Talk:BSA Exploder

(quote from FViral: In the mean time I'll play with the unpacker utility. There is no chance of me damaging my .bsa files is there?)

If your bsas get corrupted it will not be because of tes4bsa. FYI all bsa but the voices extracted are ~1.6GBs, 2GBs ondisk for me. Installation should be as easy as copying tes4bsa.exe to your \Oblivion\Data folder, start -> run, type "cmd", hit ok. Supposing "D:\Games\Oblivion" is your install dir, type "d:" in that black window that came up and hit enter (ignore that step if it's your c: drive), type "cd \games\oblivion\data" and hit enter. The type "tes4bsa unpack file.bsa" and hit enter. For example, "tes4bsa unpack "Oblivion - Meshes.bsa"". Please note that if the file name contains spaces (which it does) it will need quotes around it to be recognized properly. I'll write up something more after I've slept. You'll need to run it on all the bsa files to get them all extracted. --Stickman 19:18, 26 March 2006 (EST)

Okay now if I unpack and reference the content inside the .bsa files, will my plugins work on machines where the .bsa data has not been extracted? Additionally if I create my own meshes and icons etc. wil I need to recompile the .bsa files to include my work and then distribute the new archives with my plugin? FViral 19:26, 26 March 2006 (EST)

To answer: Yes. No. If it behaves the same as Morrowind, which it looks like it does, the first place it looks is under the meshes, textures, etc subdirectories. If it finds nothing, it checks the BSA. If you include new meshes and etc they must be in the file location you reference them in the mod file.

Example. Say you add a sword with a custom model to the game. Your "mod" people download could contain the following files:
sword.esp
meshes/weapons/fviral/customsword.nif
textures/weapons/fviral/customsword.dds

Many times people pack it so you extract it to /Data and everything pops into place with directories and such.

This should probably go on some kind of "mod standards" page. --Stickman 07:15, 27 March 2006 (EST)

Visability in Objects

You're right, this really isn't a catagory, but I still think it should have some visability in the Objects category. Hence the addition to said category in addition to links. [MD]Languard 09:40, 27 March 2006 (EST)