HD Textures DLC QUESTION!

[BFirebird101]

I did some digging prior to this but could come up with no answer whatsoever, so hopefully y'all can answer it for me. So I am currently downloading the newly released Bethesda Texture pack via Steam, however I currently have multiple texture mods already installed, which range from the 2K texture mod, serious HD landscape, Flora overhaul, and multiple other little mods such as the wood on signs pointing to cities and the newly popular "sexy cities" mods.

Now my question is, will the Texture pack from Bethesda automatically override these unofficial mods or will it cause instability? Should I delete the unofficial textures? If the Bethesda one overrides them them there should be no reason to delete them hopefully, because I have absolutely no idea which files to delete since I have so many. Thanks in advance!

[BrknSoul]

Incorporating DLC Textures into Skyrim so that Unofficial textures can overwrite them:

 

Find and open up Skyrim.ini (Win7: .\Users\<UserName>\Documents\My Games\Skyrim)

Find the setting "sResourceArchiveList" under the [Archive] section (or add it, if the line doesn't exist)

 

Change this line to read:

sResourceArchiveList=Skyrim - Misc.bsa, Skyrim - Shaders.bsa, Skyrim - Textures.bsa, HighResTexturePack01.bsa, HighResTexturePack02.bsa, Skyrim - Interface.bsa, Skyrim - Animations.bsa, Skyrim - Meshes.bsa, Skyrim - Sounds.bsa

 

Save this, then open up the Skyrim Launcher and disable the two texture packs.

 

Now you should all the goodness of the DLC Texture packs (hi-rez items, etc) but Mods will be able to overwrite this.

[BFirebird101]

Thanks for the response! But just to get it straight: so the Bethesda packs automatically override unofficial mods (which is good on my part), but doing this method allows unofficial mods to take the place of specific textures?

[JDFan]

Thanks for the response! But just to get it straight: so the Bethesda packs automatically override unofficial mods (which is good on my part), but doing this method allows unofficial mods to take the place of specific textures?

 

IT all depends -- the DLC is just like any other mod and it will load just like any other mod file -- so the game works kind of like this :

 

Lets say we need Textures\mymod\mytexture.dds so the game starts looking for the file

 

first it goes to RAM and sees if the texture is already loaded into memory if it is it uses that - If its not there

next it goes to the loose files in the install folder so it checks the HDD for a loose file in Data\Textures\mymod\mytexture.dds if not found

Next it goes to the BSA files staring at the last mod loadeds BSA up to the original games BSA files until it finds it

If Still not found it uses the game's Default Purple Texture

 

So in order to use the unofficial mod textures you would need them placed loosely into the Textures folder or if they are in BSA files the mod that they come from would need to load after the esp for the texture pack !

 

This is also why at times even if it loads correctly it may not at other times if you have another mod that has a texture with the same name that has already loaded the texture into RAM since the game first looks there !

Edited February 9, 2012 by JDFan