DDsopt question involving Skyrim Revisited: Legendary Edition

[FamousDeadGuy]

Did a quick search, couldn't find a specific answer to my 2 questions..

1. Is the process of ddsopt supposed to take hours? The main textures .bsa from the data folder took almost three hours.

2. I named the target folders the prescribed name "Vanillia Textures optimized", but the files that end up in the folders after the optimization are named "bsa.bsa.bsa" or something like that. Should I rename these?

Also, a quick explanation of how using these in the mod manager works would help me overall with my general understanding. Am I correct in thinking that the data folder is virtualized by mod organizerr and the .bsa's that you optimize and put in as mods overwrite the vanilla ones? If that is case, couldn't I just replace the vanilla files with the optimized ones in my actual data folder? Or would that be counter-productive? Thanks, ladies and gents!

[Kelmych]

I'm not quite sure which instructions you followed, so it's hard for me to answer without knowing the answer. I expect you followed the SR:LE instructions, and if so I'm not exactly certain what happened. It's probably related to the DDSopt settings.

 

The SR:LE guide has a simplified approach, while the DDSopt guide has a more involved approach and you need to follow one or the other. There is a shortened version of the DDSopt guide approach in the QuickStart section and a longer version in the Vanilla Texture preparation and DDSopt Optimization sections. The effects of the DDSopt guide approach are summarized in Question 3 in the General FAQ. The simpler SR:LE approach provides a subset of these effects.

 

The resulting optimized textures are used by Mod Organizer to overwrite the vanilla textures contained in several BSAs in the SkyrimData folder. If you put the optimized ones directly into the SkyrimData folder then that folder is no longer in its original altered condition, and one of the goals/advantages of MO is that the SkyrimData folder is left in its original state.

 

On a computer that isn't particularly fast the optimization process can take quite a while; it didn't take as long as you mention, however, on my computer.

[PlanetExp]

1 yes, it takes a long time. For me almost 10 hours for the whole shebang.

 

2 something's seems to have gone amiss. I'm not sure you need to make that folder. You have Working Directory and Vanilla Extracted, the rest is supposed to be automated by the bat files, if I remember correctly.

 

It is true you could put the loose files in the Skyrim data folder and it'll overwrite the BSAs automatically. I don't know what magic tricks MO does to load the virtual file structure but it could potentially lead to troubles if you let Skyrim handle some files, and MO to handle others. What I did was to repackage the textures and install them as separate mods in MO. It is essentially the same thing, only you let MO handle everything without touching your Skyrim install.

Edited March 5, 2014 by PlanetExp

[FamousDeadGuy]

I'm not quite sure which instructions you followed, so it's hard for me to answer without knowing the answer. I expect you followed the SR:LE instructions, and if so I'm not exactly certain what happened. It's probably related to the DDSopt settings.

 

The SR:LE guide has a simplified approach, while the DDSopt guide has a more involved approach and you need to follow one or the other. There is a shortened version of the DDSopt guide approach in the QuickStart section and a longer version in the Vanilla Texture preparation and DDSopt Optimization sections. The effects of the DDSopt guide approach are summarized in Question 3 in the General FAQ. The simpler SR:LE approach provides a subset of these effects.

 

The resulting optimized textures are used by Mod Organizer to overwrite the vanilla textures contained in several BSAs in the SkyrimData folder. If you put the optimized ones directly into the SkyrimData folder then that folder is no longer in its original altered condition, and one of the goals/advantages of MO is that the SkyrimData folder is left in its original state.

 

On a computer that isn't particularly fast the optimization process can take quite a while; it didn't take as long as you mention, however, on my computer.

I followed the SR:LE guide and used their .ini to optimize the textures through DDSopt. In the instructions it said to make seperate folders for each extraction. I followed the directions and am up to the HRDLC part, which is taking a while. I have an AMD FX something or other.. I know it has eight cores and 4.2 Ghz clockspeed. I just wanted to make sure the process wasn't getting messed up because it was taking so long.

