I meant the BSA's as a blanket statement, The Fallout > Oblivion / Morrowind is deff. illegal, but ripping something from Fallout 3 -> New Vegas is borderline because not EVERYTHING from F3 made it in to New Vegas.

And sorry about the Nif DDS confusion, I knew what I was saying about mesh / texture was correct, but I knew i screwed up what a nif and dds was ><, so thanks for the clarification.

Photoshop needs the DDS plugin to edit them, though you already have GIMP2, should be ready to go.

Here is for the NIF's -> http://niftools.sourceforge.net/wiki/NifSkope

Thanks Gunmaster for jogging my memory and helping out instead of yelling at me XD

Edit: It'd be nice if a mod can clarify the BSA issue up, or someone post a link to an official statement.

No you cannot use an object from the Fallout 3 BSA in Fallout New Vegas. You can only use objects from the NV BSA in NV. Albeit alot of them are the same, if you want to MAKE SURE the object made it into the game, just search for it in the NV bsa. If its not there, you cannot use it from the fo3 BSA. So the safest route is pretend Fallout 3 doesnt even exist, and look for all meshes/textures and sounds in the NV BSA. Then, you can ONLY use things extracted from a NV BSA in a NV mod, nothing else.

The majority of things made it in anyways, but this is where the 75-100% of the texture changed thing. If its from F3 and not in NV, evidently changing the NIF enough is a work around. Idk how legit or court savvy that is but its what i've heard.

Any thoughts?

Your thinking more of general copyright. For example, if you make a texture, and I go to make one, and your is copyrighted, mine has to be oh so different from yours or it violates the copyright. This is where that percentage comes in, though I'm not sure what it is. Still, why would you use a FO3 texture if your just going to change it like 80%? I would just make one from scratch in that case. I'm no expert, and to avoid issues I still highly reccommend you just leave the Fo3 BSA alone when modding NV.

Well if you make one from scratch, you have to create the nif too, and idk about you, but that looks like a pain in the ASS! For example, before my partner Tananbaum found the trains from F3 in NV, I was contemplating taking the tracks and trains from F3 and changing them up.

But you would also have to change the nif like 75% or more. That seems like more work than its worth, and you should either start from scratch then, or just use another object in its stead.

facanating discussion you two had,
but what does it look like when editing a texture anyways?

You know... i've totally forgotten.

Its either one of two things, its flat, as in everything, or you can view it in a 3D type mode, and move around the object.

yea, but that would depend on the program wouldn't it?

Not really. Its flat. There are programs (like blender) where you can 'paint' textures onto a model in a 3d space. But about 99% of texturing is done with completely flat 'pictures' that look really weird until they are on the model. If you want to edit a texture for something, it can sometimes be difficult to figure out what is what when you look at it. I can perform minor modifications, and do them very well, but I don't know how the pro's make a texture from scratch. It boggles my mind.

welll i understand its very difficult
but i guess certain parts of the texture is part of a certain section of the model
heck i know a slight bit about how to add texture to models,
its just extremely complicated

but the problem is i cant find a way to extract the nif files with the programs ive found

Yeah the texture represents a 2d spread of the object. You have to UV map chunks of it onto the object, it just looks very odd before doing so.

What program did you find for this? The only one I know of is Fallout Mod Manager. That lets you easily open a BSA, and extract any files contained within.

well i tried fomm witch wouldn't install
and nvmm witch i couldn't find out how to extract nif files

The latest version of FOMM also works with New Vegas as well. Why won't it install? Its a fairly straight forward installation and all.

I'm not sure if NVMM is the same program just only for NV or if its a horse of another color altogether. If its the same you should just be able to double click your BSA's in the New Vegas data folder and it will open them. Then you can browse files and pick what to extract and where.

well it keeps saying that theres an action key thats restricted,
where should i download it from (perferably a link) cause i could be downlouding wrong one..

Either I didn't post this, or it was ignored then

http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/BSA_Unpacker_Tutorial

It's for oblivion, but remember where this file structure comes from, oblivion, they're the same files. ESM = Elder Scrolls Master (file), ESP = Eslder Scrolls Plugin (file).

Not sure what BSA stands for, but a lot of people still find a lot of Oblivion programs for this sort of thing to work, in some cases better, then the ones coded for fallout. I've personally used this on F3 just messing around, and I used this when FOMM wouldn't work.

ok, but its a rar file, how do i use that-?

WinZip
7Zip
WinRar

Take your pick, .rar is one of the most common compression forms / methods / file extensions on the net, and used a lot, other then 7Zip, to pack together mods on New Vegas Nexus, so learn it.

i got 7-zip i think so i can just use that to open it?

Yea, you un-compress it. Right click the file and go down to 7-Zip in the menu, then extract here.

You can also double click it and it has more options when you load the file in to the program,

ok i got program and stuff,
but it says the Bsa file wont load

Ack, because I forgot about the Hex editing, but that's way to much.

Try this http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=34

When I did the BSA extraction, the Archive Utility wasn't out yet, so forgot all about it till just now.

Edit: Or I didn't bother to look... X_X that was over 2 years ago so meh, that SHOULD work now, unless there is a New Vegas Archive Utility... ><

ok will do
= d

Sorry for the run around, the Oblivion BSA Extractor wont work, but the F3 should work since there is no New Vegas specific one.... well none I can find.


Let me test it real fast

Edit: Yep, extracted the Sound.bsa just fine.

Remember some of them are rather large, so expect a decent load time, especially on slower pc's, and which ever BSA your extracting, make sure you have the same amount of MB/GB free on your pc.

It's rather simple, click File > Load, pick the BSA, then Action > Extract All Contents, or if you select something specific just that, then select a folder to extract them to.