Omg help me please. Messes up my .esp files.

[DarkInnerEssence]

Ok so I wanted to open an esp file, so I changed it to open with notepad. Now my mods won't work. Oblivion tells me that they are not valid files. How do I change it back so that the .esp files open the way they use to.

[eric31415]

If you do not already have the Construction Set installed, install it. If it does not automatically associate the .esp filetype with the CS, then you can fix it yourself the same way you changed it to notepad.

 

Out of curiosity, what did you see when opening an esp this way?

[DarkInnerEssence]

Are you suggesting changing the program it opens with to the CS? I've done that. I'm trying to get the esps to go back to how they were before I opened them with notepad. For some reason, oblivion launcher tells me they are now invalid. This is probably because I changed it's properties.

 

All I saw where what I believe to be scripts for the mod the esp was for.

[eric31415]

Ah, if the only ones that do not work are the ones that you opened then you will have to redownload those files. Windows can't recompile that mess into a usable esp.

 

From what you said earlier, I thought that changing the association caused the game to not recognize any mods.

 

Note - scripts are not part of the esp, they will be in a "scripts" folder, or packed in a bsa.

Edited November 26, 2013 by eric31415

[DarkInnerEssence]

I just tryed something. Apparently it is something with the mod, because oblivion recognised the other mods. False flag. Thank you for trying to help though.

[DrakeTheDragon]

Before it becomes misleading, in Oblivion Scripts are very well stored 'only' inside the ESPs/ESMs. There even is no 'scripts' folder anywhere inside Oblivion or the BSAs.

Let not get yourselves become confused by Skyrim's all-new Papyrus way of scripting here. In Oblivion it's still ObScript only, and everything is within the plugin.

 

And for future reference, changing preferences for which program opens which file type is exclusively an OS thing. You simply change a setting in a config file of your OS or something. The files themselves aren't even remotely touched by this process or setting. You can switch back and force between 2-hundred different text-editors to open a ".doc" file, but never once during the process will any ".doc" files themselves ever get altered in any way. The only way to alter a file itself is when it's opened and saved again. And even then it's not always a modifying process.

 

For example I can open my ESPs with a text-editor or a hex-editor any time, and with most of them I can even save them again without altering the byte structure the slightest. What I cannot do with these editors though is making any sense of the data displayed to me. It's a byte code represented in ASCII-characters, sometimes string-values can be deciphered right-away (names, texts, script sourcecode, etc.), but everything else is just a blob of 0s and 1s packed into bytes displayed as characters. Without the structure in which those bytes are stored at hand you can impossibly get any straight values out of the mess.

(Remember the Matrix screen? That's how byte-code reads. It doesn't make any sense without the template how to read it.)

 

And for the game Oblivion it's a save bet the file extension doesn't even matter too much in recognizing any file as a plugin. You can switch a little byte-flag in the header of an ESP and as far as the game is concerned it becomes a full-fledged ESM, although its filename still says ".esp" of course! That's what Wrye Bash's ESM-ify function does, the ultimate solution to create ESP-ESP dependency, when the CS itself doesn't support ESPs as parents for plugins.

[UltharSeramis]

Hi guys,

 

DrakeTheDragon is completely right. Scripts in Oblivion are stored in a folder only if you export your scripts via the Construction Set but this only makes sense if you want to edit a script outside CS or to move it from one mod to another.

 

Greatings, Ulthar

[eric31415]

@ Drake

 

:facepalm:

 

Yep, too much messing with Skyrim lately. Sounds like I should visit an old friend.