FAQ
What do i put in source ?
The program was designed to be used with MO2. I never tried any other program, so you will have to find yourself how it work with Nexus or any other.
In MO2, you have a mods path, where all your mods are unzipped. Something like "...MyMo2Folder\mods". This is what is expected in the source text field.
To say that differently, you have, for any mod manager, somewhere where your mods are stored. Something like "c:\modmanager\mods\modname\modfile.xxx". You have to target "c:\modmanager\mods\" in the source field. Any other input will not work.
You cant to target directly the skyrim folder, but i do not advise that.
What downsizing textures actually do to my performances ?
Two things:
- It reduce the loading time, if you have long loading time you can actually reduce them to almost nothing, at the cost of texture quality.
- It reduce the video card graphic memory usage, and doing so it reduce the time your graphic card takes to treat textures, and so you will gain fps. Again, at the lost of quality.
Where do i set the programs path to texdiag, texconv, and optionally bsarch and other ?
See this. Don't worry Octagon will stop and show which path is wrong if the need arise.
How did i configure the program to make the basic changes to my textures ?
For Skyrim i recommend this
For Fallout 4 i recommend this
I set 1024px for diffuse textures and 512px for utility textures. It's very good for performance on a 2GB memory video card.
If you want better performance on a 3/4GB video card, set them to 2048/1024.
If you want better performance on a 1GB or less video card, set them to 512/256.
How did i configure the program to exclude some mods ?
First, for this you need to use mo2, or any mod manager which use virtual folder (i don't know how vortex works so i can't say)
Set the filter in the general panel: Follow this example
In this example, mods with names starting with 'water' will not be processed; and only mods with 'textures' in their names will be processed.
Can i change the format of the textures of all my mods ?
In short: no. Don't change the format unless you know exactly what you are doing, and if you are you don't need advice or warnings from me.
You won't gain anything in quality nor in performance by changing the compression/format of a texture, you can only loose quality by doing so. Only the original mod author can make better textures compression from his uncompressed work.
Can i force the mipmaps of the textures of all my mods ?
In short, yes. You can set them to be regenerated or to be corrected without any risks. It's unlikely you have any textures without mipmaps in your mods; and if so, it will not cause ctd, but you will see it in game; the texture will be very sharpened even from far away. Here an example to what to expect.
All textures should be mipmaped, but the ones only used for 2D UI purpose and the ones for NPC face customization should not (but it's not the end of times if they are, but read the black face paragraph for warnings).
Black face curse
I recently run into the black face problem in Fallout 4, because i downsized too much the actors\facecustomisation textures, or so it seem, it's unclear to me how this could infer the black face problem but be warned. Eventually i ended putting all the facecustom textures in a folder appart, to avoid touching them. They also don't have mipmaps so don't apply the force generating mipmap filter on them. Facecustom texture are originally 1024px; so it won't be the problem unless you try downsizing under 1024, if you do be sure to either work with backup in case or do like me and discard the face customs.
Please comment/ask question in the post section of the mod for better readability.