Franscesco's invisible unfinished armor and crashing mithril

[nenina]

Awww. I had FCOM and saw no FCOM problems for 14 played hours... until this dungeon.

 

Problem 1: There was a dungeon with Ravagers. One of them was a female orc, and on her the Unfinished Armor was invisible. Only her head, hands, and lower body could be seen. I looted it off her and dropped it on the ground. It had a ground mesh. If it were the case that there was no female mesh then it would show a yellow ! mark. Oh wait! Invisible means missing a normal map, correct?

 

Problem 2: Soon, in the same dungeon I found a chest with Worn Mithril Armor. Wanting to see what it looked like, I put it on my female character and the game crashed.

 

I think both of those armors were from Frans.

 

What could I be missing, please? These are the FCOM .bsa files, names pasted here from my data folder:

 

Bob's Armory Oblivion.bsa - 91,304 KB

FCOM_Convergence.bsa - 268,496 KB

FCOM_Convergence_FraNewItems.bsa ( this one, I was instructed to rename from FraNewItems.bsa ) - 353,361 KB

FCOM_Convergence_MartsMonsterMod.bsa ( also instructed to rename ) - 1,532,772 KB

Francesco's Creatures and Items Resources - Creatures.bsa - 394,096 KB

Francesco's Creatures and Items Resources - Items.bsa - 519,775 KB

FraNewCrea.bsa - 236,823 KB

Harvest [Flora].bsa - 9,150 KB

Oblivion WarCry EV.bsa - 408,332 KB

Oscuro's_Oblivion_Overhaul.bsa - 1,270,170 KB

 

That should be it for the FCOM .bsa files. I've reread the instructions and I don't seem to be missing anything, unless I still missed something.

Edited March 20, 2013 by nenina

[nenina]

Absolutely strange, man. I reloaded the game just because. Tried on the Worn Mithril Armor, no crash. Tried on the Unfinished Iron Armor, no crash and it was perfectly visible.

 

The last thing I remember doing was going into the Oblivion Stutter Remover .ini file and setting use heap to 1 and heap size to 1024. Never had these problems until after that.

 

Just going to put the .ini back to the way it was, then.

[Striker879]

Loading from a BSA does sometimes suffer from some records not being read. For example I use Alluring Potion Bottles (which changes the world meshes, textures and menu icons for potions). It has it's resources in a BSA. Even with my game running off a well defraged RAID0 (two WD Raptors) I will sometimes get a missed read for the menu icon for user made potions (world model has never been a problem). Another person who had the same problem extracted the BSA (so that the game was using the loose files) and the problem went away for them. It's never bugged me enough to do that myself with that mod ... it's a rather occasional minor problem in my case. I have used that trick while beta testing a mod before and it helped a bit (I was crashing on cell transitions into a cell with a lot of high poly models ... having them uncompressed outside of the BSA helped the cell load complete).

 

I just used OBMM to extract the BSA to a temporary folder and then copy/pasted to my game as done in a manual install. I believe you can also use BSA Commander, but I think I've seen problems reported when using it to extract BSAs.

[nenina]

Thank you for the information, Striker. I will not be using BSA Commander to extract, only to make .bsa files.

 

I just have one more question: If two .bsa files have the same items then isn't that... VERY BAD? I'm talking about these two .bsa files...

 

FCOM_Convergence_FraNewItems.bsa

Francesco's Creatures and Items Resources - Items.bsa

 

...after packing them with some missing normal map files swiped from OOO, I remembered that many files and paths are the same.

 

Could that cause crashing?

[Striker879]

I'm not 100% certain about BSAs, but with loose files and folders it's always last installed wins (because the last one overwrites the first). Looking at it that way BSAs would be different, because the contents of BSA # 2 wouldn't overwrite the contents of BSA # 1 until the game called for the contents of BSA # 2 and unpacked it (they're just compressed files and folders).

 

Situations like this is probably the reason that a bashed patch is the only way to get conflicting mods of that type (that come with BSAs) to work together. I guess the alternative would be to unpack both BSAs into temp folders and then manually decide which records from which mod to install.

 

Someone like Hickory would know far better than I, but it seems likely to me that two BSAs with the same file in the same folder structure wouldn't lead to good things.

[Nephenee13]

Oblivion, unlike Skyrim, does not handle BSAs intelligently. If you have two objects or textures in two different BSAs, but with the same path, its a crapshoot as to which the game will load.