23 replies to this topic

[PierreBeauregard]

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

The bsa files, if you notice, are still in the temp directories in case you change you mind The morrowind.ini file could be backed up, but doesn't need to be as long as you *comment out* the archive file entries instead of deleting them. If you change your mind, remove a semi colon.

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.

Reading from a BSA file might actually be faster. All morrowind does is read the look up table at the beginning of the bsa file, and go to the entry and dump the data into RAM (since it's uncompressed). Besides, by having everything in one file (and assuming you've defragmented) when reading multiple files, the hard drive doesn't have to skip everywhere since everything is in one location.

[Marxist ßastard]

Hrm -- so then the BSA format doesn't use any compression at all, with the exception of grouping everything into a single file?

Well, live and learn.

However, I still doubt that it can still do anything dramatic performance-wise. Certainly nothing that will make packing all the art file worthwhile.

[PierreBeauregard]

Having one file instead of 15000 I'd say is quite convenient

Also, if a person has 15000 art files (as someone posted earlier), you can actually calculate the expected disk savings.

Assuming the person is using fat32, the person probably uses the minimum cluster size of 16K.

Usually, the last cluster used in a file has some amount of empty space. So, let's say that on average, every single file wastes 8K of space.

8K*15000=120000K=120 megabytes!!!

That's a significant chunk of hard drive! Even if you use NTFS, 120MB/4=30 megs. Not too bad.

Imagine the hard drive as something like 30 CD's stacked on top of each other. Instead of a laser, a magnetic arm reads the surface of each disk. If you have 15000 files, the arm has to jump all across the surface to read each file. If you have one linear file, the arm jumps a lot less often.

So, you get decreased loading times. In-game performance probably won't increase too much if you don't use threaded loading, though you don't have to wait as long. But, if you use threaded loading you can expect a siginifant boost in FPS when crossing cell boundaries.

[Xeniorn]

My loading time entering interiors went from 4 to 3 seconds. It's not dramatic, but it's worth it (IMO). ^_^