Modification in Fallout 3

[tjcollier3615]

I know I'm going to sound like a total idiot here, but this has been something that I can't yet seem to understand.

I've played Oblivion and done modding to it, it was easy. But in Fallout, all of the Meshes and Textures are in those .bsa files.

I tried expanding them and then putting in the textures or meshes and then when I load the game, I get all of these error messages.

From what I've been reading, I don't think that you have to pack the original .bsa back into an archive, but what is the secret to actually making modifications?

Can anybody tell me what I'm doing wrong or give me a tip or two about how to actually be able to add new meshes and textures and STILL have the game load correctly?

I've already seen several cool modifcations that I'd like to make, but because of my lack of understanding as to how to actually do this, I've held off.

Just call me stupid in Miami.

[Trigonous]

All the meshes and textures were in .bsa files in Oblivion too, you need to create the meshes/textures folders, just like in Oblivion. If you have Archive Invalidation on, any mesh/texture with the same name/file structure in the folders will overwrite the ones in the .bsa files. Some mods come with their own .bsa files, but most just use the meshes/textures folder.