Invalidate your BSA archives

[MurderxBase]

What does invalidate your BSA archives mean and how do I do it. Im trying to figure out how to get this http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/45749/?tab=1&navtag=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nexusmods.com%2Foblivion%2Fajax%2Fmoddescription%2F%3Fid%3D45749%26preview%3D&pUp=1 to work. Also im using Nexus Mod Manager if that matters. Thank

Edited February 14, 2016 by MurderxBase

[Striker879]

The game gets almost all of the assets it needs for displaying stuff in the game from compressed archives (the Oblivion - Meshes.bsa, Oblivion - Textures - Compressed.bsa etc. that you'll find in your Data folder). When the earliest modders tried replacing game assets (in particular textures) they found that the game would continue to use the old assets from the BSA files. So if you tried changing the vanilla green glass armor to red for example as a simple replacer it wouldn't work (in other words even if you put your textures in the exact directory path as the vanilla game expected it would still only display the green texture and not your red texture). What was needed was a way to invalidate the game's BSA assets if a replacement was available, hence archive invalidation.

 

Various methods have been tried over the years. The early methods were unreliable and high maintenance. The recommended method these days is BSA Redirection. You do it once and then forget about it and it just works.

 

Nexus Mod Manager (NMM) has a way to enable it but I'm not at all familiar with NMM. Oblivion Mod Manager also has a way to enable BSA Redirection (Utilities -> Archive Invalidation -> click on BSA Redirection -> click on Update Now). It also has a way to easily reset the BSA timestamps (useful if you use the Steam version of the game as Steam gave the vanilla game BSA files modern dates, thus breaking BSA Redirection for any mods older than the date they gave the BSAs ... BSAs should all be year 2006).

 

An alternative way to fix the Steam BSA timestamps is with a utility like File Date Changer.

Edited February 15, 2016 by Striker879