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About this mod
I was playing around with some Hubble images and I thought: why not use them as Skyrim textures?
- Permissions and credits
Ultra Hi-Res Nightsky
DESCRIPTION
This mod is a texture replacer for the galaxy showing up in the night sky. It offers extremely high resolution textures of up to 16k x 16k which were carefully crafted to nicely fade into the background or into adjecant textures.
Of course, this texture size is not very useful for regular gameplay, the full size textures would take up way too much VRAM.
That's why the mod now comes bundled with a little Program that generates usable textures with a configurable resolution and opacity to control visual intensity.
That way it's not neccessary to supply many different downloads of multiple versions, instead you are able to customize your galaxy texture to your desire!
INSTALLATION
To install the current version, you will have to run the texture generation program that comes with the download.
The Program only runs on Windows 64-bit Systems (which you very probably have when playing Skyrim SE) and requires .NET Framework 4.5.2 to run.
Step 1:
After unpacking the download you will see a folder like this:
In there you have to run the Program "TexChoice.exe", which will open up to the following window:
Step 2:
In this window, you can Choose the Galaxy texture you want to have and set its opacity. A lower opacity will lead to less intensity as the texture becomes more see-through. The preview on the top left in the window will update automatically to reflect every change in choice you make, including changes in opacity.
After deciding on your texture, you click "Next" to come to the next window.
Step 3:
This window is the selection of the Resolution and Graphics compression choice. This window might take a while to load because the program preloads the selected texture in full resolution to prepare for exporting it. The next window looks like this:
In here you can choose the desired resolution of the texture from a drop-down menu like this:
The drop-down menu will show all possible resolutions from the source resolution down to the first resolution in which at least one side of the texture has a size of 512px.
The other choice in the window is for the compression algorithm. Skyrim SE supports the higher quality BC7 DDS compression, which is rather new and thus cannot be loaded by Skyrim LE. Since BC7 Compression is quite calculation-intensive, the program will accellerate the compression by using your GPU.
The alternative is BC3/DXT5 compression, which is the most common option used for textures which can be see through. The quality is a little lower and may have more artifacts, but the texture will be supported by Skyrim LE as well and can be opened in most Graphics editing programs like Paint.NET or Gimp (with the DDS plugin), while BC7 requires newer plugins only available for very few programs like Photoshp.
When clicking the "OK" button, the program will export the generated texture in a zip file containing the proper texture path and a fomod "info.xml" file.
Step 4:
This zip can be imported into the mod manager of your choice for easy installation.
The "info.xml" is currently in the wrong location (will fix asap, but uploading the whole 1GB file takes a while) but does not have a big effect anyway, it's only a placeholder should the mod get more features in the future.
Please move or remove the zip-File after you installed the texture or at least before attempting to generate a new one. The program is currently not able to overwrite the zip file and does not automatically delete the old one. One of these features will be added into the next version to avoid issues if the file is still there.
ADDITIONAL INFO
The source code of the Program can be found on my Github Repo. You can take a look at it if you want to do stuff with DDS images in C# too.
I can see some future for this program for other mods, if I ever manage to offer a texture list dynamically from all found textures within a folder, so maybe other texture mods don't have to publish multiple resolutions one by one either. But for now that's pretty far off.
Concerning higher resolutions than 16k square:
Bad News: I did manage to fix a dds export plugin to create a 32k x 16k texture. I can't open that texture with any
other program though, since they all crash with an overflow (if it's the same issue
as with the regular gimp plugin, then it's due touse of signed integers for memory
allocation, which overflow at 32k*16k*4byte). This also means that Skyrim crashes when
trying to load a save or start a game with that texture...
I appreciate feedback or tips on how to improve the texture.
Please remember this was done just for experimenting and is no professional work. The source of the image can be found in the credits.
Now, enjoy your new night sky!
DESCRIPTION
This mod is a texture replacer for the galaxy showing up in the night sky. It offers extremely high resolution textures of up to 16k x 16k which were carefully crafted to nicely fade into the background or into adjecant textures.
Of course, this texture size is not very useful for regular gameplay, the full size textures would take up way too much VRAM.
That's why the mod now comes bundled with a little Program that generates usable textures with a configurable resolution and opacity to control visual intensity.
That way it's not neccessary to supply many different downloads of multiple versions, instead you are able to customize your galaxy texture to your desire!
INSTALLATION
To install the current version, you will have to run the texture generation program that comes with the download.
The Program only runs on Windows 64-bit Systems (which you very probably have when playing Skyrim SE) and requires .NET Framework 4.5.2 to run.
Step 1:
After unpacking the download you will see a folder like this:
In there you have to run the Program "TexChoice.exe", which will open up to the following window:
Step 2:
In this window, you can Choose the Galaxy texture you want to have and set its opacity. A lower opacity will lead to less intensity as the texture becomes more see-through. The preview on the top left in the window will update automatically to reflect every change in choice you make, including changes in opacity.
After deciding on your texture, you click "Next" to come to the next window.
Step 3:
This window is the selection of the Resolution and Graphics compression choice. This window might take a while to load because the program preloads the selected texture in full resolution to prepare for exporting it. The next window looks like this:
In here you can choose the desired resolution of the texture from a drop-down menu like this:
The drop-down menu will show all possible resolutions from the source resolution down to the first resolution in which at least one side of the texture has a size of 512px.
The other choice in the window is for the compression algorithm. Skyrim SE supports the higher quality BC7 DDS compression, which is rather new and thus cannot be loaded by Skyrim LE. Since BC7 Compression is quite calculation-intensive, the program will accellerate the compression by using your GPU.
The alternative is BC3/DXT5 compression, which is the most common option used for textures which can be see through. The quality is a little lower and may have more artifacts, but the texture will be supported by Skyrim LE as well and can be opened in most Graphics editing programs like Paint.NET or Gimp (with the DDS plugin), while BC7 requires newer plugins only available for very few programs like Photoshp.
When clicking the "OK" button, the program will export the generated texture in a zip file containing the proper texture path and a fomod "info.xml" file.
Step 4:
This zip can be imported into the mod manager of your choice for easy installation.
The "info.xml" is currently in the wrong location (will fix asap, but uploading the whole 1GB file takes a while) but does not have a big effect anyway, it's only a placeholder should the mod get more features in the future.
Please move or remove the zip-File after you installed the texture or at least before attempting to generate a new one. The program is currently not able to overwrite the zip file and does not automatically delete the old one. One of these features will be added into the next version to avoid issues if the file is still there.
ADDITIONAL INFO
The source code of the Program can be found on my Github Repo. You can take a look at it if you want to do stuff with DDS images in C# too.
I can see some future for this program for other mods, if I ever manage to offer a texture list dynamically from all found textures within a folder, so maybe other texture mods don't have to publish multiple resolutions one by one either. But for now that's pretty far off.
Concerning higher resolutions than 16k square:
Bad News: I did manage to fix a dds export plugin to create a 32k x 16k texture. I can't open that texture with any
other program though, since they all crash with an overflow (if it's the same issue
as with the regular gimp plugin, then it's due touse of signed integers for memory
allocation, which overflow at 32k*16k*4byte). This also means that Skyrim crashes when
trying to load a save or start a game with that texture...
I appreciate feedback or tips on how to improve the texture.
Please remember this was done just for experimenting and is no professional work. The source of the image can be found in the credits.
Now, enjoy your new night sky!