arahat

Thanks for the support. We urgently need someone with the proper skillset to be able to shoehorn in support for BC5 to BC7 to existing image viewers, and .There have been request threads opened on irfanView and XnView forums, but noone seems to care :( Also useful tools like Ordenador and DDSOptimizer need BC7 support. I was just using Ordenador an hour ago to remove useless alpha channels from a lot of the dds textures released by Mystirious Dawn. If anyone is curious, you need to click Options for Mod makers > Remove Invisible Mask, to purge to alpha channels carrying no useful data from these textures (in WTC the useless alphas were pure magenta and doubling the file size, real alpha maps have detail).

I am looking for a Window image viewer that supports the newer dds formats like BC7 that are used in Fallout 4 and Skyrim SE. Older dds formats are reasonably well supported by viewers (IrfanView, XnView,WTV, Imagine for Total Commander) and convertors (eg Ordenador), but so far I cannot find a program to quickly view a texture or directory of textures. There are plugins for various image editors now, but they are far too cumbersome for just viewing and evaulating the textures from various mods. Irfan, WTC and Imagine say invalid type/unknown format while XnView displays a hallucinogenic mosaic image of various blobs of colour. The closest I could find was Fallout 4 DDS Image Viewer by Sir Garnon, but it doesn't work like a standard file viewer that can be associated with a filetype on Windows (the way your average Jpeg viewer does); it only supports one prefined directroy and is designed to compared large texture packs to Bethesda's own textures. I'm not 100% sure it supports BC6 or 7; Skyrim Image Viewer doesn't seem to be able to parse BC7. Edit: Delving a little deeper, the main compression formats used for DirectX 9 games were DXT1 (for an RGB with no alpha channel) and DXT5 (for RGB with an alpha channel). In DirectX 10, DXT1 is called BC1, and DXT5 is BC3. I'm not sure about BC5, whether it is new or old, only a post with someone recommending it for specular _s.dds . DDS itself is like a container (a la mp4, mkv) which can store different codec compressed contents. The old tools cannot recognize files encded with the BC6 or BC7 codecs (BC5?). The best introductory article I have found so far is: http://www.reedbeta.com/blog/understanding-bcn-texture-compression-formats/#bc6-and-bc7 DirectX 10 is old (2006?) but these newer DDS codecs are still lacking support.

Thanks for the information.

This is a very late reply, but it may be useful. I just tried dropping and dragging an .xwm music file to the latest version of Foobar, and was amazed that it could play the music without any problems. It used to not be able to handle this format. I have a lot of plugins installed, but think Foobar itself may have been updated to support this aweful , obscure format. Foobar uses Ffmpeg , and Ffmpeg has inbuilt support for wma. Foobar can be downloaded here: http://www.foobar2000.org/ If it fails to play back xwm, then probably the vgmsteam decoder plugin is handling the format. it is available here: http://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_input_vgmstream

I just had a look at SteamCharts - http://steamcharts.com/ - and noticed that 4 out of the top 5 trending games were Fallout titles. The Fallout games are at their all time peak. The biggest increase was in the original Fallout, so it looks like people are playing from the beginning to prepare for Fallout 4. Still, the number of players is low to ARK. Most gamers are 0-day-ers and forget about any title more than 6 months old. Name 24-hour Change Current Players Fallout +328.4% 723 Fallout 3 +305.6% 1,485 Fallout 3 - GOTY +245.3% 6,014 ARK: Survival Evolved +233.6% 44,912 Fallout 2 +144.6% 399

The Blackened mod has most of the compatibility patches you need, except for WMK issues, for which you need to use FOIP. For Project Beauty there are just a few NPC conflicts (PB changes a lot of NPC records while FWE, MMM and EVE change just a few). FWE is a great overhaul but causes problems with other firearms mods since it changes the weapon stats (especially damage) so much. Load order is very important when usings as many big mods as you do, and LOOT seems to get most things right for me. Here are the relevant patches I am using: UUF3P - FWE Patch.esp Blackened FWE + MMM + EVE + Project Beauty.esp Blackened RH + FWE + EVE.esp FO3 Wanderers Edition - Talon Loot Crash Fix.esp RH_WMK_Bridge.esp WeaponModKits - FWE Master Release.esp (FOIP version) FWE(v.5.04)+WMK_weapons_xCALIBRified.esp

The best place to go when starting out modding is the STEP page: http://wiki.step-project.com/User:Kelmych/Fallout3 It has a good, but not comprehensive, list of mod recommendations. NeilMc has the best texture pack, and there are a few Clutter retexture packs as well that NeilMc hasn't modded. FWE (Fallout Wanderers Edition) is my preferred overhaul. You will probably also want a Weather/Lighting mod or two such as Fellout, Project Reality, Realistic Interior Lighting. If you like guns, 20th century Weapons, Apocalypse Armoury and/or the Book of Earache are the ones to get (not on Nexus anymore though).

