Unpacking BSA's with mod organizer?

[eulersidentity]

I'm using mostly graphic enhancement mods: texture packs etc. and I'm getting super long load screens. Often the animation in the screen stops altogether, sometimes I get indefinite hangs and lose the cursor until I manually force the Skyrim to close. I was wondering if unpacking the bsa's in my texture packs would ease this problem. I'm pretty sure my HD I/O speed is the system bottleneck, so I'm not sure whether it's better for Skyrim to load the uncrompressed data or compressed data from the disk.

 

With everything already installed, how should I unpack the bsa's? Should I unpack straight from mod organizer without changing anything or should I reinstall each mod and hit yes on the box that pops up when it asks if I want to extract bsa's?

 

Thanks for the help! I'm pretty new to mods so please answer as though I don't know what I'm doing.

Edited May 25, 2014 by eulersidentity

[lufusol]

MO2 has several plugins for handling installations and it will use the FOMOD one or the standard method by default, but sometimes it detects something as BAIN and uses that plugin to handle the installation. Sometimes it IS a BAIN installer and MO2 detects as a FOMOD and then you get an error during installation because the xml is the wrong format... in which case you have to go into MO2 settings and DISABLE the default "fomod" installer plugin, then when you try again the BAIN one will be used and properly install. I forget which mod that happened to me with, but it was a major one. Very annoying.

 

Know what else is very annoying? MO2 gives you NO control over this plugin selection at installation time, the ONLY way you can "steer" it as to which one to attempt to use is by enabling/disabling installation plugins in the MO2 settings.... which is tedious, and inefficient. How about a drop down added to the initial installation window that shows the automatically detection plugin MO2 will try to use, but allow user override? Same when slapping that "manual installation" button.

 

Or at the very least, a right-click cascaded context menu for items in the download list that says "Install using plugin >" and then the list of MO2 installation plugins.

 

Sheesh. Great program but this is a pretty disgusting oversight, or at the very least arrogant of the devs to assume the correct method will ALWAYS be detected.

 

That said.... back to your topic at hand... NOT ALL THE INSTALLER PLUGINS WILL OFFER TO UNPACK .BSA AT INSTALLATION TIME. I'm not sure which ones do.... i think the regular FOMOD one does.... definitely not the standard installer (when there are no XMLs) regardless if it contains .BSA files.

 

Furthermore I can't find an option ANYWHERE in MO2 to MANUALLY unpack a BSA after it has been installed. At least not one consistent with intuitive UI design. Clearly MO2 has access to the code to perform this function, but the user is not offered any control over the functionality.

 

Fingers crossed the Mod Organizer 2 developers get a lightbulb over their head, or read my rant here (hehe) because it really is the best mod manager, in most cases, IMO

Edited October 10, 2022 by lufusol

[lufusol]

Sorry for the double post but I didn't think anyone would read an edit at the bottom of that rant ^_^

 

I figured out a good enough workaround.... 1) the BSA Extractor plugin is independent of the installation plugins, though which installation plugin was used seems to determine whether the BSA Extractor plugin is triggered. HOWEVER:

 

Go into MO2 > settings > 'Plugins' tab > find/expand 'Plugin' in the list > select BSA Extractor > make sure "Enabled" is checked, of course, it probably is though, now here's where the magic happens. Look under that. Where it says

 

"only alternate source true"

 

This is no mere text message... Move your mouse over to true.. OMG it's a drop down dialog! Change it to false.

Now it will ALWAYS ask if you want to unpack .BSA files (if they are present) at the completion of installation. Hooray!

Edited October 10, 2022 by lufusol

[IsharaMeradin]

Lovely eight year necro here...

 

The proper way to extract a BSA within MO2:

After the mod has been installed, go to the Archives tab on the right hand side

Locate the BSA for the mod in question

Right click and choose Extract

Use the window that appears to select a suitable directory.

 

The ideal method would be to extract to a clean empty folder outside of MO2 or the game. Then create a 7z / zip / rar archive to import into MO2 and install as a separate mod. Sort it below the original mod. This way if in testing it is discovered that any issues attempting to be resolved are still present, the extracted files can be easily disabled.