It makes sense not to move them into the data folder, because I want to keep that clean. So you are saying that MO will have these optimized textures overwrite the default ones? That is pretty nifty.

What about renaming the optimzed .bsa's? Do you think I should?

[hellanios]

I want to downsize Telvanni Reborn. It's included in the guide. I want use 1024 diffuse and 1024 compressed normal maps. Should I change any option in DDSopt or should I live the settings as seen in the "Using DDSopt" tab? Also, in the "DDSopt Optimization" tab should I use the same settings as seen in pictures S1 and H2?

[Kelmych]

I followed the SR:LE guide and used their .ini to optimize the textures through DDSopt. In the instructions it said to make seperate folders for each extraction. I followed the directions and am up to the HRDLC part, which is taking a while. I have an AMD FX something or other.. I know it has eight cores and 4.2 Ghz clockspeed. I just wanted to make sure the process wasn't getting messed up because it was taking so long.

The SR:LE instructions do extraction from BSA and optimization in one step so it can take a while; it sounds a little long compared to what it took me with a slightly slower computer, but I use the approach in the guide.

It makes sense not to move them into the data folder, because I want to keep that clean. So you are saying that MO will have these optimized textures overwrite the default ones? That is pretty nifty.

What about renaming the optimzed .bsa's? Do you think I should?

I generally save the results as loose files. For the vanilla textures I don't see any advantages for saving them as BSAs. As far as folder or BSA names are concerned you can use whatever name you want; simple names are usually good.

I want to downsize Telvanni Reborn. It's included in the guide. I want use 1024 diffuse and 1024 compressed normal maps. Should I change any option in DDSopt or should I live the settings as seen in the "Using DDSopt" tab? Also, in the "DDSopt Optimization" tab should I use the same settings as seen in pictures S1 and H2?

When I optimized a bunch of the mods in the STEP guide I used the batch file for mods that's discussed in the guide since it made it easier to use different DDSopt parameters for the exterior textures than for the interior ones. For Telvanni Reborn I used 1Kx1K for the exterior textures (in the architecture folder)  and 2Kx2K for the rest. If you want to downsize everything in Telvanni Reborn to 1Kx1K I'd suggest using the constraints tab parameters from S1 in the section of the guide about optimizing textures in mods.

[FamousDeadGuy]

Dragon Prince, so these extracted files aren't .bsa's? The output files that were put into the folder for me were a text document and a BSA. I just want to make sure I have done this right, because it is fairly time-consuming.

[Kelmych]

DDSopt output can be either a set of loose files in a folder or a BSA; it depends on how you configure it. Either is fine. It takes longer if it makes the output into a BSA.

[FamousDeadGuy]

DDSopt output can be either a set of loose files in a folder or a BSA; it depends on how you configure it. Either is fine. It takes longer if it makes the output into a BSA.

Well that would explain the longer times! Awesome. So a renamed .bsa's in neat little folders will work just fine then?

[Kelmych]

You could have a folder such as "HRDLC1" or "HRDLC1 Optimized" as the output. It will contain textures in individual files.

[FamousDeadGuy]

Sweet, got all of it extracted last night. There was some error during the 3rdHRDLC optimization, but hopefully everything is fine. Now onto the ENB!

[Tarikko1]

Strange i followed the Skyrim Revisited steps and each BSA took me like 5-10 minutes for optimization.

[torminater]

You need to use the 64-bit exe of DDSopt.

[Kelmych]

I didn't realize there was a performance difference; I always use the 64 bit version. Is there a difference in time only for large files or for everything?

[Nearox]

On my comp (i5 2500k) everything related to compression (zip, rar, video encoding) is a lot faster when using the 64bit version of a program than with the 32bit. I suspect this also be the case for DDSopt, though I've only used the 64bit version of that prog.

[DoubleYou]

If you're on a x64 system, the current version of DDSopt will not allow you to run the x86 version. At least that's how it's been for me.