More Oblivion Re-Rating Fallout

The ESRB has a retort to the criticism leveled against it after rating Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mature. The move has required Bethesda Softworks to pull all of the current stock of the game to relabel. From the GameDailyBiz article: "When we brought the topless female images to Bethesda Softworks' attention, they confirmed that the art file existed in a fully rendered form in the code on the game disc. The ESRB's investigation found that the mod allowed users to change the filename for the female character mesh in order to access the art file that was created by Bethesda. While true that a modification was required to access this file, the changes we implemented last year - expanding our disclosure rules to include locked-out content - were made to prevent these kinds of situations" Via Cathode Tan, who has his own commentary, an opinion piece by John Romero has yet another view of the complicated situation.

Comments

Re:Decent underwear

[Feanturi]

As mentioned many other times already, the mod involves pasting a barechested male texture over the female body size.

Trust me, there is nothing male about textures\characters\imperial\female\upperbodyfemal e.dds which is what the nude mesh uses natively, with no modifications at all. The nude mesh simply has to be extracted from the .bsa file the game came with and renamed to replace the non-nude mesh. I am seeing that quite a few people posting to this topic have very different ideas about how this mod is done, so I'll lay it down for you:

There is a third-party program called tes4bsa. Its whole job is to unpack the game's art and sound files from the proprietary archive format they are in. That's all it does, it makes no changes to any of the content at all. It is an essential tool for making your own unique copies of objects for a mod you want to do, as you have to be able to browse to the nif file when making a new object. With Morrowind they gave you all the art files unpacked on the second CD. So this tes4bsa merely enables the tradtional means of modding this game, so that it is available again as we modders were used to with MW.

1. Download tes4bsa, and put it in the Data folder.

2. Run it to unpack the textures archive.

3. Navigate to Data\meshes\characters\_male (yes, it doesn't sound like there's females in here, but there are, don't ask me why)

4. Delete femaleupperbody.nif and rename femaleupperbodynude.nif to drop the word nude.

5. Play the game, find a dead woman (or, um, stalk and kill one) and loot her clothes. See?

Note that no textures were modified, or superimposed on anything, or even touched. No hacking out of mesh coordinates to remove the perma-bra that the default female characters actually use in-game. Just unpack the art files, delete one file and rename another. This content is not the result of any user input whatsoever.

I wonder if there is a connection: Just as many of us don't RTFA, we also seem to have a propensity for not TTFE (trying the fabulous experiment) before talking about it like we know what's happening. This is not a flame on anyone, just an observation.