BSA Alteration and Archive Invalidation not working!

[infaltrator12]

HI all thx in advance for the help but I can't figure out why my texture mods arent working. I have used BSA alteration in Vortex and a seperate file for Archive invalidation but it still isn't working in my game. The mods I am trying to use are Roberts Female Body v13 and Quarls texture pack revised. Thx again, this has been bothering me for the past couple hours.

[Striker879]

BSA Redirection is the only archive invalidation method you should be using. BSA Alteration is an older method that was superceded by BSA Redirection.

[ReverendFelix]

I suggest this;

 

https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/10724

 

Get the installer version. Don't listen to what people say about it either. I have over 40 bsa's working flawlessly together, and it is all I use for it.

[LFact]

If you applied BSA alteration and don't have backup of vanilla BSAs, you may need to reinstall your game to undo it. As Striker said BSA redirection is the only one recommended. However, BSA redirection won't work if your BSA file date is newer than any other 'replacer' type mods, so you need to 'reset' the timestamp...(I'm sure both OBMM and Wrye Bash can reset BSA file date)

[DrakeTheDragon]

ArchiveInvalidationInvalidated! is one way of applying BSA Redirection to your game. All others (OBMM, NMM, Vortex, what have you) do exactly the same, just in slightly different ways.

 

They place an empty dummy BSA into your Data folder and insert it into the "sArchiveList" entry inside your Oblivion.ini, for some reason leading into this one empty dummy being the only BSA left requiring invalidation for external contents to be used over its own, basically invalidating the very need for Archive Invalidation itself entirely once and for all.

 

The crucial points are:

 

1) Like others already pointed out, that in Oblivion file date trumps just about everything, and when coming from certain digital distribution platforms, like Steam or GoG, the dates of the BSA files will be way too recent for any replacer-type mods ever to work, Archive Invalidation applied or not. That's why there's multiple means to "re-date" the BSAs back to somewhere around 2006, around when Oblivion was originally released, which will make replacements work again through Archive Invalidation.

 

2) If through any means either the empty dummy BSA gets removed or the edit to the Oblivion.ini gets undone later, you'll have to re-apply BSA Redirection again, of course.

 

3) And one very critical point that's often overlooked: If by any means there still are left-over files named "Archive Invalidation.txt" anywhere inside your Data folder, be it from yourself having created them, following some archaic manual install instructions, or from them having been automatically created by a tool, these left-over files will keep instructing your game to use external file X over internal file Y, while there of course isn't any Y inside the empty dummy BSA, which is known to lead to multiple random texture and mesh issues throughout your game.

 

 

And yes, the other means to Archive Invalidation, BSA Alteration and the "Archive Invalidation.txt" file way, are highly discouraged nowadays. The file-based approach starts randomly failing after a certain number of files have been superseded, stops acting up temporarily once some more files were added, and starts causing issues all over again after yet a few more, and so on. And BSA Alteration, that is inserting the new assets straight into the BSA and removing all trails of the original game files, can in most cases only be undone through re-installation of the game, or perhaps through use of backups, if you're lucky, and can seriously damage your game when done wrong. ...Plus "both" have to be re-done every time further replacements are added to your game, which is not the case with BSA Redirection.

[ReverendFelix]

That's some great info!