Remove the Eye Checker - Githubissues

If someone can provide me with an actual case where this thing helps rather than blows everything up, we can talk about writing a replacement from scratch.

Because as it stands, all this does is break things. As far as I understand the issue ('googly eyes'), it happens as follows (based on information from https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/46254):

Mod A changes an eye mesh
Mod B changes an eye texture
Due to the different UV mapping of Mod A's eye mesh, Mod B's eye texture is no longer compatible with the eye mesh. It won't crash or anything, but the texture will be applied in an ugly-looking way - a typical UV mismatch.

The most common result of UV mismatches are seams - places where the texture suddenly stretches and 'jumps' from one part to another. But they can cause all kinds of weird-looking output, including what became referred to as 'googly eyes'.

So that's the issue, as I understand it. What do we do to detect and fix it? We check if a plugin changes the eye meshes used by a race without also overriding the EYES record used by that race.

That doesn't actually suffice to fix it. For example, in the scenario above, we would detect absolutely nothing wrong - because Mod A and Mod B are still using the vanilla paths. We would assume everything was fine, when in actuality googly eyes are awaiting us ingame.

Which brings us to the crux of this issue: This is a resource conflict! You should solve this using BAIN, NifSkope and a DDS-capable image viewer. Like any other resource conflict involving UV mismatches. It has absolutely no business being in the BP.

Unless I'm completely misunderstanding it. But even if I am, this patcher is horrid and breaks one of the most popular mods on the Oblivion Nexus right now (OCO, to the point that an unofficial patch is needed: https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/49988).

And if I am misunderstanding it, then someone needs to provide a test case. I asked on Discord and two of our biggest Oblivion experts could not figure out what 'googly eyes' actually are, I had to go digging on Google - so no guarantee that any of this is correct.

Perhaps the most enlightening thing they had to say was "I saw the Eye Checker as only harmful and in no way helpful to me." When a 'feature' is described like that by the experts in a field, it should probably go.

\</rant>

wrye-bash / wrye-bash

Remove the Eye Checker #655