Araanim Posted November 13, 2015 Share Posted November 13, 2015 (edited) So I made a mod and packed all of the necessary files in a BSA. But when I test everything on a vanilla computer, some of the meshes and textures just don't show up. I know they are in the BSA, I can see them in FO3 Archive, I can extract them from the BSA and get the actual files. I know they are in there. But when I downloaded my mod from creation kit to a virgin computer, stuff was just missing. So I physically copied the BSA over on a flash drive, overwrote the BSA in the data folder, and stuff was still missing. I was thinking maybe I did something wrong with my nif files, or in the creation kit itself, but everything is fine on the computer I made the mod on (where the meshes/textures are physically there.) In FO3 archive the folder structure all looks right, right where it all should be. I just don't get it. Is there a wrong way to pack a BSA so Skyrim can't find stuff correctly? I just can't comprehend what I did wrong... Edited November 13, 2015 by Araanim Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
icecreamassassin Posted November 13, 2015 Share Posted November 13, 2015 I'm assuming you used the Archive.exe program to pack them? Firstly is the BSA anywhere near the 2.1GB size limit? anything over 2.1 will simply not show up in game. Also when packing them up did you ensure to check box the Meshes and Textures and Misc options? Lastly the best way to actually pack the files via archive.exe is to rename the DATA folder to DATABAK and then have a new DATA folder with the mod file structure and then you tell the archive program to add that data file. If you added things manually through the archive program it;s possible it may have messed up something. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
skinnytecboy Posted November 13, 2015 Share Posted November 13, 2015 It's best to ask just to be sure, but are your nif files pointing to the textures correctly? Ie: textures/mytexturefolder/mytexture Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Araanim Posted November 13, 2015 Author Share Posted November 13, 2015 Ah. I did not realize there was a BSA size limit. How do you get around that? I know fully voiced quests have to be larger than mine; I don't know how it's so big. Can you have multiple BSAs for the same esp? Can you compress it at all? (Can I just tell people to unpack the BSA on their own :-) ?) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
agerweb Posted November 13, 2015 Share Posted November 13, 2015 I asume you have already compressed the bsa using the options in Archive.exe. You must have enormous amount of resources! You can't have multiple bsa for the same esp unless you start making changes to ini files which you can't expect the punters to do. You will have to either have loose files as well or have second bsa which will require a dummy esp to load it. Also just a thought - check that the archive has the resources in the correct directory (ie the meshes/ textures are in the Data dir). The directory that your meshes/textures directories are in (or any updates) that you drag into Archive.exe should have 'data' in the title like 'DavesData' or some such otherwise the contents of the bsa won't be read as being in Skyrim/data. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
icecreamassassin Posted November 13, 2015 Share Posted November 13, 2015 1- Have you FUZ'd your voice files? if you haven't and have a lot of them even a dead air WAV track will take up almost half a meg each. WAV;s are completely uncompressed sound files. Look for a FUZ tool online. and convert all your WAV files.2- Any custom textures, have you run DDSopt to make sure that any you have made are not excessively and unnecessarily large?3- How large is your ESP file just for reference? I once came across a plugin I was helping with that was over 10MB and was just a dungeon because they had accidentally re-finalized the navmesh of every interior cell :P (oops)4- Are you certain that you have not accidentally packed vanilla resources into your BSA? Just for comparison, my mod ESP is 18MB and I run all my files loose because I have over 6GB of uncompressed resource in my mod (all optimized, FUZ'd, etc) but this is a HUGE project that's been over a year and a half in the making. Also what agerweb suggests works to get a second BSA. It's what immersive armors does. You simply have to make a new plugin with no data in it, then you can pack up any meshes or textures into it with no issue. Don't put mod critical items like scripts or voice files or SEQ files into the dummy esp's BSA though Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Araanim Posted November 16, 2015 Author Share Posted November 16, 2015 Yep it was the BSA size. I got it all worked out. Thanks for the quick help! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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