23 replies to this topic

[PierreBeauregard]

I hate switching CDs all the time.  <_<

The game works fine, but no noticeable speed improvement.

get alcohol 52% or 120%. the virtual disks run at about 200 speed.
as a result, my load times went to near zero for interiors and about <5 secs for exteriors

Eh? Could you elaborate, I have no idea what you're talking about.


Going back to the subject, I found out that a bsa is NOT a compressed format. It just takes all the files and stacks them into one file. Still, it does save *some* space by not partially-filling clusters.

[Xeniorn]

get alcohol 52% or 120%. the virtual disks run at about 200 speed.
as a result, my load times went to near zero for interiors and about <5 secs for exteriors

As Pierre already asked, what do you mean by that?

Going back to the subject, I found out that a bsa is NOT a compressed format. It just takes all the files and stacks them into one file. Still, it does save *some* space by not partially-filling clusters.

Interesting... But I don't think that information is useful for anything, the game still needs it to work, and you can't use it while it's in BSA format.

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.

BTW could you post the changes to your Morrowind.ini file? I don't want to mess anything up. And how did you pack them in one file?

[PierreBeauregard]

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.

[IgorTheBlack]

Eh? Could you elaborate, I have no idea what you're talking about.

Sorry about that.

Alcohol 52% and Alcohol 120% are CD emulation and backup programs.
Both allow a user to make a 1:1 copy of a game disk on their had drive, while bypassing any protections on the disk.

They both also allow it to be run from a "Virtual Drive" i.e. runing it off the hard drive.

As a result, fast loading (up to 200x) and no chance for lost or scratched disks.

the main difference between the two is that 120% allows you to copy disks as well.

For more infomation go here

[Xeniorn]

Thanx, Pierre! The part about mods was especially useful... since I have 15,000 art files in my data files (textures and meshes) directory. :ph34r:

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:

Create a backup copies of Morrowind.ini, Morrowind.bsa, Tribunal.bsa and Bloodmoon.bsa

It's always safer to create backup copies when doing things like that.

[Marxist ßastard]

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.

[Xeniorn]

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.

[Marxist ßastard]

Prove it.

[Xeniorn]

How? I can't.

[Marxist ßastard]

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.