So its BSA time again, thats easy enough to pull apart to get at the textures and models. I suppose until the CK is out we are going to struggle over the nitty gritty of the game. One thing that needs sorting asap I would imagine would be getting different land textures, rocks etc into the game. One thing that looks fairly limited is the Nordic setting. I cant see there being a desert or arid aspect to the game and that the trees will be fairly limited to the nordic setting too.

NIF models: so far I havent dug into these to see if Nifskope will work on them but I suspect it is currently a no no. As before, once I have worked out how to get models into the game with collision etc they are free for anyone to use. I have hundreds of them for Mesogea, several hundred, so we shall see what we shall see soon enough.

throttlekitty is once again being a wonderful person and decoding the new NIF files.

Good. There may be a lot of crossover of effort. I know the MERP team and Anequina and Mesogea will all be aiming to create heightmaps with varied scenery, ground textures, sandstorms and all the stuff needed to port the mods across. Animals and so forth may also be duplicated so I for one am willing to make anything I knock up available. The first thing I will aim to do is get all the meshes into the game and the heightmap. I just pray there will be a heightmap and region editor maker.

Are there performance improvements if repackage BSA's as uncompressed? Load times are so short anyway but I'm just curious. I would test it myself but I don't have time today.

Well no there shouldnt be. Personally I dont use BSA's to pack the mesogea stuff and I have had absolutely no FPS hit on any part of the mod that I didnt get using BSA's. BSA is convenient but to be honest whilst a mod is being developed and to make it easy for others to use and see the content I prefer to keep it in open folders.

Well it becomes a real mess real fast. Better keep the new resources in tidy bsa for mod delivery and only have replacers as loose meshes and textures.

For now, I agree with this. As an individual who runs over 250 mods for oblivion. It gets to be a real Mess when trying to remove anything if it isn't in a bsa. Plus we don't have to worry about overwriting original files. This is especially true until we have a proper mod manager like Wrye Bash. Using uncompressed BSA Reduces load times because it takes time to uncompress BSA in the engine. Like I said load times are nearly negligible. Even so I'm still curious if there are changes to load performance.

I completely disagree; I really dislike BSAs in general. I like to see what's involved in mods I download.

As zone says, a proper mod manager is more appropriate for dealing with install/uninstall issues.

Depends on how you do things. I always put everything into a unique folder as the whole mod is a total overhaul. Nothing gets overwritten other than previous same mod stuff. Another advantage is that updates to the mod can be much smaller.

Just to clarify my stance on the issue I think things should be kept to bsa until proper mod manager is released. I don't want to have to validate my game every time I remove a mod. Now that I say that when you validate the game does it remove altered/added files or just replace missing ones?

I am going to take a look at the ground textures tonight and see what state they are in. The try to source new ones for desert, jungle, tundra etc.

Loading from disk takes time as well ...

You're absolutely right! I'm not sure if we'll be able to tell until we actually have a lot of mod running whether or not uncompressing BSA help reduce load times. In my experience with oblivion it was substantial. With Skyrim they've done a lot of optimizing to the compression algorithms. This time around it might be loading from disk that is the larger factor of the two.

Has anyone opened up a BSA yet and taken a look at the textures?

I dont really want this to turn into a to BSA or not to BSA thread, but youve a point. We will need to take a look at the most optimum way of doing things. If it means BSA then thats the way to go.

List of stuff needed then:

Creation kit
NIF ability
Nif export for Skyrim for Blender, Max and Maya etc.

Compressed files in BSAs have a BSTR prepended, so you won't be able to use normal (Oblivion) BSA-tools. I am currently updating NIFopt to support Skyrim-BSAs.

actually Karithian I recommend you go delve into the regions northeast of white run, thick with snow and rolling hills and air effects forming misty breaks at the crests of hills and low lying inclines. if that doesnt scream retexture me into sand and get the same awesome effect, Im not sure what is

I use nothing but BSA format for my release mods. Take the gueswork out of installs for downloaders. I leave the unpacking or omod conversions to those who know how to do it.

Good point about the BSA, so I'll have to wait a bit to muck about with things.

As for the desert stuff, theres a lot more that can be done with Skyrim. Got to love Oblivion, but as long as the construction kit allows the same distance of land and massive world sizes, all will be good.

That rolling wind/snow effect would be phenomenal in a sand dune setting.

I agrree. Hopefully this time around BSA becomes trivial for new mods with many files. For replacers there is still the question about the BSA validation order.

As soon as the BSA can be opened and the CK is available we will be able to add in new textures and test the desert idea.

Aye, I'm real testy to find out how these Quests are handled, lol I did 5 missions for the Companions WITHOUT REALIZING they were random radiant quests....they were pretty much creature stomping, but this has the potential to spiral out into varied quests like enemy inserections, Patrol missions, escorts etc etc. I'm sad there weren't real time traveling on the carrige as I thought there would be but I see potential in that as well

I only agree with this for big projects. Small mods wouldn't really benefit from it.

I noticed there were no .kf's in the animation bsa's, just .hkx (havok) and .txt - (while I'm new to Blender modeling/animation) I hope there will be a way to import/export .hkx using Blender.

We can already export the files with the OBMM.