v3.0.0-alpha.3

16 commits since v3.0.0-alpha.2 (2026-08-19 → 2026-08-21).

A small, corrective release. One user-facing fix — the 3D renderer would not start on Windows 10 — plus the repository hygiene behind it: continuous integration works again after months of red, and the test suite no longer depends on one developer's drive layout.

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The Windows 10 fix

If the 3D viewer showed a blank panel and the log said D3D12 init failed, this release is the fix.

Device creation probed a single default adapter at a fixed feature level, which fails on Windows 10 for two independent reasons — either one alone was fatal:

• Older Windows 10 runtimes do not know the 12_2 feature-level enum and reject it outright with E_INVALIDARG.
• D3D12CreateDevice(null, …) only ever probes the DEFAULT adapter, which on hybrid-graphics laptops is routinely an integrated GPU below feature level 12_0 — even with a perfectly capable discrete GPU installed.

Creation now walks the whole 12.x ladder (12_2 → 12_1 → 12_0), so an unknown feature level falls through like any other failure, and enumerates hardware adapters explicitly in best-first order — IDXGIFactory6 performance ordering where the OS provides it, plain DXGI order otherwise.

A new GpuAdapterPolicy decides how far the search goes. Under the default, the WARP software rasterizer is the last resort — feature level 12_1 on every supported Windows 10 build — so a machine with no 12_0-capable GPU renders slowly rather than not at all. That state is reported in the viewer rather than hidden, so a WARP session reads as "slow, and here is why" instead of looking like a fault.

When nothing works, every adapter probed is logged with the reason it was rejected, replacing a bare "init failed" with something diagnosable.

Please report back if this does or does not fix your machine. See Verification below for why.

Repository health

Not user-facing, but it is most of this release:

• CI had been failing since April. Four independent faults were stacked, each visible only once the one ahead of it cleared: real-asset tests running ungated; source-contract pins comparing LF marker strings against a CRLF checkout, so they passed locally and could only ever fail in CI; the SDK resolving to a release candidate that parses dotnet test arguments differently from the GA SDK; and a test-count floor set to an exact local total CI could never reach.
• CI could report a green run having built nothing. A shell block reports only its last command's exit code, so a failing build was swallowed and the resulting zero-test run slipped past the very guard meant to catch it — that guard is enforced by a test host that has to start first. Every command in that step is now exit-code checked.
• Retail assets are located, not hardcoded. 53 paths across 41 test files pointed at one machine's E:\SteamLibrary. A shared locator now honours BETHESDA_TEST_DATA_ROOT, then repo-relative Sample/, then every fixed drive's Steam library.
• A real bug fell out of the analyzer pass: a vertex-cell hash packed three 21-bit integers into a 64-bit key but cast only two, so the third sign-extended through the upper bits and collided cells with a negative Z.

Known limitations

Unchanged from alpha.2 — Starfield normal maps unwired, Fallout 76 map markers missing, decode is read-only with no schema writer, DMP→ESM output limited by capture completeness. See the alpha.2 notes for the full list.

Verification

Build: 0 warnings, 0 errors across both target frameworks and all companion apps. Tests: 8,167 passing, 0 failing in the main suite, plus 63 and 217 in the auxiliary suites — all three verified green in CI, per project.

One honest caveat on the headline fix. The device-creation paths that actually failed — 12_2 rejected, default adapter below 12_0, WARP engaging — need a real Direct3D device to exercise and sit behind an opt-in gate CI does not set. The policy layer is unit-tested; the ladder itself is verified by the renderer starting on a real Windows 10 machine, not by the suite. Treat this fix as tested-by-hand.

Downloads

Artifact	Contents
BethesdaMultitool-Windows-GUI-x64.zip	WinUI 3 desktop app, self-contained
BethesdaMultitool-Windows-CLI-x64.zip	Command-line tool, self-contained
BethesdaMultitool-Linux-CLI-x64.tar.gz	Command-line tool, self-contained
BethesdaAudioTranscriber-Windows-x64.zip	Companion transcriber app

All builds are self-contained — no .NET runtime install required.

The full entry is in CHANGELOG.md.

v3.0.0-alpha.2

588 commits since v3.0.0-alpha.1 (2026-06-02 → 2026-08-19).

The short version: the tool stopped being a Fallout New Vegas utility and became a Bethesda one. Record reading now spans Morrowind through Starfield, the 3D viewer moved to D3D12 and grew an engine-grounded lighting and water stack, and a texture-decoding bug that had been silently corrupting roughly a fifth of all converted textures was found and fixed.

Still an alpha — see Known limitations near the bottom before relying on any output.

