Unpacking BSAs to loose files

[VulcanTourist]

Is there any functional or technical reason why I shouldn't unpack the BSA files of mods that still use them? I don't see any personal advantage to them, rather they are an obstruction for me. Since a BSA is just a container that duplicates the paths that the files it contains would referenced from if they were loose, I don;'t see any functional harm to mods by unpacking them, and doing so makes it easier for me to deal with certain conflicts as well as easier to learn. It might make updates of mods that contain them a bit more work, but that seems a worthwhile tradeoff to me.

[ChaoticMarin]

It's my understanding that the consequence of loose files over BSAs are longer load times.

[VulcanTourist]

It's my understanding that the consequence of loose files over BSAs are longer load times.

I'd expect that as a potential given, but it doesn't worry me much. I didn't think to mention it because it's not an important consideration to me.

[Striker879]

My spin on the loose files vs BSAs debate is that if you are loading either off a SSD the thing I think could make a difference is that the CPU burns some cycles just decompressing files after it has found them in the BSA. For loose files it just reads the SSD after it has located the correct spot ... the decompressing step was taken care of long before you started playing the game.

[VulcanTourist]

My spin on the loose files vs BSAs debate is that if you are loading either off a SSD the thing I think could make a difference is that the CPU burns some cycles just decompressing files after it has found them in the BSA. For loose files it just reads the SSD after it has located the correct spot ... the decompressing step was taken care of long before you started playing the game.

Do you know if anyone has profiled and compared CPU usage during compression versus simple file I/O and how they affect the game's startup time? I suspect that with a recent-generation CPU the former wouldn't have much impact, and I am indeed loading the game from a PCIe NVMe SSD.

 

Even if it did extend the startup process, I think I'd still choose to unpack them all unless there's some other good argument yet unspoken against it. The benefit to me of being able to more easily explore, search, and find files when they're loose is worth any extra delay to startup. Startup takes mere seconds compared to the hundreds of hours I spend playing and modding.

[saurusmaximus]

The standard wisdom around here is that BSAs load faster, but I've never seen anything that actually confirms that, so who knows?

 

Personally, I tend to run with loose files as much as possible, mainly because I had a large number of mods in LE that I ended up porting over myself, and I had to unpackage them when doing so. And, it's a PITA to repack everything. If I d/l a mod that's packed and it works I don't usually bother with it, but if I want to change something, it gets unpacked and I leave it that way.

[Algabar]

The standard wisdom around here is that BSAs load faster, but I've never seen anything that actually confirms that, so who knows?

I don't know of any valid tests series or something like that either. At least on an SSD, from my experience the difference is minimal. BTW; Fallout 4 is a different story - BSAs seem to definitely load faster in that game. In Skyrim SE, BSA vs. loose files doesn't seem to matter much.

 

In some cases, BSAs may come in handy though. Large texture overhauls are an example. Most people take one of the larger and more comprehensive texture mods as their "base" and then change individual files if the don't like them or if there's a special "ultra-high quality" version for some objects available. In this case BSAs are useful: You can simply install the few textures you want to change as loose files. This way you don't have to deal with overwrite rules and conflicting loose files....

[Striker879]

 

The standard wisdom around here is that BSAs load faster, but I've never seen anything that actually confirms that, so who knows?

I don't know of any valid tests series or something like that either. At least on an SSD, from my experience the difference is minimal. BTW; Fallout 4 is a different story - BSAs seem to definitely load faster in that game. In Skyrim SE, BSA vs. loose files doesn't seem to matter much.

 

In some cases, BSAs may come in handy though. Large texture overhauls are an example. Most people take one of the larger and more comprehensive texture mods as their "base" and then change individual files if the don't like them or if there's a special "ultra-high quality" version for some objects available. In this case BSAs are useful: You can simply install the few textures you want to change as loose files. This way you don't have to deal with overwrite rules and conflicting loose files....

 

 

And when you change your mind and want to revert back it's a very simple delete and you're back to the original texture upgrade. Striker and the Vulcan will be spending plenty of time relocating the previously overwritten files so that we can restore them.

 

There we are ... first "valid point".

 

I don't have any "test results" to back up my assertion regarding CPU work load of BSA vs loose files. That all falls into the "Striker thought experiment" bracket, which can admittedly often lead to pathways into the wilderness (as opposed to roadways leading into the light).

[VulcanTourist]

I have 171 of the suckers currently, and a surprising number are tiny, just a few KB. As often as not I'm finding scripts embedded in them, which someone else had recently told me was a bad practice (but didn't explain).

 

I even have a few that have just one file in them, and it's just a script. What's the motivation for doing that?

[worm82075]

From my own experience (because i have a tendency to muck about with textures and meshes) is the main problem with loose files occurs around the 15K file mark. At this point (again, in my experience) endless loading screen occurrence increases at least 4x. Endless loading screens are part of the vanilla game but they only occur every 50hrs or so even with a full mod set with over 20k files packed in BSAs but having them all unpacked the endless loading screens happen very often, 10 hrs or so.

 

I have taken to unpacking them in a cloned directory on a secondary drive and only moving the files i'm working with to the active game folder to avoid this.

 

As for the speed, well my rig is old but beefy and even with HDs i cant really see any speed difference, especially having 8gigs of vram, that's a third of a modded game's assets loaded at all times.