tetchy, are you saying that load order for BSAs works opposite to load order for esms and esps? If this is so, I'm glad you posted. I never knew that.

He is right Elaura and this BSA's are even worse in Oblivion, because every BSA you have installed also take one slot from the loadorder, which the engine for Oblivion only can manage 250-350 mods if any mod over 250 must be imported into the bashed patch in Wrye Bash. The opposite thing happens when you have a working BSA file and install a mod with loose files (without a BSA), because the newly installed mod overrides those files there is in the BSA .

I have changed the timestamp on Connary's BSA as suggested.
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Made it year 2000 for creation and last modification.
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Same result as ever.


Correction:
None of Connary's Textures appear in the game, when i do this.

@Orc49152
Interesting. I'm using 27 archives besides Tribunal.bsa and Bloodmoon.bsa without problems. Those 27 archives are referenced by esms/esps tho - I had thought some of them were pluginless.

The only other ideas I can think of is to repack your own custom Morrowind.bsa that replaces the stock assets with Connary's (and likewise for Tribunal.bsa and Bloodmoon.bsa), or alternately change the path for all of the assets in Connary's bsa and create a esp that redirects the model/texture/icon paths for the objects involved, then load that esp. Probably more work than it's worth - you'd have an easier time of it by unpacking Connary's bsa to the Data Files directories as suggested by Kalian (and seconded by Kingpix).


@Elaura
That should be true for same-named assets in BSAs when the morrowind.ini has TryArchiveFirst set to 0 or 1. However for setting 0, same-named files with the same path in the Data Files directory structure will always override with priority given to dds over tga.


@Slartibartfast
Apologies, I seem to have contradicted what you posted earlier regarding the timestamp on BSAs. I will need to verify again what I stated - it's been a while since I testing all this previously and most of that was with esm/esp references to archived assets, not simply different versions of pluginless assets in the identical path.


[edit] clarification about altering Connary's bsa.

You are a wealth of information, Sir. Thank you for teaching me another new thing today, tetchy. Have you written a guide or a wiki or something? If not, you should, I never really understood what the TryArchiveFirst setting in the ini was for.

Being back home and on my own computer i did some more testing.
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I have to correct myself (again).
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Changing the timestamp on the bsa has no consequences.
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Doesn't matter if it's 2000 or 2011, i always get the same textures replaced.
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Which are ground textures and the dunmer stronghold door.
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Haven't seen any other replaced yet.
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It's the same for un- and repacking the bsa - no effect.
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As far as i can tell, it's impossible to do a pluginless replacer in bsa format, because you can't be sure to overwrite the original content.
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If there are conflicting filenames in the bsas, it looks to me like lottery which ones appear in the game.
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Although, in all my testings these textures have always been the same, i don't know why they are overwriting the vanilla ones and the others don't.
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Having said that, i seem to be the only person having problems with Connary's bsa.
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So, it's maybe my fault.
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Mods which have only unique (non-conflicting) filenames imo can be safely made into bsas.
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An esm/esp would be required, though.
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Installing the game from the original disk instead of the iso had no effect.
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Replacing the original content in the vanilla bsas is too cumbersome.
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Honestly i'm tired of testing and i decided i won't package my mods.
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I want to begin a new game.



Edit:
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Thanks for your help.
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I would like to hear, if a pluginless replacer in bsa format is working for you.

I think tetchy is mistaken here - this is the opposite of what you need to do. You should redate the game files (Morrowind.bsa, Tribunal.bsa and Bloodmoon.bsa) to have an earlier date than the mod file. If this doesn't work, I guess it could be because some of the individual textures in Connary's bsa have an earlier date than some of those in the game files. I'm not sure exactly how that works.

Yeah, I could very well be mistaken since I haven't had a chance to test it directly with pluginless replacers.

Assets inherit the timestamp of the BSA.

This may be just a limitation of how Morrowind handles replacement assets that share the same path with the stock assets without an esm/esp to reference the replacements; i.e. Morrowind.esm already has references to the assets, so an overriding esm or esp is required with a new path for the replacement. I know this works because I have made such plugins to replace containers and fauna with refs to custom versions with the same file names but in a different path. I always date the overriding esm/esp to load after the stock esms.

Placing replacement textures 'loose' into the Textures file will always override the originals, as long as they have the same name and a later date. I guess it might work differently for a BSA, though I'm not sure why. Orc49152: if all else fails, you can just manually extract the entire contents of the BSA (use http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=12189) into the Data Files\Textures folder.

@Orc, you're not alone. I've never had any luck getting Connary's bsa's to work properly (from BTB's site if it matters). Same results as you, where its just a random amount of textures getting replaced. I always just unpack them first then start in on other texture replacers. Just isn't worth the stress, at that point in an install, there's usually a dozen other things to figure out...