when using /texture directory vs the .ba files i get bad textures in game

[balogm]

anyone know the reason I get low res bit mapped looking textures on a lot of things in game once I use the textures / meshes folders vs the original BA files. I have no mods installed and was just prepping the data folder for that possibility and noticed the gltiches. examples. clouds are very bit mappy, trees have a mesh look to the leaves etc. when I remove the rexture folder or rename it the game take over the orgional BA file and all is fine, so im guessing something with the textures folder isn't rendering in game right..perhaps non compressed files. any help here would be appreciated

Balog

[throttlekitty]

You really don't want to unpack the textures into your game directory.

[balogm]

so I can still use the /textures folder but only with the mods, and the game will read the reast from the original file then. nifty.

[throttlekitty]

I wanted to clarify a bit: It'd be generally bad to unpack the whole game texture .ba2 files to your game directory. Fine for most small mods coming out right now.

 

a) Bethesda stores textures differently now with .ba2. dds files are separated into 3 chunks. Header, Upper mips and Lower mips. In this scheme, runtime only loads what it needs into memory rather than the whole dds. So if you're walking around your settlement, it's not going to load the entirety of far-away-but-still-close-enough-to-not-need-LOD textures; the lower end of the mips specifically. Big savings! -bypassing this scheme forces the whole dds to load from the disk which might explain some of the badness you're seeing.

 

b) At current, BAE doesn't extract _s and _n files "correctly", and this may cause render issues. They are stored as BC5/BC7, but since there's virtually no viable way for most modders to work with that format for the time being, he chose to decompress them as other formats so people can at least look at the textures.

 

 

So in the future, We're likely to see better support and options from BAE at the very least. Mods that use many textures should certainly be packing into a .ba2 when that time comes.