giant floating yellow box with exclamation point in the middle

[fatVape]

Hey there, I installed this mod https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/43129/ and it's supposed to replace the blade of woe. I was having some trouble but I found out that it had separate files for enchanted/unenchanted and I thought I had fixed it. I load my game to check it out and my weapon was gone, I zoom out and there's a huge floating yellow box with an exclamation point in the middle. I read some other posts about this and most people said it was meshes and texture files that were out of place. But I couldn't find anything that looked wrong, I'm pretty new to modding and I'm not very sure where everything is supposed to go.

 

I use nmm for everything. Never manual. Any help would be appreciated

[LFact]

NMM is not really reliable when it comes to older Oblivion mods. If the package is NMM-friendly, that's okay. If not, you need to learn how to install mod manually or using OBMM(for OMOD) and Wrye Bash(for BAIN).

By the way, have you opened the package with any unarchiver and find the path and filename of graphic resources, then checked said files are installed correctly?

Edited February 26, 2018 by LFact

[leonardo2]

Only Wrye Bash is needed to get a modded Oblivion stable, but don't' forget to use BOSS to sort your loadorder and TES4Edit to clean your mods from dirty edits. :smile:

 

307 WB wip standalone

[DrakeTheDragon]

While the NMM can in fact very well be used for all Oblivion mods I found so far, provided I re-structure them first before I add them manually, it is indeed not very advisable, especially not to newcomers, for modding a game as old, and with mod packages as incompatible, as Oblivion.

 

For what it's worth, the "Main" file from the page you linked is already packaged quite fine and the NMM should 100% understand it correctly the way it is. If you haven't installed only the update from the "Optional" files, the "missing mesh" error indicator you're shown shouldn't be coming from an incorrectly installed mod, for a change. I cannot tell, however, if the mod package's folder structure is correctly fitting the paths used inside the ESP coming with it though.

 

As this doesn't seem to be a pure replacer though, it has an ESP pointing only the Blade of Woe to another NIF file and isn't replacing the Vanilla NIF file instead, it is paramount your load order is also right in the end, or the Blade of Woe inside your game will still use the old NIF from the DLC, if the changes from this mod are overridden again later down your load order. As already mentioned, BOSS can fix the load order, and Wrye Bash's Bashed Patch can preserve the vital elements of plugins no matter where inside your load order they are in the end.

 

But neither of it looks likely to be the culprit here. The game, due to load order, still using the Vanilla NIF would not cause a missing mesh error indicator. Only the files pointed to by the game, after all plugins have been loaded, not being found where they're expected can cause this thing. The most likely cause here would thus be, the plugin of this mod is very well used, or you would still see the Vanilla blade, but the files of this mod aren't where they're supposed to be. So check both, that you installed both files from the page and not only the update one, and that the files are also found inside the game folders where they should be. I'm not seeing other people complain about the mod being wrongly compiled with files or folders at incorrect places, so it's unlikely to be a problem with the mod package itself.

 

edit: Maybe the mod's archive containing both, a data folder as well as a screenshots folder, on the same level is confusing the NMM, so you end up with having "another" data folder inside your data folder... but it honestly never did that to me on my last 200+ installs of similarly basically structured mods.