Rant: Stop renaming every texture file to 'override' and calling it a mod

I keep seeing people in the Skyrim forums telling new modders to just dump a renamed texture into the data folder and call it a day. That works for maybe one or two items, but after you do it for 20 armor pieces your load order turns into a mess. I spent 4 hours last Saturday trying to figure out why a retextured iron helmet kept showing up on bandits as a weird purple block. Turns out the tutorial they followed told them to rename the file but didn't mention the mipmaps. If you don't resize the DDS file properly the game just glitches out. I learned the hard way after deleting my whole mod setup three times. Has anyone else hit this wall where a simple texture swap ruins half your game?

2 comments

2 Comments

lisa8399d ago

Used to think renaming files was fine until I spent an entire evening trying to fix a blackface bug on orc NPCs. Turns out the texture was named right but the normal map was wrong size. Now I always check the DDS settings before I drop anything in the data folder. Mipmaps are a pain but skipping them just breaks everything.

betty_scott189d ago

Did your friend try resizing the normal map in GIMP first, @lisa839?