I had a problem similar to this, but it was with some other FOSE plugins while running with ENB. Even with the FOSE plugins removed, ENB would cause a crash when loading a Save about 33% of the time. ENB works much better with Skyrim.

Overreacting? Hardly. Beftesda/Valve will KILL the modding community unless this is stopped immediately, though I fear even then it may be too late. Once people get that the idea that money can be made from modding, everyone will want to be in on it. Valve lied to gamers. They claimed they were introducing paid mods to support modders, but they are simply exploiting them to make easy money. Let the modders do the work and cash in on their effort. If they really supported modders they would let them keep 90% of earnings generated. For future games, mod support will be DRM-ed and Limited to the Steam Workshop. You won't be able to install 3rd party mods from sites like ModDB or the Nexus, and pir8ted content will not work either. The game will phone home and will block unauthorized (non-Workshop) content. Companies will only support modding if they can make money from paid community created mods. Companies will ship buggy or incomplete games because they know modders will do their work for them, and these Publishers shall steal most of the earnings from Paid mods. Fallout 4 and TES6 will have 100s of Day1 payware mods. A load order of 200 mods will cost $500 :( Paid Skyrim mods may not generate much money for Valve & Theftesda because so many free mods are available, but this is about the future of gaming. There are hundreds of wonderful mods for Bethesda games, and guess how many were created for profit. NONE. The modding community has thrived despite the absence of a profit motive. Michael Albert: "Capitalism is the astonishing belief that the nastiest motives of the nastiest men somehow or other work for the best results in the best of all possible worlds."

In response to post #24563524. #24563719 is also a reply to the same post. Also, I suspect DRM will be built in at the plugin level, as opposed to previous games where the DRM was only on the Exes. Even time you load Fallout 4, the game will phone home to make sure you are authorized to use all of the content, to prevent people pir8ing the inevitable plethora of payware Steam Workshop DLCs.

Early on, I get the impression that what is going to happen in the future, is that modders on the Nexus will keep their old content here but release new mods and updates of old mods (eg bug fixes, compatibility with other mods) as payware Steam Exclusives. About the only thing you can do to protest is to revoke your endorsements from such authors. Love is overrated; greed is the most powerful force in the universe. The ability to make your own changes to a game, create your own content, download the content of others, and modify it to your own needs is a wonderful thing. In a console-centric world, very few PC games now support community content, though people have had limited success modifying mod unfriendly games, like the GTAs. Skyrim will be the last game witha great modding community :( Fallout 4 will be a payware extravaganza. Nobody will share content, modders won't help other modders, collaborators with get into arguments about how to divvy up the spoils.

I think Valve and Bethesda are exploiting modders the way capitalists exploit their workers. From what I have read, authors of curated mods on Steam Workshop only get 25% of the cost of their mod. Is that is true,then that is pure theft. The modder spends hours creating something of valve but Valve and Bethsda, who don't lift a finger, take most of the money. Despicable.

I have a Nvidia GTX 970 cards. I highly recommend it if you want to run an ENB and use 2K texture replacers. I get almost 60 frames per second using RealVision ENB with most of the features on, unless I install a mod that adds huge amounts of grass. Texture Pack Combiner is a good place to start for replacing textures, as well as Amidianborn retextures of most of the armour and weapons. Avoid 4K rextures and uncompressed 2k retextures though, except for really large things like mountains and dragons. 4K textures consume massive amounts of VRAM. 8 GB system RAM is enough, but if you have lots of programs running in the background along with ENB Skyrim and 2K retextures, you may encounter crashes due to running low on memory. Upgrade to 16 GB if necessary. Also, get a SSD. Samsung Evos are excellent. They will reduce your startup and load times by 60%. Massively modded Skyrim takes a long time to load on a conventional HDD. Have fun.

I am pondering whether to experiment with Parallax mods or not as I am currently installing and comparing Texture mods. It is quite time consuming, comparing textures, picking one, and sometimes downsizing or adding a little filtering (for instance, I have discovered that Highpass sharpening does a wonderful job on Normal maps, whereas standard sharpening does artifacts them). Texture Pack Combiner was a good place to start, but it doesn't take into consideration newer mods, and i don't always agree with the choices the author made. I believe ENB is requied with the following line enabled in enbseries.ini: [GLOBAL] UseEffect=true Correct? Parallax seems to requied altered meshes. If I install a whole lot of parallax enabled meshes, and decide to use non-Parallaxed texture sets (eg Beautiful Skyrim, The Beauty of Skyrim), do the parallaxed meshes need to be deleted, or can standard textures be used with them without a hitch. Parallax mods also come with _P.dds textures. I assume these have to more removed before replacing them with another texture? Also, does Parallaxing override standard Bump maps (_N.dds files), or is it applied in additional to Normal mapping).

Thanks for your advice, BigBizKit and lofgren. It is good that Skyrim's engine canot be crippled by badly written or by Excessive scripts.