I seem to be the only person who has a problem with pyffing my Oblivion Meshes BSA. Sure, I can pyffi the meshes just fine... but when it comes to getting the game to actually USE them, I fail miserably. Simply renaming the file doesn't work; editing the ini file doesn't either. I've gotten it to work a few times, by using various methods (keeping both BSAs in the Data folder, renaming one, then swapping their names around), but every time I reinstall, I have the same problem. Is there something I'm missing here?

Are you repacking the BSA correctly? You need to select the folder above the meshes folder you want to pack if you are using OBMM (so in this case, if you are using the INI option for PyFFI, add the in folder, and then the out folder to ensure proper overwrites). OBMM adds the contents of the folders you select to the BSA, not the folders themselves, so remember that. Don't forget to make sure the trees folder makes it back in. The DistantLOD folder is subjective, and I would suggest leaving it out of you are using TES4LODGen to avoid issues.

Finally, make sure the BSA retains the same name as is defined in sArchiveList entry in Oblivion.INI, and don't forget to reset the timestamp for proper Archive Invalidation.

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=36882

I couldn't wait to manually PyFFI my vanilla meshes, it would have taken ages. So I used the above. Had my vanilla meshes PyFFI'ed in 10 minutes. Very clear instructions, I got everything right in the first try. Consider trying it and following the instructions exactly to successfully PyFFI your vanilla meshes.

EDIT: Are you sure you've correctly redated your resulting, optimized BSA? You can do it from within Oblivion Mod Manager.

Hey, I may have to check that out myself. I've been thinking of PyFFIing my vanilla meshes anyways but hadn't gotten around to trying to do it manually yet. This could make things simpler.

Yeah thanks for the link, it finally motivated me to do this. Afterwards I jumped in the game real quick to see if everything worked out all right, and I had no problems (can't imagine doing it without OBMM though). I'm not sure how much of a performance increase I got--I want to say it's smoother in some places, it seems to be so, but places that brought things to a crawl seem just as brutal, though I know there's only so much that can be done. Especially with the patching utility, though, there's really no reason not to optimize.

Yeah, I've got everything - my new BSA is 613 MB (good advice about ditching the LODs - I might just do that).


Got the ArchiveList entry.. but how do I reset the timestamp? I can't find anything about it in OBMM (and it would appear that this is, in fact, the problem - it's got a 2011 date on it :confused: ).

To reset the BSA timestamp, go to Utilities --> Archive Invalidation. You'll see the "Reset BSA Timestamp" button.

Er I had probably done it wrong, but when I used the reset timestamps in OBMM it reset ALL my BSAs. So I use the Setfiledate program instead lol.

OBMM just reset them all to the vanilla Oblivion dates, Im not sure if that affects newer mods at all.

There shouldn't be issues for new mods' BSAs since they most likely all contain new content so there's nothing to "replace".