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Highlights

Multi-game record reading

Record and subrecord decoding extended from Fallout 3 / New Vegas to Oblivion (TES4), Morrowind (TES3), Skyrim LE, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and Starfield. Rather than hand-writing a decoder per game, tools/EsmSchemaGen generates per-game C# schemas from xEdit's wbDefinitions*.pas, so a new game is a regeneration rather than a rewrite.

Records, dialogue, and NPC/armor/weapon/quest/package displays are wired for every supported game, with localized string tables (.STRINGS, and BA2-localized for Fallout 76) resolving base names, dialogue topics, and map markers that previously rendered as mojibake.

Read-only. Unmatched subrecords and undecodable tails stay visible as raw nodes rather than being dropped, but this is explicitly not a no-data-loss editing contract — inline unused bytes are consumed without individual retention, and there is no generic schema writer yet.

3D worldspace viewer

Migrated from D3D11 to D3D12, then built out considerably:

• Lighting & atmosphere — imagespace HDR/tonemap (IMGS/IMAD) with BrightPass bloom, 4-cascade sun shadow maps with off-screen caster replay, sky dome with sun/moon billboards, layered clouds, per-game ambient/DALC lighting, and day/night gating for placed lights.
• Water — per-game water shaders derived from decompiled engine shaders, authored NIF water geometry, and mirrored-scene reflections for Oblivion.
• Vegetation — SpeedTree with weather-driven wind, engine-accurate LOD0 geometry rebuild, and canopy-depth dimming.
• Collision & movement — NIF Havok collision decoding with walk-mode ground and wall collision.
• Animation — NIF playback (banner sway, waterfall/lava scroll), NiControllerManager idle sequences, Morrowind keyframe animation, and rigid-node baking.
• Projection & export — orthographic/isometric/trimetric modes; tile-and-stitch raises the non-tiled PNG export cap to 16384px.

2D world map

Per-game map markers with authentic icons extracted offline from each game's own SWF — Skyrim, Fallout 4 (including faction and DLC types), Fallout 76, and Oblivion's parchment tiles. Plus terrain streaming with a viewport LRU, per-worldspace water, a searchable worldspace browser, layer export, and a FormID heatmap overlay.

DDX texture decoding — silent corruption fixed

The LZX decompressor stopped writing when its output buffer filled and still reported success. The buffer was sized from a mip-0 linear-size hint, so any texture whose real tiled extents exceeded that hint was silently truncated — roughly 4,700 of 22,616 converted textures shipped with black rectangles.

It went unnoticed because the validation harness compared golden hashes, which were stable: the corruption was deterministic, so every run reproduced the same wrong bytes. The buffer is now sized from real tiled extents, with pitch-rounding and tail-base fixes, shape-keyed heuristics removed, and a mean-absolute-error oracle plus decode diagnostics replacing hash-only validation.

Script decompilation

Papyrus (.pex) decompilation for Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Fallout 76, and ObScript extended to Oblivion via game-keyed opcode tables. A hash-pinned retail gate parses and decompiles all 7,194 scripts in the shipped MiscClient archive. Uninterpreted flag bits and references stay visible rather than being assigned guessed semantics.

Archives, VFS & repacking

• Format-agnostic archive command group (BSA and BA2 auto-detected by magic; bsa/ba2 kept as aliases), with BA2 (BTDX) read support and LZ4 block decoding for Skyrim SE v105.
• A layered game VFS with lock-free BSA reads, so loose files and archives resolve through one view in load order.
• Xbox 360 repacking — console menus unpacked from final_master_xml.dat, _n/_s specular maps merged in memory, and MP3 music delivered loose because FNV cannot read MP3 from a BSA (Fallout 3 can).

DMP→ESM converter

Renamed from DMP→ESP (dmp to-esm; to-esp kept as a back-compat alias) and moved onto a plan-time pipeline — every emission decision is settled by the planner before a byte is written. Navmesh handling, cell parentage, placed-reference disposition, leveled-spawn recovery, and dialogue reconstruction all saw substantial work.

Tooling

tools/EsmSchemaGen (schema generation), tools/ShaderProbe (FNV shader package probing), headless renderer and 2D-map profiler apps with JSONL traces and camera automation, and an audio transcriber with a playlist review panel and timestamp converter.

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Known limitations

This is an alpha release. Known-open items at the time of tagging:

• Starfield — normal maps are parsed but not yet wired into the renderer; terrain UV scaling and edge creases are unresolved.
• Fallout 76 — map markers are not yet surfaced.
• Record editing — decode is read-only. There is no generic schema-driven writer, so no round-trip editing.
• DMP→ESM output — converted plugins load and are playable, but memory-dump captures are inherently incomplete; output is not a substitute for a real plugin.
• Xbox 360 repacking — the menu-delivery policy is settled for the six menus the retail PC executable cannot run, but the broader policy is still open.
• Skyrim schema — the IsSSE v43 wrapper and write-side member selection remain unimplemented.

