VICTORY!

You may remember some time ago when I expressed frustration at the hair problems inherent in NV.

I had posited a theory at the time that the issue had to do with bsa files. Since hair worked perfectly from Ling's, but not when I extracted the very same meshes to use stand-alone.

Most people would simply use Ling's or Mikoto's beauty pack in all their companions and other mods.

One look over the 'My Mods' folders on my hard drive will tell you I'm not most people.

I tried creating a bsa file of my own, which was a dismal failure. Rather than fix the issue, it simply removed all the meshes.

Whoopsie.

I shelved the idea for the time, since having messed up hair is better than none at all.

Flash forward to this afternoon. I was trawling the Bethsoft forums, looking for patch information; when the thought occurred to see if there had been any new developments in the bsa area.

Got to reading, and find out that the problem before was with FOMM's bsa creator, and not the game specifically. It seems that bsa creator doesn't correctly include a 'data' folder in the tree inside the archive; so it throws the whole tree off, and the game can't find any of the resources.

Followed some posted advice, set up a special directory tree outside the FONV install for the express purpose of bsa packing - with a setup that allowed for simply selecting 'data' and taking the whole tree (something you can't do in your install directory for obvious reasons).

Sure enough, it worked.

My cosmetic resource works correctly; I fixed my girls' hair - even managed to give Natasha back her correct 'do.












Even fixed my character's ability to wear hats without the hair clipping through:




It's a small victory, granted; but these days I takes what I can gets. Seeing hair styles correctly makes the game less frustrating on the whole, and will actually let me release a 'ported' cosmetic resource.

It also makes my personal mods easier to keep track of. I can pack all the needed resources into one bsa, and not have to deal with directory structures.

Even took the opportunity to get Maeva back up and running with her personal body textures.

Seems the issue at hand was that Obsidian fucked up yet another part of the game engine, which now won't read the egt and egm files for hair unless they're packed into an archive. Without these files, there's nothing to tell the game where to place the hair on the head - so you get the now-prolific off center hairs, bald spots, and mis-sized hair styles when you set an NPC's scale to anything other than 1.

It still amazes the hell out of me that any of these people remain employed.