Fallout 3 file formats (How to open BSA files inside)

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Delphy

First time out of the vault
Hi All,

Having just finished installing Fallout 3 on my PC, before even playing it, I figured I'd see what could be done with the file formats.

The good news: the game has .bsa files that are the same as the ones used in Oblivion. The version number is 0x68, as opposed to 0x67 for Oblivion.

To open them with BSA Commander you have to do the following:

- Backup the original .bsa file
- Open it in a hex editor
- Change byte 5 from 68 to 67
- Save and open in BSA Commander

This will allow you to extract the textures, nifs etc.

More to come in a bit when I've had a change to grab some dinner and look at the .nifs in more detail.

Regards
Delphy
 
That's good news at least. :) With the continuing lack of news about a cs we certainly could use some.

If you have obmm installed it might save you a bit of hex editing; it gives you an option to ignore the version number in the file.
 
Okay I've looked at the .nif files - unfortunately they can't be loaded with nifskope at the moment (lots of errors with block ranges). I'll need to dissect the format some more to see exactly whats different.

Edit: Just tried with the Blender .nif import and they don't work either.

The Textures bsa file contains a whole ton of DDS files, so that should be relatively easy to mod.

I don't know enough about esm files to look inside those (I never modded Oblivion but my girlfriend did)
 
Delphy said:
Yeah but obmm doesn't let you actually look inside the BSA files and see whats in them :)
Click to expand...
aww, that's annoying. :(

What happens when you try and open one with it then? It just gives an empty list? Something other than the version number must have changed since oblivion then; I always thought obmm was a bit more forgiving in hitting unexpected data in the bsa's than bsa commander was.
 
I honestly didn't try anything in obmm... I mean, it's 20 seconds to hex edit the Fallout 3 bsa fiels and extract them in BSA Commander... :) Also I didn't think obmm could actually extract anything from bsa files... at least, not in the version I have here.

Just grab a freeware hex editor and change the bytes and extract in BSA Commander.
 
For some reason I get empty files when I unpack the archives? :|

I managed to get the textures and half of the combat shotgun using 3d Ripper but it's kinda broken and I'd much rather use the actual model files

E:/ Hmm, this only applies to textures, meshes seem to export fine? :E
Well, since I'll probably be retexturing some weapons from scratch anyways I don't need the original textures

E2: Yeah, I seem to have the same problem of having a completely blank scene in NifSkope as well
 
This is good news on the BSA file at least.

If nifskope doesn't work I expect neither blender, max, maya, pyffi tools to work since they all work off the nif.xml file which is currently wrong for the bethesda format.

Give us a couple of days to analyze the files and maybe some time to actually play the game. I expect much of the decoding to go quickly as it usually has with newer games thanks to the block size info in the nif header. Also, we'll probably put out a development build on the forum before an official nifskope release.
 
Millenia said:
Cheers, can't wait to get modding this awesome game :D
Click to expand...

Wow. There are a large number of changes with the few files I've looked at. I wouldn't expect much until the weekend.
 
Textures are still DDS format.

By the way I had problems with OBMM, so I used BSA commander with the hex edit trick. Have to run from Oblivion directory I guess which I dont have installed, doesn't work form Fallout directory.
 
Delphy said:
I honestly didn't try anything in obmm... I mean, it's 20 seconds to hex edit the Fallout 3 bsa fiels and extract them in BSA Commander... :) Also I didn't think obmm could actually extract anything from bsa files... at least, not in the version I have here.

Just grab a freeware hex editor and change the bytes and extract in BSA Commander.
Click to expand...
obmm has allowed you to browse and extract files from bsa's since, umm, forever afaik. Creating new BSA's is more recent, but any recent version of obmm should be able to do anything with a bsa that bsa commander can do.

I know it's quick and easy to do a hex edit, and having to use a tool that requires oblivion to be installed before it'll run makes no sense whatsoever anyway, but if it works then it means I can easily package obmm's bsa utilities up separately, change the version number to get rid of any warnings/hex edit requirement and release it as a specific fallout tool.

After some testing at the official forums, it turned out that obmm can open all bsas with the exception of the textures, which causes it to crash with an out of memory error. Probably due to obmm being inefficient with its memory usage rather than bsa differences, since it doesn't crash unless you try to extract the whole thing at once.
 
Yeah the textures bsa seems to be the most problematic one, maybe out of memory errors were also causing BSA commander to unpack 0 byte texture files for me?
 
I have to admit to not actually using obmm so the version I have is probably ancient. :) Thanks for the heads up on it though.

I actually did manage to extract the Textures bsa file ok with the hex trick, so not sure whats going on here.
 
Delphy said:
The good news: the game has .bsa files that are the same as the ones used in Oblivion. The version number is 0x68, as opposed to 0x67 for Oblivion.
Click to expand...
Kewl! Would it be possible to rewrite the source code, so that BSACommander accepts both versions without all of us having to do a hex edit?

Metalmurphy said:
Does it also allow you to replace files?

I wanna get rid of that annoying XP sound.
Click to expand...
I haven't got Fallout 3 yet, but if it works anything like Oblivion, these are the steps:

1) Extract the .bsa archive containing sound (using the tools mentioned in this thread).
2) Figure out which file controls the XP sound.
3) Make/find new cooler sound. I'm not certain of the format expected by Fallout 3. If you look at the Oblivion CS Wiki, you can find the format for Oblivion sound files.
4) Place new sound file at the file location found in 2.
5) Rename new sound file to the name of old sound file.
6) Start your game and enjoy your new sound.
7) Once tested, pack your replacer into any archive (rar, zip, 7z, etc) and upload to your favorite modding sites :)

Edit: The autoreplacer is pretty funny :D
 
Zumbs said:
I haven't got Fallout 3 yet, but if it works anything like Oblivion, these are the steps:

1) Extract the .bsa archive containing sound (using the tools mentioned in this thread).
2) Figure out which file controls the XP sound.
3) Make/find new cooler sound. I'm not certain of the format expected by Fallout 3. If you look at the Oblivion CS Wiki, you can find the format for Oblivion sound files.
4) Place new sound file at the file location found in 2.
5) Rename new sound file to the name of old sound file.
6) Start your game and enjoy your new sound.
7) Once tested, pack your replacer into any archive (rar, zip, 7z, etc) and upload to your favorite modding sites :)

Edit: The autoreplacer is pretty funny :D
Click to expand...

Well, I used some mods in Oblivion but I didn't really understand much how they worked. I know some of them weren't compressed into a bsa file, they would just be there in the Data folder.

I tried doing that with the XP sound file (it's "sound\fx\ui\popup\ui_popup_experienceup.wav) and replaced it with another file and the same sound would still come up.

Then I tried using BSA Commander. I extracted the entire file Sound BSA file, replaced the one I needed, used the Packer in the Tools section to make a new BSA file. Replaced it with the original .bsa file. Then I launched the game and I had no sound whatsoever meaning the file wasn't recognized :p

Is there any way to replace a single file inside the BSA archive without having to extract everything and pack everything again?


*edit* Ok, I got it to work with BSA Commander. I just had the Flags wrong. The offsets for the files were all different but I haven't noticed any missing sounds yet.
 
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