Verification

Full non-incremental Release build across both target frameworks and all companion apps: 0 warnings, 0 errors. Test suite: 7,980 passed, 0 failed, 177 skipped (real-asset, GPU, and shader-compilation suites are opt-in via environment gates; the shader gate runs in CI).

Downloads

Artifact	Contents
BethesdaMultitool-Windows-GUI-x64.zip	WinUI 3 desktop app, self-contained
BethesdaMultitool-Windows-CLI-x64.zip	Command-line tool, self-contained
BethesdaMultitool-Linux-CLI-x64.tar.gz	Command-line tool, self-contained
BethesdaAudioTranscriber-Windows-x64.zip	Companion transcriber app

All builds are self-contained — no .NET runtime install required.

The full changelog entry, including the Changed and Removed sections, is in CHANGELOG.md.

v3.0.0-alpha.1

⚠️ Alpha release. Use, file issues, expect rough edges. Known gaps and ongoing investigations are documented in the memory/ topic notes.

Headline features

🧬 DMP→ESP converter

Turn an Xbox 360 Fallout: New Vegas memory dump into a PC-loadable plugin (.esp + co-emitted .bsa). A new two-pass planner / encoder / merge pipeline covers ~60 FormTypes end-to-end with runtime-read → encoder coverage, plus a post-emission sanitizer pass for FormID, NVEX, and CTDA dangling references. Available as falloutu dmp-to-esp … on the CLI and as a new tab in the WinUI app (multi-DMP picker, dialogue-CSV inputs, secondary-data overlays, live event log).

🏞 v3 worldspace 3D viewer

Real-time WinUI 3 viewer for exterior worldspaces. Five phases shipped:

• Phase 0 — GPU pipeline migrated from Veldrid to Vortice.Windows / D3D11
• Phase 1 — Camera, cell-origin transforms, frustum culling
• Phase 2a — Per-cell terrain meshes from runtime VHGT/VNML, water, walk mode
• Phase 2b — Per-cell landscape texturing via opacity-blended shaders, world-map 2D overlay system, multi-format Map Export dialog, per-stage frame profiling
• Phase 2c — Instanced 3D rendering of placed references (statics, doors, containers, lights)

Also in this release

• 50+ new encoders for the converter — full coverage from ARMA to WRLD
• GLB exporter generalized — MeshGlbExporter + TerrainGlbExporter replace the deleted OBJ pipeline; NpcGlbWriter → GlbWriter
• ESP Planner pipeline — Tier 0 through Tier 7b, opt-in via --planner-types
• PdbStructView runtime layout abstraction + ~30 specialized readers migrated
• New CLI commands — report validate / report consistency, dmp analyze / compare / formtype-census / scan-cell, dialogue player-lines, esm gameplay-audit, esm diagnose-scripts
• WindowsAppSDK 1.8 → 2.1.3, centralized package versions via Directory.Packages.props
• From-scratch test-discipline framework — SyntheticStructFactory, RuntimeReaderTestFixture, snippet harness retired

⚠️ Breaking changes

• OBJ mesh / terrain exporters removed. Consumers of CLI-driven OBJ output need to switch to GLB.
• NpcExport{MeshPart,Node,NodeKind,Scene,SkinBinding}.cs → Glb* as part of the GLB writer generalization.
• CrossDumpComparisonPipeline.cs deleted in favor of the new streaming projection pipeline.

Known alpha limitations

• DMP→ESP master-cell NAVM augmentation is gated off by default (PluginBuildOptions.EmitMasterCellNavmAugmentation); some new NAVM cells still require an extended NAVI override the planner doesn't yet emit.
• A WastelandNV-specific crash is under investigation (other worldspaces render fine).
• v3 viewer's reference renderer is alpha — diffuse-only, no shader effects.

Downloads

Artifact	When to use it
FalloutXbox360Utils-Windows-GUI-x64.zip	Default Windows download — full WinUI 3 app with GUI tabs (NPC Browser, World Map, DMP→ESP converter, etc.)
FalloutXbox360Utils-Windows-CLI-x64.zip	Windows headless — just the falloutu CLI
FalloutXbox360Utils-Linux-CLI-x64.tar.gz	Linux headless CLI
FalloutAudioTranscriber-Windows-x64.zip	Companion app for transcribing extracted dialogue audio

All builds are self-contained (no .NET runtime install required).

