I seem to have misplaced all of my icon files for morrowind.

every time i make a new object and want to add an inventory icon, there aren't any.

I've checked with explorer and on the disk but i cant find them.
Anyone else had this problem?

also, does anyone know where i can get a top-down view of the whole of morrowind?

The icons are on your Construction Set CD. What do you mean, top-down view of morrowind? Vvardenfell map

there is a "topdown view" option under the "view" tab. But I think it might only work with interiors. Try it though because I am not sure.

It works with both Exteriors and Interiors. The shortcut button is T. Selecting Top-Down view will switch you rotation so that up is north. Which is pretty useful.

yes, thank you both of you.

but shouldn't the files get copied to the Hard drive during the instalation?

Nope, for some reason you always have to add all the files from the CS CD manually after every install. All the Construction Set installation does is install the program itself... which is odd. Oh well.

The reason why it doesn't copy all the files over is because the files are already packed into the *.bsa files in you data files directory. Why would you want to install both the compressed *and* the uncompressed files? They figure most casual users wouldn't be tinkering with the NIF files, or would just pop in the CD.

If you're feeling really brave and have oodles of time on your hands, you could try copying all the uncompressed files from the Destruction Set CD, and deleting the morrowind.bsa file and see what happens, that way you only have the uncompressed files and save some hard drive space. If something goes wrong you can always reinstall.

EDIT: If you're even more bored, you could fine a BSA unpacker and unpack the morrowind, tribunal, and bloodmoon files (in that order), then delete all three BSA files.

You could also repack *all* of the files into a single BSA file to decrease hard drive space and decrease loading time.

Don't say I didn't warn you though

That wouldn't work. The game uses the .bsa files, TESCS uses unpacked files. I have tried it. I keep both packed and unpacked versions on my hard drive, I hate switching CDs all the time.

have you tried packing everything into a single BSA file? It worked for Total Annihilation, but I can see it not working for morrowind.

EDIT: I have successfully packed morrowind.bsa, tribunal.bsa, and bloodmoon.bsa successfully into morrowind.bsa. I had to grey out the references to tribunal.bsa and bloodmoon.bsa in morrowind.ini, and it worked.

Now, the real question is, was it worth it?

The game works fine, but no noticeable speed improvement. Total disk savings? One megabyte. Wasted hours on my life: one.

So, no, not really

Though it is nice to have one file instead of three.

Well, since you asked for it I'm going to post a howto here. Don't say I didn't warn you though! It requires a little experience with the command prompt.

How to repack morrowind, tribunal, and bloodmoon bsa files into one file:

use google to search for a utility called "bsapack.exe".

create three temp directories wherever you wish: "morrowind", "tribunal", "bloodmoon".

Copy morrowind.bsa into the morrowind temp, copy tribunal.bsa into the tribunal temp, and same for bloodmoon.

copy bsapack.exe into each temp directory.

click Start->Run... and type in cmd into the box. A dos prompt should pop up.

Go to each temp directory that you made and type:
bsapack unpack [name of bsa file].bsa
(replace [name of bsa] with morrowind, tribunal, and bloodmoon for each temp directory-don't include the brackets)

in each temp directory all of the icons, meshes, etc will appear. THIS WILL TAKE A WHILE FOR EACH TEMP DIRECTORY.

now, go to your tribunal directory (still at the prompt, DO NOT USE EXPLORER).

type in:
xcopy /e *.* [location of morrowind temp directory]

go into the bloodmoon temp directory and do the exact same thing. REMEMBER to copy tribunal before bloodmoon.

Now the morrowind directory should contain all of the files.

Now type:
bsapack pack morrowind_new.bsa
this will take all the files and repack them into a single file. This will take a while. Go make yourself a bowl of cereal. Now, go to your original data file directory, delete morrowind.bsa and copy morrowind_new.bsa. Rename the new file to morrowind.bsa. Now delete tribunal.bsa and bloodmoon.bsa from your data file directory.

Here's what you do to the morrowind.ini file:
find the [Archive] area. You will see two lines like this:
Archive 0=tribunal.bsa
Archive 1=bloodmoon.bsa
You can either remove these two lines now, or simply put a semicolon ; in front of the two lines to comment them out (disable them) just in case.

Now fire up morrowind. If you get no errors, that means everything is peachy! If something bad happens, uncomment the two lines from morrowind.ini, and copy over the old bsa files from the temp directories that you hopefully haven't deleted yet.

*phew*!

IF THAT WASN'T ENOUGH, HERE'S ANOTHER HOW TO!

Many mods have their own files in the meshes and icon folder. If you're installing a new mod, unpack all these art files into a temp directory. Copy bsapack.exe into the temp directory. Fire up the command prompt and type in bsapack pack nameofmod.bsa. Now add a line to the [Archive] area of the morrowind.ini file:
Archive #=nameofmod.bsa
# represents the next number after the last entry under [Archive]. If it were Archive 1=bloodmoon.bsa, then # would be 2.

If you have a mod with 11 megs of art data (represented by "size on disk"), the packed bsa file will only take 10 megs "size on disk". And it will speed up load times a little too.

Thanx, Pierre! The part about mods was especially useful... since I have 15,000 art files in my data files (textures and meshes) directory.

P.S. I already had BSApack, but I didn't know how to use it.

BTW I think you should add this at the beginning of your howto:

Okay... I may not know the specifics of the NetImmerse engine, but could someone remind me again how you can get performance gains by forcing the decompression of files each time a request for them is made? I mean, I may be simple folk, but I don't reckon that increasing CPU and memory load so that you can save a grand total of two megabytes is going to help that there fps counter.

I don't know how or why, but my game is faster now when I merged everything in one file. And I think Pierre mentioned that BSA is not actually compressed file, just a merged one. So it's probably easier (IMO) for NetImmerse engine to use only one instead of 15,000 files.

Prove it.

How? I can't.

Get FRAPS. Record some benchmarks where you're just running forward through a crowded city, both with the files that should be unpacked being uppacked and with this little BSA idea of yours. Record a movie at low resolution and try to enter a cell, then isolate the frames where the "Loading Cell..." screen shows and record the final length of the movie. Once again, do this with both packed and unpacked art files. Just for fun, try doing another run of each test with all art files unpacked.

Hrm -- so then the BSA format doesn't use any compression at all, with the exception of grouping everything into a single file?

Well, live and learn.

However, I still doubt that it can still do anything dramatic performance-wise. Certainly nothing that will make packing all the art file worthwhile.

Having one file instead of 15000 I'd say is quite convenient

Also, if a person has 15000 art files (as someone posted earlier), you can actually calculate the expected disk savings.

Assuming the person is using fat32, the person probably uses the minimum cluster size of 16K.

Usually, the last cluster used in a file has some amount of empty space. So, let's say that on average, every single file wastes 8K of space.

8K*15000=120000K=120 megabytes!!!

That's a significant chunk of hard drive! Even if you use NTFS, 120MB/4=30 megs. Not too bad.

Imagine the hard drive as something like 30 CD's stacked on top of each other. Instead of a laser, a magnetic arm reads the surface of each disk. If you have 15000 files, the arm has to jump all across the surface to read each file. If you have one linear file, the arm jumps a lot less often.

So, you get decreased loading times. In-game performance probably won't increase too much if you don't use threaded loading, though you don't have to wait as long. But, if you use threaded loading you can expect a siginifant boost in FPS when crossing cell boundaries.

My loading time entering interiors went from 4 to 3 seconds. It's not dramatic, but it's worth it (IMO).