processed by DDSopt) and to just grab those from each BSA, create new BSAs or archives (corresponding to each original BSA) with just those files, and then remove the original BSAs.

The more recent versions of Skyrim (TESV.exe) seem to have problems with BSAs created by BSAopt and DDSopt. They worked find with earlier Skyrim versions. For the HRDLC and STD files, a 7zip archive has greater compression than a BSA; of course, when MO or WB installs it the archive will be decompressed and the files will again be loose.