Oblivion terrain texture problem

[Triton6]

Does anyone know where I should be looking specifically within the Oblivion data folder to fix this problem? Aside from the obvious terrain textures, that is. Or ever seen anything like this? Distant terrain drawing looks fine, problem is just medium distance & near terrain. Water is unaffected as are dungeons/caves. I have too many mods loading to list here, though probably the most pertinent ones I am running are Qarl's Texture Pack 3, Natural Environments, and a handful of landscapes such as rolling hills, entius gorge, etc. If helpful, I can post screenshots of my Oblivion Mod Manager load order. ES4 has the latest patch and I have both Shivering Isles & Knights of the Nine. I've disabled various mods & changed load order in hopes there was a conflict, but the problem persists. I have also adjusted texture size & other settings within the video options, but that didn't help either. The game runs fine aside from this nuisance.

http://home.austin.rr.com/eljefe/ima...enshot1_sm.jpg
http://home.austin.rr.com/eljefe/ima...enshot2_sm.jpg

I'd prefer not to have to uninstall/reinstall Oblivion and load mods one at a time to identify the problem...

System is a custom built Core2Duo box running XP Pro 64-bit, video card is evga superKO ACS3 Geforce 8800GTS 320MB (latest WHQL drivers installed), 4GB RAM.

[Spectre8]

That is massively bizarre!

Sounds like you know as much about mod managing as I do... so I doubt I could help. I too wouldn't want to do a reinstall, but maybe just an install of Qarl over the top of itself? I'm guessing it's a file that's somehow gotten swapped around in there. Qarl does a full overhaul, so I'm also guessing it's to do with that, rather than any of the others directly.

Best of luck mate, and sorry I couldn't be more help.

[Triton6]

No worries. I'll give it a whirl and see if "reinstalling" Qarl TP3 helps.

Thanks!

[Spectre8]

One other thing... I'm assuming you have both parts of Qarls pack? There is a small patch for it as well as the big mumma. If not, grab it.

[Coot]

Triton, I have seen this before and also had it occur in my game once. It was some time ago however and I just can't recall what was done to fix it. I think it was a mod issue. If I get a chance I will have a look around the various forums. In the mean time do a google search on possibly "weird graphic issue with Oblivion" or something similar. Do you know when the issue started exactly?

Come to think of it...it may have been Qarls textures.

[Triton6]

I have ignored this a few weeks now...From what I can remember, the problem started immediately after a fresh OS install and Oblivion install. All mods running now are the same when I initially started.

I have the monster 1.7GB file for Qarl TP3 and a patch file that is needed if the unofficial Oblivion 2.x patch (I have 2.2) was applied. I could've sworn I also had another Qarl patch, but it appears not. I downloaded the 10MB TP3 patch 1.3 and that may be the missing piece. Looks like I should have installed it before applying the unofficial 2.2 patch. I'm going to start from TP3 and go forward. I'll let y'all know how it turns out.

Thanks for info!

[Spectre8]

Hope it's the answer mate!

Also, were you running a 32bit OS before your upgrade?? I've still got Oblivion and tons of mods running on my other partition under XP32 and it's fine. When I tried it with Vista64... I had nothing but trouble. Even getting it to run vanilla wasn't fun. Given that the game takes a LONG time to install, as do the big mods, it's just a massively time consuming process that I don't have time for.

Hopefully the patch is the key.

[Isthiriel]

I'm not completely sure what the screenshots are supposed to be of?

Textures in the near to middle distance are applied to models in your cell and neighbouring cells, the texture in the far distance is a single separate image that is height-mapped &c.. to make it look like the cell corresponding to that location is loaded when it actually isn't.

That first screenshot looks a bit like a normal map applied as a texture :-/

Mod load order is important for ESPs where object definitions can replace each other, it doesn't apply to texture replacers in general because the texture data (whether it is in a bsa or occupying the Data Files hierarchy) is handled differently.

This is usually an ArchiveInvalidation.txt or Oblivion.ini kind of problem (the first because it controls what isn't loaded from BSA files, the second because it controls which BSAs are loaded). I don't remember off the top of my head if you can control BSA load order, I don't think you can.

[Triton6]

First, sorry for the novel, but this thread came up when I googled "weird graphic issue with Oblivion" & figured a detailed log might help anyone else if I can fix this.

Very interesting, Isthiriel. I agree something is being called improperly and then getting mapped as the terrain. I've thought about trying to isolate the problem texture/map/etc., but don't have a clue of where to start and there's way too much data in the \textures and \meshes folders. I appreciate the info nonetheless.

