NifSkope 2.0 Pre-Alpha 4

Changelog

2015-12-14

• Wider vertex format support
  • Generated meshes in Meshes/SCOL now fully supported
  • BTR files now have the correct vertex format
  • Many atypical vertex formats now handled correctly, such as certain editor markers
• Archive Browser fixes
• Faster BA2 loading
• Double Sided / Alpha Blending rendering fixes (Gallery)
• Scrollbar minimum height fix

2015-12-11

• BA2 Support. For both the Archive Browser and loading resources via Settings > Resources > Archives.
• Material file support. Loads BGSM and BGEM files when referenced by the shader property and will override shader/texture settings.
• BSLightingShaderProperty/BSEffectShaderProperty all new values now properly decoded.
• Improved FO4 shader support
  • Grayscale to Palette support. FO4 uses this extensively to make recolors on layered materials easy and use less VRAM.
  • Environment mapping, including blurring of reflections based on glossiness.
  • Much more accurate specular, though still an approximation as the method they used and their asset pipeline is still not clear (i.e. if smoothness is linear or curved).
  • Glow/emissive now shows, accuracy TBD.
  • BSEffectShaderProperty overhaul. FO4 adds support for normal/spec/env for BSESP blocks (also via BGEM). The class and shaders were updated to support this.
• Support for BC5U FourCC (as opposed to just ATI2 before).
• Spell updates for Smooth Normals/Face Normals.
• Bounding Sphere visualization for BSTriShape and BSSkin::BoneData. (Highlighting "Bounding Sphere" in block details will show the calculated bounds)

2015-12-11 Gallery

Update Notes

If you continue to use loose texture files, you must re-extract the cubemaps if they were extracted with B.A.E. v0.03 or earlier. The cubemaps were extracted incorrectly and will break the shaders in NifSkope.

You must add the Materials BA2 to Settings > Resources > Archives if you want to load BGSM/BGEM files without extracting them.

---

2015-11-26

• Vertex colors now rendering for FO4 meshes.
• Editor support for new Vertex Color format (i.e. color wheel).
• Other general rendering improvements for FO4 meshes.
• Visualization for BSSubIndexTriShape segments which are used for dismemberment or occlusion.

2015-11-24

• Fixed display of normals/tangents including issues at UV seams and mirrored islands.
• Fixed display of specular. May still be too bright, but it was completely inverted before.

Namely I was having issues with ATI2/BC5 as read by OpenGL, combined with the fact that they seem to have swizzled the tangent-bitangent-normal matrix compared to Skyrim.

Before and After

2015-11-23

Initial Fallout 4 support.

PLEASE REFER TO THE KNOWN ISSUES

Update Notes

This is a highly preliminary first effort for Fallout 4 NIF support. The important parts such as NiTriShape/NiTriShapeData from previous games are gone and replaced with BSTriShape and some inherited shapes such as BSSubIndexTriShape and BSMeshLODTriShape. These no longer inherit from NiTriBasedGeom/NiTriBasedGeomData like all previous Bethesda games and so the workflow will be quite different. The data is on the main block itself, which also poses another set of problems.

In the past replacing merely the vertices/normals/etc. was as simple as pasting over the NiTriShapeData. You can no longer do this, and since we also do not have the vertex record flags fully decoded, I have disabled things such as Import. At some point actions will be implemented to allow importing directly over the Vertex Data array. Worse still, the vertex data is compressed together as one object, and certain vertex features change the length of this vertex data record. For example, turning on Vertex Colors is no longer as simple as toggling Has Vertex Colors. Therefore things like this are not yet implemented.

Skinned meshes appear to use BSSubIndexTriShape exclusively and have a large chunk of undecoded data at the bottom. Until this can be regenerated for any mesh, do not expect to be able to change skinned meshes significantly.

Known Issues

• Import is DISABLED. We don't know enough about the data formats to reasonably allow for this in general use cases.
• Visible position of skinned meshes is often incorrect.
• The vertex format on a small percentage of files is incorrectly handled due to inadequate condition checks. You will get a warning upon opening if saving this file is unsafe.

---

Changes Prior to 2.0.dev4

For the previous changelog visit the 2.0.dev3 release page.