Links

• Full release notes: CHANGELOG.md → [3.0.0-alpha.1]
• In-flight investigations: memory/ topic notes
• Full diff: v2.4.0...v3.0.0-alpha.1

v2.4.0

Full Changelog: v2.3.0...v2.4.0

v2.3.0

What's New

Full-Body NPC Rendering & glTF Export

Full-body NPC model assembly and export to glTF (.glb) format.

• Head, body, and equipment meshes composited into complete NPC scenes
• Equipment resolver for armor addon and weapon mesh lookup from ESM/BSA
• NPC record scanner for batch appearance extraction
• glTF export with alpha texture packing, material tuning, normal map encoding, and tint color support
• Tangent builder and coordinate adapter for correct glTF orientation
• Fixed NPC head attachment, eye transforms, and holster posing (baseball bat, weapons)

NPC Browser (GUI)

Interactive NPC browsing with 3D model preview in the GUI.

• BSA discovery for automatic mesh/texture archive detection
• NPC list with filtering and selection
• WebView2-based model viewer with embedded <model-viewer> component

Dialogue Viewer (GUI)

Full dialogue tree visualization and browsing.

• Conversation builder with quest-to-topic-to-response navigation
• Dialogue tree renderer with expandable condition display
• Condition parser with function, operator, and parameter formatting
• Runtime dialogue merger for combining split Xbox 360 INFO records into coherent conversations
• Dialogue picker tree for browsing all quest dialogue topics

Runtime DMP Struct Readers

Major expansion of memory dump analysis with PDB-derived struct layouts.

• Typed runtime readers for 14+ new record types (Book, Challenge, Class, Collection, Explosion, Global, Magic, Message, CharacterAppearance, ActorWeapon, and more)
• PDB-based generic reader: reads any FormType's C++ fields using embedded pdb_layouts.json (116 types, 2,612 fields)
• BSStringT diagnostics for validating string fields in memory
• Memory-mapped file access via IMemoryAccessor / MmfMemoryAccessor — efficient random-access reads of large DMP files
• Runtime NPC layout auto-detection across different build versions
• Runtime world cell auto-detection and cell map probing
• Data-driven field probe system with baseline verification tests
• GPU texture scanner for locating textures in DMP memory regions

ESM Parser Expansion

• Eyes (EYES), Hair (HAIR), and expanded effect/magic data parsing
• Dialogue schema registry extended with new subrecord field definitions
• FormUsageIndex for cross-reference tracking across record types
• Expanded property panel builders for character, item, and world record display

World Map (GUI)

• Interactive world map control with hit testing for placed objects
• Heightmap builder and overview renderer improvements
• Cell property display and placed object category resolution

NIF Animation Support

• Controller sequence selector, interpolator pose reader, and keyframe reader
• Node controller pose reading for skeleton animation data

DDXConv Improvements

• Partial decompression support for truncated/corrupted textures
• Sequential tiled mip extraction
• DDS header fixes
• 3XDR block-size-dependent untiling fix
• 16B-block tiling fix for small grids (<16 blocks wide)
• ATI2/BC5 sub-tile untiling and 3XDO decompression buffer fix

DMP Diagnostics

• New dmp dmp-diag command for scanning persistent refs and map markers across dump directories
• DMP snippet extraction framework for creating self-contained test fixtures from real dumps

Code Quality

• Rendering code split and deduplicated (lighting constants consolidated)
• Analysis and export reporting infrastructure refactored with semantic formatting
• Savegame model types split into dedicated files
• Test suite expanded with new helpers: DmpSnippetExtractor, SparseMemoryAccessor, RecordingMemoryAccessor, EsmTestFileBuilder
• Removed obsolete test files and EGT verification pipeline (superseded by probe-based testing)

Full Changelog: v2.2.0-pre1...v2.3.0

v2.2.0-pre1

What's New

NIF Sprite Rendering

New sprite-gen CLI command for rendering 3D item models from BSA archives into PNG sprites.

• Extracts NIF meshes from BSA, converts Xbox 360 big-endian to little-endian, and renders textured sprites
• DDS texture decoding with automatic BSA texture resolution
• Gore cap filtering (BSDismemberSkinInstance body part ranges 100-299)
• Isometric view mode (--iso) for body armor and larger items
• Fixed endian bulk-swap bug that cross-contaminated multi-byte sub-fields in 4-byte structs (BodyPartList, HalfTexCoord, HavokFilter)

NPC Head Rendering

New render npc command for generating NPC head sprites with full FaceGen support.

