Trouble with BSA extraction.

[ll0stryker0ll]

HI, i'm hoping i can find some help here.

I wish to extract the .bsa's (textures/meshes, ect) so i can add mods.

 

I have used BSABrowser, BSAunpacker, BSAopt and FOMM.

Every time i extract the Sounds.bsa and Meshes.bsa, things go wrong.

 

Once the two are extracted i remove the original .bsa's for safe keeping, then when i launch the game, and get in-game, i notice immediately that things are wrong.

Spell and ambiance sounds are missing.

LOD mountains are gone, distance trees, and mountains are messed up and missing, and everything on the map is gone, its all white, with just the map markers showing.

Once i delete the folders and put the original .bsa's back in, everything works fine again.

 

I have no idea what would go wrong with the textures.bsa, or the other .bsa's, i just want everything to extract correctly so i can enjoy the game with some mods.

 

Can anyone help with this?

[MShoap13]

I'm not exactly sure what's causing your particular issue but I can tell you extracting the archives isn't a necessary step for modding the game. You don't have to extract and move the .bsa archives out of the \Skyrim\Data\ folder in order to get loose file replacers (typical mesh/sound/texture replacers) to work properly. Loose files will automatically override any resources stored in a .bsa archive that is loaded with Skyrim.esm via the Skyrim.ini config file (how the games archives are loaded by default in a vanilla installation).

[flobalob]

Extracting the bsa files to your Skyrim directory is probably a bad idea, as the game engine will have to load tens of thousands of files where previously it only had to open half a dozen or so. This is likely to have a detrimental effect on you performance.

 

I would advise extracting the bsa files to somewhere entirely seperate from your Skyrim installation and copying back only those meshes/texture files that you actually plan on changing yourself.

[ll0stryker0ll]

I'm not exactly sure what's causing your particular issue but I can tell you extracting the archives isn't a necessary step for modding the game. You don't have to extract and move the .bsa archives out of the \Skyrim\Data\ folder in order to get loose file replacers (typical mesh/sound/texture replacers) to work properly. Loose files will automatically override any resources stored in a .bsa archive that is loaded with Skyrim.esm via the Skyrim.ini config file (how the games archives are loaded by default in a vanilla installation).

 

 

Yep, i figured this out, not to soon after i posted this topic, lol, i feel silly now, but hey, i didn't know :P

 

Thanks for the reply's.

 

For mods, this thread can be locked/removed, i'm done.