NifSkope Material Properties aren't applying in-game

[dreamCloud]

Not sure what I'm doing wrong here since this was working before for other models just fine. I often do a little dabbling with models in NifSkope to do color and luminance corrections on materials after I export and link up all the textures. Before I could adjust the Ambient/Diffuse/Spec/Emissive/Glossiness just fine to dial in and get things exactly how I wanted them to show up. Now it seems the only thing I can change is the emissive color and the alpha value.

When I change the ambient, diffuse, or spec colors nothing gets applied even if the changes are drastic (like going all black or pink or something). What's weird is they look fine in NifSkope but in-game nothing ever changes any more when before it would. I checked the specular (alpha channel in the normal file) to make sure it wasn't overriding like it does when it's too strong and even just went without a spec map altogether (using a DXT1) and still the colors I select in NifSkope do nothing. Aside from changing material colors I'm still kind of a dunce with NifSkope so not sure what I did wrong here.

Using NifSkope 2.0 Dev 7 and exporting files from XBlender 2.49b (using NIF Scripts 2.5.9, PyFFi 2.1.11). I haven't changed anything in my setup from when I was doing things before successfully. The only thing I can think of was I had an alpha error on export for one of the meshes so I removed the alpha on that particular mesh and re-enabled it after export, but it's not even the meshes I'm having a problem with (in the screencaps you can see I darkened the rafters under the roof and the top roof element, but in-game they show up super bright still). 

Edited March 1 by dreamCloud

[AndalayBay]

Probably not related to your issue, but Nifskope has been updated. I've been using dev 9d and can confirm it works quite well with Oblivion. There's another active branch which has just been released. It focuses more on the newer games, but the author says he fixed a number of issues for the older games as well. I was going to give it a spin, but haven't done so yet.

Now silly question time: are you sure you're copying your new mesh into the proper directories under Data? In other words, the game is using your new mesh? Personal experience here, so I have to ask.

I'm not a modeller so I can't help you much more than that. I have messed around with the vertex colours, which is a huge array in Nifskope, but I don't know how to use Blender.

[dreamCloud]

I mean yeah it's present in the game and isn't showing any missing mesh symbols or purple textures for missing textures so I'm fairly positive I got that part right .

This is like my 100th model or so I've put in and just started noticing this issue. For some reason it just doesn't want to receive any of those material values, and now the problem is retroactive as well as I can't get it to work on previous things it was working on. 

As for vertex colors I mostly do that by hand in Blender. These are all generic textures I use across several models to prevent Oblivion doing so many draw calls in any given cell. So to give the models some hutzpah I vertex color in a lot of details that would be handled by Ambient Occlusion in modern games. You can see that on the model especially well on the rocks. But I don't like having to do that for every single piece of the models so I relied on the material shader to do some of the work as well but now that's not functioning. So, guess more troubleshooting in the future :/.

I'll give some of those new nifskope editions a whirl in a bit too. Thanks for those links!

[dreamCloud]

Tried the new nifskope versions.

Something interesting to note: the latest doesn't process attachkf spell for Oblivion animation files. Thought that was a weird bug.

Anyways, for the dev9 I noticed that it shows the material coloring just fine in the file. Really not sure what's going on tbh.