Xenoviewer
“Xenoviewer” game asset viewer. Early alpha build
Game asset viewer with some visualization tools. For those who want to appreciate well made game assets, and understand how they are made.
Early alpha build. Some jankiness is expected. Not heavily compatibility tested (with different versions of Windows, different GPUs, etc). Not tested with mods.
If you prefer to wait for a more tested version, feel free to come back in a week or so. But I appreciate early adopters who want to try it on their hardware. It doesn’t write to the game directory, so it won’t screw up your install or anything.
Xenoviewer reads model data files directly from the game install without any extraction required (ie, it reads the files in the same way as the game itself does).
For Starfield, a good place to start is the “meshes/setdressing” folder. Look for .nif files, most of which are somewhere within the “meshes” folder. You may find some items with easter eggs that are too small to read in the game, and maybe even a cryptography challenge or two?
Installation
Copy files anywhere and run “xenoviewer.exe.”
Partial support for Starfield materials
Only some of the material settings in Starfield’s engine are emulated. As a result some models may not appear as they are in game, or as the artists intended. In particular, many “grime” and “scratches” layers do not show up.
Also, since all engines work differently, some material parameters are interpreted slightly differently than the Starfield engine. In particular, Starfield is quite biased towards matte materials, so many things appear too shiny/metallic.
Support may improve in time, if I add some of the unique Starfield material features and tweak things to match the game engine more closely.
Possible future features
Rendering in the lighting preview modes is still pretty basic; but in later builds I might enable some more rendering techniques and visual polish.
Depending on my motivation and other priorities, I may add more features in time, such as:
– animation support
– character customization support (face morphs, etc)
– loading character configuration data from the esm files
– other ways of visualizing the geometry
– material data inspector (ie, some way to look at all of the details of a material)
– texture visualizer
– more rendering features & better presentation in “lighting preview” mode
Known issues
– “UI scale” options in windows may be ignored, resulting in very small controls on high resolution monitors. This is because Windows’ “UI scale” options interfere with the proper working of the underlying rendering engine.
– “Lighting preview” mode may use significant system resources the first time it is enabled. The tool will compile and cache some lighting resources during this phase. However, the workload may be too high for lower end machines. If so, stick to the “visualizations” mode, which runs well even on low end hardware.
– Opening the “geometries” folder in starfield can be a little slow. There are a large number of single file directories inside this folder, which do not interact well with the .ba2 reading algorithm.
– Many character assets don’t load — animated asset formats have changed in Starfield, and I haven’t gotten around to this side of things yet
– you may see a crash after minimizing the window or after waking the PC from sleep sometimes
Feedback
Bug reports and feature requests are appreciated. Check out our change on nexusmods (in the Starfield section).
Troubleshooting
Xenoviewer will cache some files in your %USERPROFILE%/AppData/Local/Temp/Xenoviewer directory. If you run into problems, you can try deleting this folder.
