NIF files texture path?

[ratkiller13]

Some time in the past I used BSACMD to extract meshes and textures from some BSA files. After having some problems with the game I reinstalled (I have the D2D version) on a new SSD drive, then copied all the custom meshes, textures, and mods to the new OBLIVION folder. Deleted the old folder and discovered all the custom items had no textures. Investigating with NIFSKOPE I found that the textures for all the NIF files contained the complete path to the texture, instead of F:\Bethesda Softworks\Oblivion\Data\Textures all the F:\Bethesda Softworks\Oblivion\Data\meshes\*.nif files pointed to the original C:\Bethesda Softworks\Oblivion\Data\Textures\*.dds files.

At the time I just restored the backup to the original location and that worked, but I think it slows the game down and causes a jerky animation as the program loads the mesh from the SSD then needs to load the texture from the C drive.

One fix, open NIF file with NIFSKOPE, change each NiSourceTexture to the correct path then save. Tedious, plus at my age I don't expect to live long enough to do every NIF file in the entire mesh folder and subfolders.

So the question, anyone know a utility or batch process in BSACMD that will redirect the whole smash to the correct main DATA folder?

Just took a squint, meshes folder is 2.8 gigs, 1744 folders, 21,385 files. :ohmy:

[Guinefort1]

1. Are these loose meshes and textures from mods, or are they vanilla assets?

 

2. I don't know of any program that will do such a thing.

 

3. Since manually re-pathing ~20,000 .nif files is clearly a ridiculous task, my best suggestion is to wither bite the bullet and just cope with the delays.

 

4. Assuming these are mods we are talking about, would reinstalling the mods and leaving the BSAs intact, rather than extracting them, help?

[ratkiller13]

Dunno. Mods are self made, for example the helmet in my profile pic with the vampire skull on it - made from the vanilla iron helmet. Best I recall (at my age my recollector don't always recollect recorrectly) I used bsacmd to extract the vanilla meshes and textures from the BSA files to clone and make new objects several years ago. Sometime last year Oblivion quit working, wanting me to activate it again (Direct2Drive version) and it wouldn't activate (long story, I still use Win XP and the new owners of the D2D thingy want the user to have internet exploder 11 installed, which you can't do with XP) so I uninstalled and reinstalled the whole smash. Copied all my ESPs, meshes, textures, sounds etc from a zipped backup to the new install, but now every time I go to edit a texture the NIF file is pointing to the original install folder for the texture. It gets real tedious having to change the texture path on every NIF so I was wondering if there was a faster way.

 

Main question is how does bsacmd work? Does it consult the system registry for the path? Why does it use the whole path instead of just starting in \Data\Textures? "Why" isn't all that important, main question is there a way to stop it from doing that?

NifSkope is another question, there are no good tutorials on what some of the controls do - one example here, SPELLS/SANITIZE/ADJUST TEXTURE SOURCES sounds like it might be what I'm looking for, but there's no documentation I can find.