VGI Posted February 23, 2011 Share Posted February 23, 2011 Some items in the game, (some pies, some housewares, etc) does not have icons. Why? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Striker879 Posted February 23, 2011 Share Posted February 23, 2011 The only pies I'm aware of in the vanilla game are Shepherds Pie and that has a menu icon. You probably have a mod that adds extra items to the game, but the mod developer didn't assign a menu icon to the resource. Happens with some armors etc as well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VGI Posted February 23, 2011 Author Share Posted February 23, 2011 The only pies I'm aware of in the vanilla game are Shepherds Pie and that has a menu icon. You probably have a mod that adds extra items to the game, but the mod developer didn't assign a menu icon to the resource. Happens with some armors etc as well. Anything I could do to add icons to these items? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lazilot Posted February 23, 2011 Share Posted February 23, 2011 Well. There's the Construction Set of course, I never really needed to add icons to items i make. I usually just use a default item icon Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Striker879 Posted February 23, 2011 Share Posted February 23, 2011 (edited) I'm certainly no expert at this, but I believe this is how you'd add an icon to your pie. Open the mod's esp in the Construction Set and find the item in the Ingredients list in the Object window (you'll probably need to click the plus sign (+) and scroll down the list. There will be two buttons to the left of a rectangular box (that would display the icon if one was assigned). The top one will be the world model nif that displays the item if you drop it on the ground during the game, the lower one will probably be blank unless an icon is already assigned but not displaying. If it does have an icon assigned note the path displayed on the button (e.g. the icon for Shepherds Pie I mentioned earlier is found in Clutter\IconServantPie.dds). Now go that directory in your Oblivion install directory using Windows Explorer and see if you can find the dds file that your pie is looking for (menu icons added by mods are usually found in Oblivion\Data\Textures\menus\icons and then the subdirectory named by the mod). If you can't find the directory, go to the folder you downloaded the mod to (hopefully you extract the contents of the downloaded archive into a separate directory and check out it's contents before you install a mod ... good practice) and look at the directory structure of the extracted mod. When I downloaded and extracted Bisquits Elven Princess for example, it created folder structure inside my temporary directory for it's menu icon giving me subdirectories Textures\menus\icons\ElvenPrincess and three dds files for displaying it's menu icons. This is the directory structure and contents that I copied into my Oblivion install directory when I installed the Elven Princess mod. If the downloaded and extracted directory structure and contents for your mod that added the pies isn't the same as your Oblivion install you'll need to correct any differences. If for example I didn't have the icons\ElvenPrincess subdirectories in my Oblivion install directory (using my example above) I would go to my downloaded and extracted directory, right click on the icons subdirectory there and select copy from the right click menu. Then I would right click on the menus subdirectory in my Oblivion install directory and select paste from the right click menu, which would give my Oblivion install directory a copy of the contents of the icons\ElvenPrincess subdirectory in the correct location. Checking my Oblivion install directory would now show Oblivion\Data\Textures\menus\icons\ElvenPrincess and the three dds files needed by the mod. If however, when you check the downloaded and extracted directories you don't find a menus\icons subdirectory that means the mods authors may have never created any menu icons for that resource. Please note that when you're looking for the icon resources for one particular item in a big mod that adds lots of items there may be a menus\icons subdirectory with icon resources for other items added by the mod, just not that one item you're looking for. Another possibility, that leads onto the next steps anyway, is that the resources for the mod may be contained in a bsa archive, the same kind of location that the vanilla game uses for it's resources. They're just a form of compressed archive, similar to zip/rar/7z formats. You can look inside the bsa archives the same as you can other formats, and extract resources you need. I use the BSA Browser utility that's part of Oblivion Mod Manager myself but there are also other tools. If your mod does come with a bsa file for it's resources but it's not displaying the menu icons you can look inside the bsa files for the dds file that you found way back near the beginning (my example was the icon for Shepherds Pie which is found in the Clutter\IconServantPie.dds file located in Oblivion's 'Oblivion - Textures - Compressed.bsa' file located in the Oblivion install Data directory). If you can find the right file name but it's directory structure isn't the same as the one that was listed in the Construction Set (way way back near the start of this explanation) you can extract the file from the bsa into your download directory. You would then create the required subdirectories in your Oblivion install and copy the file into the correct subdirectory (one caveat here, and perhaps more knowledgeable members could correct me, but for this to work you may need to use archive invalidation). If the required file doesn't exist in the mod's bsa you can extract a suitable one from the Oblivion bsa resources and use it. Again using Oblivion Mod Manager's utility BSA Browser, I'd open the Oblivion - Textures - Compressed.bsa in the BSA Browser and click the drop down box in the lower right and change it to File name then click the Sort button. Scroll way down to the files with names beginning with 'icon' until you find the file iconservantpie.dds (there will be three of them, one in a menus50 subdirectory, one in a menus80 sub and one in a plain menus subdirectory ... I'd use the menus one, not sure what the other two subs are for). Highlight the file and click the Extract button. Select where you want the file extracted to from the resulting menu (if you do this a lot you may want to create an ExtractedResources directory somewhere on your hard drive) and click Save. Create a subdirectory in your Oblivion install that's consistent with established standards (my suggestion is Oblivion\Data\Textures\menus\icons\<name_of_the_mod>) and then copy your extracted iconservantpie.dds there. Back in the Construction Set double click your pie that's missing a menu icon and click on the lower of the two buttons to the left (the one that says Add Icon Image). Navigate in the Select DDS File menu that comes up to find the iconservantpie.dds that we copied to the Oblivion install directory and click Open to assign the extracted file to your item. Again you may need to use archive invalidation, not sure on that. OK, after all that I know what your thinking ... way too much bother. I don't disagree, a blank spot on the menu isn't that big a deal to me either. Edited February 23, 2011 by Striker879 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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