DirectX-Graphics-Samples VS DirectXTex

I also looked at the Microsoft sample like this: https://github.com/microsoft/DirectX-Graphics-Samples

It looks like Microsoft has official DirectX samples available, including an SSAO demo if you want to take a look at that. It does seem very different compared to your approach though, so it may not be of any use to you.

In my post I was using the generate mipmaps example to illustrate what I'm saying. In order to generate mipmaps in realtime in OpenGL you would simply make a call to generatemipmaps() or whatever it is called. In Vulkan it is more challenging because you have to do explicit resource management, but it isn't that bad still. In D3D12 you have to write your own compute shader https://github.com/Microsoft/DirectX-Graphics-Samples/blob/master/MiniEngine/Core/Shaders/GenerateMipsCS.hlsli

I wrote a sample a few years ago which implements this technique.

I eventually moved on to the official DirectX 12 Graphic Samples, which had isolated examples that were easier to learn from incrementally. The “Hello World” sample is the best starting point to get the renderer setup with a triangle. This repo is a great reference when you need to verify process and structure (like the order of operation of APIs). Whenever I had a strange bug in my app, I’d go back to these examples to do a diff and see what I was missing.

You probably want to take a look at the officiel DirectX samples page: https://github.com/microsoft/DirectX-Graphics-Samples It’s got samples covering a single topic each, which make them easier to digest, but there’s also the MiniEngine which is a render engine.

MiniEngine game engine

Something about the Github sample did catch my eye:

Microsoft put out this: https://github.com/microsoft/DirectX-Graphics-Samples

There is also this thing, but I never figured out how to compile that.

Optimized Vanilla Textures were optimized for PC and then ported to console. They were optimized using an 'optimizer' for Skyrim, which was not updated for the textures FO4 has. It did add mipmaps for the textures that were supposedly missing some and shrank the resolution; however, seeing as the Creation Kit uses Microsoft's own DDS compression program that adds mipmaps automatically, you're literally just re-adding vanilla textures that have been decompressed and then recompressed with extra loss on the visuals and taking up space. Also, specular maps must be compressed with the Photoshop Intel plugin in order to compress them properly or a program that will allow you to have the red and green channels saved in BC5U format (which is a normal map compression and flipped). GIMP does not do it correctly and I'm very doubtful the program that was used to shrink things did either since it was not designed for FO4's specularity.

DirectXTex

The images are in a split DDS format. To convert them to e.g. PNG files, you first have to concat the files and then use a tool such as texconv.

Yep, the images used for each part of the minigame (a couple variations each of lock background, pick, pins, and springs) are stored as .dds files, DXT1 format. You can convert another image format to this type of texture-- I used texconv. Overwriting the default textures with your new files will replace the assets ingame.

However I've found that MS TexConv from the DirectXTex package is the best way for loosing less quality, so I save my textures as lossless PNGs and use TexConv with my own wrapper then.

You can use texdiag to see information about a texture.

I know only Nvidia texture tools exporter but it's not in masse sorry My suggestion is to create a python script that uses texconv.exe for every file in a directory, pretty easy to get

xLODGen/DynDOLOD/TexGen uses Texoncv to compress textures.

Not necessary on Xbox. Xbox graphics will not function properly without mipmaps so the developers would have had to run everything through xtexconv for Xbox optimization. See Microsoft Documentation on DirectXTex. Code samples for xtexconv for the curious are located here.

All textures/images are .dds files. I use TexConv.exe to convert them to png files. texconv.exe *.dds -ft png