Here's a couple of daytime shots for the hell of it.

http://home.austin.rr.com/eljefe/ima...enshot3_sm.jpg
http://home.austin.rr.com/eljefe/ima...enshot4_sm.jpg

I reinstalled Qarl TP3, Qarls patch 1.3, unofficial mods patch 1.1, unofficial Oblivion patch 2.2, then Qarls/Unofficial Oblivion compatibility patch. The readme for the compatibility patch states "Qarl's Texture Pack 3 incorporated the mesh corrections made in the Unofficial Oblivion Patch 2.0 wherever QTP3 needed to change parallax settings, but this compatibility between the two mods was lost with the release of UOP 2.1.This small patch fixes that problem. All conflicting meshes from UOP 2.1 have been altered to support the parallax mode settings used in QTP3, and QTP3 normal maps have been restored wherever they were overwritten by UOP normal map corrections (with one notable exception being the vanilla arena textures that were mistakenly included in QTP3 -- in this one case I have preserved the UOP normal map changes). Install this patch after installing QTP3, the QTP3 patches, and UOP 2.1." Not sure if this is needed for the 2.2 patch as I couldn't find info expliciting stating that.

Something must still be going wrong cause the problem remains. I even deactivated all mods including official Bethesda ones and the problem persists. Also set the video options to default and only found out only one thing with that...I forgot how horrible 640x480 looks.
Actually, setting the video options to default no longer caused Oblivion to generate the generic XP program crash error when I quit the game. Choice!

My ArchiveInvalidation.txt file only has this:

textures/menus80/icons/clutter/iconbook3.dds
textures/menus/icons/clutter/iconbook3.dds
textures/menus50/icons/clutter/iconbook3.dds
textures/dungeons/chargen/prisoncellwall03.dds

Some info I found with the unofficial patch says entries for meshes or textures that don't exist can cause crashes or make textures go purple (disappearing). I have a file called ArchiveInvalidationInvalidated!.bsa that supposedly allows you to totally eliminate the need for ArchiveInvalidation.txt. Taking that out of the mix and re-running the Oblivion Mod Manager BSA setting utility didn't change anything. The BSA settings match the screenshot that comes with TP3. I also ran the BSA uncorruptor within OBMM; no difference.

I think I'm going to uninstall/reinstall Oblivion and take a methodical approach to try reproducing this. Also debating going back to XP 32-bit since other apps I use don't like 64-bit. iTunes....but I digress.

I'll update what I find regardless.

[Isthiriel]

Ok, I don't have Oblivion installed at the moment (saving up the $$$ for another hdd *sob*), so some of this is going to guesswork from what I remember fiddling with the texture packs from when I last played Oblivion (a long time before Qarl's pack was released...).

The daytime shots make it more obvious that the ground texture (under the grass -- you know how to turn the grass off, right?) has gone from being something mostly green to something mostly black.

IIRC, the Oblivion/Data/Textures hierarchy should override textures in BSAs (at least it did for certain in Morrowind and I don't think they changed that behaviour). So in Oblivion/Data/Textures/Landscape you should have a bunch of textures that correspond to the various kinds of ground and each should have an associated normal map (they'll be a .dds and a _n.dds for the normal map -- where they are used comes from the cell definition in the esm/esp but most texture replacers substitute texture for texture rather than trying to remap what the cells do ... it is much, much easier and less trouble prone). Irfanview and most other image viewers open up .dds files just fine and you should be seeing something like the description says, ie "chterraingrass01.dds" should look like a top-down view of some grass, &c..

If you are seeing black (or some other dark colour) that's your problem

It might be that the .dds isn't actually a .dds (or some other format incompatibility) so when Oblivion loads it reads something different from what is actually written. That's harder to diagnose and I'd basically cross your fingers and hope that's not it since no one else is reporting the same problem.

If there's nothing in that directory, try unpacking the .BSAs that replace the landscape textures and looking in the respective directories there -- also try copying the landscape textures from where you unpacked them back into the Oblivion/Data/Textures/Landscape folder so you can test them individually.

Also, before you reinstall, if you move all of the Oblivion/Data/* subdirectories to somewhere else and all of the non-oblivion .BSAs, then the game should only be seeing the same textures it would see if you had a clean install (ie if the problem is persisting it might be a hardware/driver fault ... like the black hexagons in bf2/bf2142) -- though this will cause other problems since some of the patches put stuff in Oblivion/Data/*/*, so it's only good for testing. (Missing textures should come up white I think.)