Question About Oblivion Mods

[zuluhour]

This message will introduce you to a point of confusion I am having regarding Oblivion\Data\Textures type of mods. Then the message has a more specific question about the Jarrod textures mod.

 

I am following the suggested mods of Oblivion Rendelius, his article can be found here:

http://www.rpgdot.com/index.php?hsaction=10053&ID=1218

 

Rendelius mentions three (3) mods before he mentions the Jarrod texture mod. Each of these 3 mods unzip to make a lot of .dds files, all of which are to be placed into the folder: "Oblivion\Data\textures\landscapelod\generated" folder.

 

Now I am familiar with addings mods to a game, so I thought to myself, "Ok. No problem."

 

But I had a surprise -- There is no Texture folder in the stock game installation folder!

In other words, I found this: Oblivion\Data

... but there was no Oblivion\Data\Textures

 

This was a surprise, because I thought surely I was making replacement files in an already existing Oblivion\Data\Textures folder. But there was no such folder. So I definitely was not replacing any files, only adding files in a new folder.

 

Well, I went ahead and added the folder structure anyway, I figured it could not hurt.

Question A: But it left me wondering how does Oblivion know to use files in a new folder????

 

So at the moment, I now have: "Oblivion\Data\textures\landscapelod\generated" folder.

 

Then I came to the fourth Rendelius mod, which is Jarrod texture.

The readme for Jarrod seemed to give me a clue for the answer to my question. The readme tells the user to add a file called archiveinvalidation.txt to the base Oblivion installation folder.

 

The path for Jarrod textures is slightly different, it is textures\landscape\ .

 

This file archiveinvalidation.txt has only the text "textures\landscape\s" on one line, but it seems this might answer my question above.

 

Question B: Should not these other (3) mods also have some sort of archiveinvalidation.txt text line also???

 

I very much appreciate any help. Right now, I have these 4 mods "installed" but I am not really sure Oblivion knows how to "reach" them. The discovery that there is no stock Texture sub-folder has me confused.

 

THANKS!

[Cyborg16]

In answer to your questions, Oblivion does have it's data files in a tree like that --- but it's all packed into archive files (with a .bsa extension). Any files put into the directory in the correct place will be used instead of the files in the archives.

 

I haven't heard of a archiveinvalidation.txt file. It's not necessary to register data files put into subfolders of the Data folder. Just put the files in place and run the game.

[zuluhour]

Cyborg16 --

 

Thanks very much for the reply. I unpacked all the mods into "new" folder structures as you described and all is well.

 

zuluhour