• Base head mesh loading from RACE records via BSA
• FaceGen NIF override (per-NPC mesh from FaceGen directory)
• EGM mesh morphs: 50 symmetric + 30 asymmetric morph targets applied via FGGS/FGGA coefficients
• EGT texture morphs: 256x256 RGB deltas upscaled with bilinear interpolation to DDS resolution
• Hair, eyes, and head parts (eyebrows, beards) from HAIR/EYES/HDPT records
• NPC appearance resolution merging NPC_ and RACE coefficients

Unified CLI Commands

New format-agnostic commands that auto-detect file type (ESM, DMP, ESP):

• search text/hex — text or hex byte pattern search across any binary file
• stats — categorized record type statistics
• list — browse reconstructed records with type and filter options
• show — inspect record detail by FormID or EditorID
• diff — compare records between any two files

Code Quality

• Massive refactoring: 5 batches of file splitting enforcing ~500-line limit across ~50 files
• New unit tests for extracted helper classes (EsmEditorIdValidator, RecordValidator, SemdiffRecordParser)
• Test suite refactored with shared helpers and ~35 parameterized theories
• All SonarQube and Roslyn analyzer warnings resolved (~336 warnings)
• CLI commands migrated from EsmAnalyzer to main project

Full Changelog: v2.1.0-pre.1...v2.2.0-pre1

v2.1.0-pre.1

What's New

FalloutAudioTranscriber

New standalone app for working with Fallout: New Vegas voice files from Xbox 360 BSA archives.

• Browse voice files with automatic ESM cross-referencing (speaker, quest, subtitle text)
• Batch transcription via Whisper with progress tracking
• Export to CSV or text

Save Game Decoder

Full save file parser for FNV Xbox 360 saves (.fxs).

• Decodes all 12 changed form types (references, actors, creatures, quests, etc.)
• CLI commands for decoding, hex dumping, and listing save contents

DMP Map Rendering

New dmp render-map command that generates map marker overlays from memory dumps.

• Renders per-dump PNGs and an animated GIF showing the timeline across builds
• Frames sorted chronologically by build date with timestamps shown on each frame
• Supports filtering out Fallout 3 markers that appear in early dumps (--fo3-esm flag)
• 15 map marker icons matching the in-game types

Other Improvements

• ESM scanning is significantly faster (was 15-25s per dump, now under 2s)
• Build era detection now uses the actual dump contents instead of relying on file timestamps
• Dialogue viewer shows player prompt text and speech challenge banners
• Codebase cleanup and deduplication across the board
• BSA file list parsing and new BSA CLI commands

Full Changelog: v2.0.0...v2.1.0-pre.1

v2.0.0

What's New

• Dialogue Viewer - Browse NPC dialogue trees with topic navigation, quest context, and speech challenge display
• AI Packages - View and compare NPC AI packages between memory dumps and ESM data
• Version Tracking - Track changes across different builds using runtime memory analysis
• World Map - Improved world map with better marker rendering and cell grid overlay
• RTTI Reader - Runtime type information extraction from memory dumps
• Various bug fixes for the dialogue viewer (difficulty display, quest enrichment)

Full Changelog: v2.0.0-pre2...v2.0.0

v2.0.0-pre2

What's New

Major scope expansion -- the project goes from a memory dump carver to a full Fallout Xbox 360 analysis toolkit. Renamed from Xbox360MemoryCarver to FalloutXbox360Utils.

ESM Conversion

• Full Xbox 360 to PC ESM conversion that produces GECK-compatible files
• Handles mixed endianness, split INFO records, subrecord byte-swapping, and compressed record rebuilding
• EsmAnalyzer CLI with semantic diff, three-way comparison, and record inspection commands

Data Browser

• GUI data browser for exploring ESM records with search, filtering, and property display
• Memory map visualization with dynamic coloring and ESM region identification
• World map with heightmap rendering and cell grid overlay

Script Decompiler

• Rewrote the script decompiler to work within the ESM parsing pipeline
• Handles all compiled scripts found in the ESM

Other

• BSA archive extraction with Xbox 360 to PC conversion
• DDX decompression now compiled in (no external dependencies)
• Dialogue system with topic navigation
• Runtime asset scanning from memory dumps using PDB-derived offsets
• DDS texture, OBJ mesh, and terrain export pipelines

Full Changelog: v1.1.0...v2.0.0-pre2

v1.1.0

What's New

• DDX Converter Tab - New GUI tab for batch DDX texture conversion with drag-and-drop support
• TextureAnalyzer - New tool for DDX/DDS debugging, including block map analysis for 3XDR textures
• UI theme and layout improvements across the app

Full Changelog: v1.0.1...v1.1.0