Workaround for GIMP not opening certain FO4 dds files?

[ehtyeci]

Out of 40,000 textures, there is only a single diffuse texture in BC7 from Bethesda. The rest are BC1/DXT1, or BC3 if it has transparency. Same with the High Res DLC, according to jonwd7. He made a spreadsheet with technical info about every texture (vanilla/high res).

The issue could just as well have been the unpacker you used to extract from a ba2 texture archive. From my understanding, texture archives differ from regular archives in that they are just a solid, continuous block of data for efficient mip map streaming, so the metadata is stored in a separate chunk of the archive. In other words, when you unpack a texture, it's actually reconstructed into a DDS file. There are reports that sometimes BAE incorrectly parses metadata on certain textures, like BC7, sometimes Archive2 does. Cubemaps, which are uncompressed, are for instance streamed incorrectly out from Archive2. Best to try them both.

[payl0ad]

Is this really something BAE does sometimes? Because if so, it does it consistently. Always thought BSA archives are well understood.

[ehtyeci]

Definitely going by memory here by reading the comments of the Nexus page, will update the post to reflect it. I think zilav mentions it here, although this issue seems to be about textures tagged in sRGB failing on extract.

I personally haven't had trouble with BAE on vanilla textures, but Archive2 has given me a lot of headaches with cubemaps. When comparing between BAE/Archive2 extracted cubemaps, it turns out there are 7 different hex values in the first 80 blocks, which I gather is the DDS header. The difference is that one will show the texture array in Photoshop while the other only a single image from the array. The actual data besides the header appears to be identical on the two, but the checksums are different.