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.

Re:Changing the rating

[Surt]

It makes a certain kind of sense if you understand the right viewpoint:
Sex content => sex crimes against women
Violent content => violent crime

Which is worse in this country? According to the stats, sex crimes are far more common than violent crimes (assuming you don't give the violent crime category credit for the violence typically involved in sex crimes).

Re:Does anyone know the background?

[lgw]

As I understand it, Oblivion doesn't have "fully rendered nipples", it has odd-looking breasts with bumps that look right once you add clothing. Also the content is no more "unlockable" than adding a third-party naked skin is "unlockable". You can't get to the content through game play. Once you include "hings you can do by changing game files", anything is possible.

Going to happen more in the future

[Aero]

One of the extras on the Shrek DVD has someone talking about how they did it for that movie, because it made the movement of clothing over the characters' bodies as they moved more realistic. So somewhere in the depths of Dreamworks's render farm, there's a nude Princess Fiona mesh. (And a nude Shrek, and Farquaad, but only go there if that's what floats your boat...)

It's only a matter of time before most 3D models use the same technique, because the technology is there and it does make things look better. So what's a developer to do? The nude character mesh has to be stored somewhere in order to get the clothing overlaid onto it.

If it were up to me, I'd slap little pasties on the female nipples reading "THANX ESRB". Heck, put 'em on the male nipples too, just to be Fair'n'Balanced.

The real solution is for America to get over itself. A teenager will see more pokey nipples in the clothing stores flanking Gameslop in the mall, and with a lot less effort, than in half a dozen videogames. (When the heck did mannequins all get pokey nipples, by the way? I stopped going to malls for the last few years of my first marriage, and when I started up again a couple of years ago, all the female mannequins had been molded in very cold rooms, if you know what I mean...)

Re:GET IT STRAIGHT

[Anonymous Coward]

BUT it is there, naked titties. In the game as you buy it in the store.

No, it is not in the game.

It is on the game disk, but it is not in the game.

There is no way to see it in the game without modifying the game. Therefore, it is NOT IN THE GAME.

When will people learn to think.

By your logic, every bar in the country should be treated as a strip club, because those waitresses are naked. Um, like under their clothes. But they have naked skin and they're in the bar, and they might take those clothes off, see? If one of them got naked in the bar, it wouldn't have involved a naked girl coming into the bar from outside, the naked girl would have been in there all along, just wearing clothes. So all those waitresses should be treated as strippers, and the bars should be regulated as strip clubs. QED.

Re:Decent underwear

[Jaysyn]

Good distraction from all the shady stuff our government is into.

Jaysyn

Re:Decent underwear

[Feanturi]

Then why not put a sports bra or something on the basic character model?

That is in fact what they did: femaleupperbody.nif is the end product of femaleupperbodynude.nif with a bra mesh permanently welded onto it, with the appropriate texture for the bra mapped to that area. Problem is they forgot to turf the nude one, which was no longer needed when the game was ready to ship. The nude one is not used when they have clothes overtop, as one might think that was why it was there, because of problems with the bra messing with the clothing, but no, it does not actually get used by the engine at all. The bottom has a similar mesh with perma-panties, however there is no corresponding nude mesh for that part. Damn.

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.