Game won't load .bsa texture archives... Help?

[3st90]

Hello there,

I have a slight problem. My game (1.2.33) completely refuses to load .bsa texture archives. Good mod examples including these would be "Optimized Vanilla Textures" and "Wasteland 512 Textures". Both of them use a dummy .esp to load the archives. They don't work for me, regarless of load order, manual/NMM installation or how often I re-check the .esp files (In NMM that is, since the 1.2.33 update diables the hidden file selection in the launcher.) Every other mod using .esp files works just fine.

Loose texture files files are no problem at all, and load as they should. I also installed "Time on loading screen", which includes a .bsa that needs to be added to the archive list in the fallout4.ini, and it works without problems. Adding the texture .bsa-archives (since the dummy .esps do not work) to the list, however, doesn't work, the game refuses to load them.

 

I quadruple-checked that the files are in the correct directory (Fallout 4/Data/OVT - Full.esp and Fallout 4/Data/OVT - Full.bsa for example), but nothing I do gets the game to load them properly. I even tried packing textures to a .bsa-archive myself, using Archive.exe from the Skyrim CK, and getting them to work, to no avail. After about 5 hours of unsucessfully searching google for a solution, and repeatedly trying different .bsa archives, it goes without saying that I start to become rather frustrated.

 

Oh, and I deleted my textures-folder prior to testing. So no overrides there. Edit: I also uninstalled any other mods.

 

Does anyone have an idea what could be wrong?

Edit: Another thread about the same topic:
http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/3489485-discussion-bsa-files-dont-work-with-fallout-4/

Edited December 2, 2015 by b6lph6gor6

[DoctorKaizeld]

is that the current patch? because if it is revert back to the previous one. beta patches disables mods.

[3st90]

Thanks for the reply!

 

Unfortunately, reverting/opting out doesn't fix the problem, so I'm going back to 1.2.33. Also, the update doesn't "disable mods" per se. It just removes the hidden data files selection, and updates the plugins.txt with blanks when using the launcher to start the game. No such problems when launching via NMM, or even directly via Fallout4.exe.

[NecroPhil]

I'm having this problem as well, I think, and I never installed the new patch. No mod that updates a texture will function at all, and More Where That Came From also doesn't function (as in, they don't break anything, the game simply acts as if the mods are not installed) but other mods will, like Armorsmith and Homemaker. I installed them through NMM and my .ini file is set up to allow textures, so I don't know what the deal could be.

[DaDump]

same here, really frustrating

 

I thought I had figured out how to .bsa textures after googling and a bit of help on the nexus...

so I made http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/4093/? until I got to know it doesn't work... and it really doesn't

 

did this dummy esp approach work fine for skyrim? and New Vegas?

 

Edit: Similar thread http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/3486865-texture-and-sound-mods-dont-work-but-other-mods-do/

Edited December 2, 2015 by DaDump

[3st90]

So at least I know it's probably not just my game acting up, very curious.

DaDump, I couldn't tell you for sure, since I never packed .bsa-archives myself, except for a few small test achives, including very obvious textures, to see if I could get them to work with Fallout 4.
Pretty sure I downloaded a mod or two including textures in .bsa archives for Skyrim and even Oblivion/Fallout 3/NV though, and if so, no problems at all.

[DaDump]

I think the issue might be, Fallout 4 just doesn't read the BSA format, so we will have to wait 'til we can archive to BA2 :sad:

 

Reasoning:

I found the vanilla BA2 for which I had downloaded a retexture. I extracted the B2A, and re-packed it to BSA, and replaced the B2A with the BSA as well as in the "sResourceIndexFileList" line in the "ini".

 

- Fallout 4 can read modded textures just fine, given that loose files work.

- BSA with modded textures doesn't work.

- Replacing vanilla B2A with an equivalent BSA results in pink, aka textures not recognized.

 

My conclusion: Fallout 4 doesn't know what a BSA is. :sad:

 

On top of this, a byproduct conclusion is that the B2A packs are compressed. Which is good, but also bad, since it means modded textures will have a larger loading time compared to vanilla, though they'll have less cpu consumption. However, disc usage is much more important than cpu usage in this matter, I'd say. This explains why optimized textures take so long to show up, keeping us looking at the blurry ugly time-placeholders, which doesn't happen with vanilla textures.

Edited December 2, 2015 by DaDump

[3st90]

While I start to believe that this holds true for textures packed inside .bsa archives, the mod "Time on loading screen" comes in the .bsa format as well (no textures included) and works perfectly fine, as mentioned above.
Considering vanilla .bsa archives have always been somewhat compressed, it's no surprise to me that the new .ba2 format is compressed as well. As far as I believe to know, there are two "types" of .ba2 archives, one of them being optimized for textures specifically (I read something about this on the net, unfortunately I can't quite recall where).

I'm kinda glad to see that I'm not the only one unable to get .bsa texture archives to work, though. I kinda felt like the odd one out inbetween all the reports of huge performance improvements using certain mods.

Thanks for your post, please keep it coming as soon as you find out something new!