I've heard a rumour that the Wrye Bash team is going to support BSA handling in the future.


True?
I'd like to request this feature anyway, so here goes.
I have a mod that uses the official horse armor meshes and I can't redistribute those legally.

Can the Wrye Bash Team provide support for BAIN to allow installation of mods that use official meshes? Those that are included in the BSA and cannot be shared even with modifications.


I used OBMM scripting to extract the meshes from the BSA (copies of the user's BSA horse armor asset). Then I have to manipulate the .NIF model paths of those copies to set different textures, independently.
The only way I learned to do it is via a binary hack provided with the scripting capabilities of the OMOD installer.
My problem is mesh corruption if the texture name associated with the mesh is too different from the original texture name (different letters, longer name, ...).

BSA handling aside, to support modification of the .NIF files through the Python interface (would be great) niftools could do that.
Only niftools functionality had to be provided out of the box from a Wrye Bash install.

The request comes from the trouble I am having with the way it is done within OBMM scripting.
Sometimes bit manipulation corrupts the file like I explained.

However, I know how to circumvent this problem in the mod installation process.
I could make a binary patch for the files. After the files are extracted by the BSA, apply it using a patcher program.

For the end user though, the install starts to get more complicated and I wish you could give me some help for installations like this or advice on another way to install it.

[threadjack]

I would also appreciate the handling of shaders and so forth, so that I can completely ditch OBMM. Not that I dislike that app, mind you, but I'd rather use BAIN and only BAIN.

[/threadjack] :ninja:

Heh, I don't mind it. It is useful, to manage one installer instead of swapping different tools that would do the same, if possible.

So, do I follow that you want to be able to copy nifs from the official BSAs, then alter those nifs to point to different textures?

Would DragoonWraith's Nifscript not work for that, along with the new function for OBSE v19 that updates meshes without disable/enable?

NifScript does sound like the better option for this.

That said, we have talked about on adding bsa support (read, extract, create) at some point, but not any time soon. Anything beyond that basic support hasn't been discussed, so I can't tell you whether or not support for the level of manipulation that you want will ever get implemented. It is rather unlikely unless we make use of niftools, and I don't think we'll ever bundle niftools with Bash. At most, we may add support for it if it happens to be installed. This isn't a "yes" or a "no", but it is an "I don't know".

Basically, I just want to use the meshes with other textures.

It's true the tools for managing the BSA and altering the meshes are already available.

You could add support for niftools and bsa commander, just like other tools already supported. The only thing to add would be to allow commands to be passed to these tools.

It could be simpler to avoid implementing a pythonic bsa interface and just use bsa commmander because it supports command line and batch-like operations.

Maybe I am wrong asking for all this trouble. I'll investigate the Nifscript further. As long as the textures stay, it could be done that way.

(If not, I'd have to put a running script to update each armor on loading save, etc.)

NifScript doesn't help here.

What it does is editing the current item model and replacing it with another model.
This is no use for me since what I want to do is to setup a model with a different texture, not a different model per se.

It is easier to do with an executable patch. NifTools support would be great though.