I've recently been doing more with mods than just installing them, since I've noticed that some of them cause problems if I don't alter the files that come with them. Especially, I've noticed that some mods have improper paths for their textures, but now upon further examining of said mods I have a few questions;

One, how do improper texture paths actually affect the game? I remember it caused disk errors for me, but I didn't note any visible difference in the hairstyles(Though to be honest I did not go back and forth between the incorrect and correct texture paths, I just corrected the texture path and moved on).

Two, I've noticed that some files will actually have multiple textures, which aren't ever referred to directly by the meshes. For example, one sees 'hair.dds', 'hair_hh.dds', 'hair_hl.dds', and 'hair_n.dds', but only the first one is ever referred to that I've seen. What are the others for?

Improper texture paths can cause several issues. All the way up to CTDs actually. But generally if textures aren't being loaded/found, the mesh may display magenta.

_hl textures are specific for the hair shader. They are for the tint process I believe. You can use it to mask off parts of the hair mesh that you do not want to be affected by the tint. for example hair pins or other such things.

I have no idea what _hh textures do. I guess another shader specific map :/

_n is normal map. It is a type of bump map used to bend light reflecting off the surface of the mesh, so that it's surface appears more detailed.

In oblivions shader system, These are all picked up by the engine simply by the using the same file name for each texture, then the suffix is used to flag the engine on how to implement it into the shader. _hh and _hl are only ever picked up when using the hair shader.

So that's why the textures still loaded properly despite all the errors I was getting. After the initial failure to load the textures based off of the path provided by the NIF file, the engine automatically loaded the texture that matched the name of the file. Did I get that right?


And thank you for answering the question.

The texture path shown in the nif must be correct. If it is incorrect, then no texture will get loaded and you will know all about it. It'll be pink at best.

If you mean the nif when you say 'matched the name of file', file being nif, then no, you can name the nif anything you want and the textures something completely different if you wish. Though the textures must all have the same file name not including the suffix. ie texture.dds and texture_n.dds. if it was texture.dds and textureXWZ_n.dds, the engine will be looking for texture_(and whatever suffix).dds ie texture_n.dds

Note that "_" is a special flag character. You can use "texture_blue.dds" and the engine will search for "texture_n.dds" as the normal map to load into the shader. But you cannot safely use "texture_blue_1.dds" and expect it to find "texture_blue_1_n.dds". If you used that, the correct _n texture would still be named "texture_n.dds".

Ah, well, if I had to guess, I would say there must be a script of some sort that replaces missing textures for specific mesh types(namely, hairstyles) built into the engine. I've dealt with hairstyles that had bad texture paths, but still were visible in game after the error had displayed.

What error do you refer to? and what do you mean by bad texture paths?

Well, I was getting http://s91.photobucket.com/albums/k310/Vercalos/?action=view¤t=OblivionError-2.jpg every time certain hairstyles were loaded, but they still displayed. As for bad texture paths, in one mod, they referred to a specific location rather than a static one(actually referring to a drive, f:\ or d:\) which was the cause of that error, and some of them referred to textures that weren't present in the package, from other mods. Recently, I downloaded another mod, because I was installing something that required the resources from it, and checked the meshes for that one, and nearly all of them referred to directories that weren't there. I didn't bother trying to play the game until I corrected all the texture paths, so I don't know what would have happened in this case. The textures were present in the package, but the directories were different from where the NIF files were pointing.

Comment on these errors on the mod DL page, because some of them those are straight up noob errors and are completely broken.