Broken textures when sharing my mod with other players

[QuentinVance]

Hello everyone

 

I recently started creating some new textures for items within a mod I'm working on, such as books and vault tiles. Everything works perfectly fine on my end, but when I share my mod with anyone, they start seeing broken textures on the models that I changed. it happened to me once, and i fixed the issue by simply opening the model in NifSkope, pointing it to the correct textures again, and saving the file.

 

Currently, my mod has a Meshes folder and a Textures folder, both with the same subfolders inside.

For example, if in the geck I have a "VGeardoor" and I want to change its textures, this is how I do it:

1. I extract the original .nif from Fallout.bsa using Fallout Mod Manager
2. I put the .nif in the Meshes folder and the new .dss file in the texture folder
3. I open Nifskope, load the .nif file, find the texture I want to change and point it to the one in my Data\Textures\ folder.
4. Save the file in Nifskope

In the end, the model is located in a folder like Fallout 3\Data\Meshes\QuentinVance\ModName\Vault\vgeardoorxx.nif, while the textures are located in Fallout 3\Data\Textures\QuentinVance\ModName\Vault\vgeardoorxx.dss

I did this with both a few doors and some books, and it works perfectly in my game.

 

Then, to share my mod, I pack the .esp, the readme, the meshes and textures folders into a single .rar file and send it to whoever i want to try the mod. However, whenever they try the mod, they see broken textures in all the items I added. Specifically, the textures seem to change depending on the angle and distance from which they are seen. I think the game actually replaces my textures with everything else that's past the model, as if you were looking through it (for example, with my Vault door, I could see some vault diner textures splattered onto the gear door).

 

Now, the problem is that it works perfectly on my game. If some textures or the models themselves were damaged, or the path to the path unclear, by using them I would see the same behaviour.

I read somewhere that Nifskope has an issue that causes models to break whenever you touch them after saving the file (such as moving the file to another folder, opening it in Nifskope again, and so on), but I'm not entirely sure this is true - if that were the case, every single user should fix every mod they use by themselves, and I don't think that's what everyone else does.

It could be of course that the model still searches for its textures in my directory (which of course is different than that of each individual user), but due to my limited experience with NifSkope I don't really know how that could be different.

 

There has to be something that I'm doing wrong, something I'm not doing entirely, or a way to solve this issue anyway.

If anyone has more experience and knows what I should be doing, please let me know.

[M48A5]

The gamebryo engine does not use a .dss file for textures. If you are actually using a file with an extension of .dss and this is not a typo, the textures will not display properly.

 

I have never had a problem with NifSkope that you describe in all the years I have been using it. Someone gave you some wrong information.

 

Have any of your testers opened the meshes in NifSkope or are you just getting "the textures are broken" with no explanation?

 

In NifSkope, what is the path you are using for the textures?

 

Since this is just a retexture, why are you using an .esp?

Edited September 24, 2020 by M48A5

[Pixelhate]

https://wiki.nexusmods.com/index.php/How_to_fix_hard-coded_texture_paths_in_NIF_files

[QuentinVance]

https://wiki.nexusmods.com/index.php/How_to_fix_hard-coded_texture_paths_in_NIF_files

Thanks, this is exactly what I was looking for. The ..\ instead of the actual path. I knew it had to be something like this, but had no idea how to do it. However, as soon as I did it, it immediately broke the textures for me as well.

 

The gamebryo engine does not use a .dss file for textures. If you are actually using a file with an extension of .dss and this is not a typo, the textures will not display properly.

I meant .dds instead of .dss

 

Have any of your testers opened the meshes in NifSkope or are you just getting "the textures are broken" with no explanation?

The issue was that the location of the textures was incorrect. As I mentioned in my original post, they saw the same path as mine, which of course couldn't work. ExhalePit pointed out the correct solution to solve that.

 

In NifSkope, what is the path you are using for the textures?

 

Since this is just a retexture, why are you using an .esp?

As I mentioned earlier, it pointed to Fallout 3\Data\Textures\QuentinVance\ModName\Vault\vgeardoorxx.dds within my game folder. Of course, it was wrong because I did not know how to change that so that it could recognize the path for another user. Now it shows as ..\textures\quentinvance\vault\dungeons\vault\vgeardoorxx.dds as indicated in the wiki that ExhalePit linked. I'm not adding the name of the mod just because it's published already and I don't want to plug it, really.

 

Honestly, I don't remember how fallout files used to work very much, I just picked up a project from a long time ago that I had abandoned. My mod also contains new world cells, items and so on, so I think the .esp was the standard for it?

[QuentinVance]

I checked again. Something weird is going on here. As soon as I edit a .nif and save it, Fallout starts messing the textures up. If I then try open the GECK and point to a new model, the textures turn red (this then happens in game too, and it's different from the issue I was having in the first post). The only solution to this is to start from scratch every single time. I have no idea why this is happening, however.

 

Edit: for some reason, things that were not working earlier are working now. I don't understand why that would be, but I can't complain.

Edited September 24, 2020 by QuentinVance