Unpacking BSA with Mod Organizer

[MushRush]

Ok, am trying to figure BSA with Mod Organizer (v1.0,3) when you install a Mod with BSA it ask you if you wanna unpack the BSA.

 

I searched it to see what it means but to be honest I can't get a straight answer to what to do!

 

so do I unpack the BSA and just leave it the way it's or there is another steps to do?

 

or should I just say no don't unpack the BSA! because if I unpack them they don't appear in the Archive, there is no check box as there was in older version of Mod Organizer!

 

and just in a short word how this (unpacking BSA) can affect my Game?

 

 

last note am not using too many mods to worry about the 250 limit on mod plugins..

Edited October 8, 2013 by MushRush

[Lord Garon]

A bsa file is a packed archive, similar to a zip or cab file, that contains game data. They keep a lot of files in one place and help keep your game and mods organized. Unless you have a particular reason to do so, or the mod author says to unpack the bsa's, there is no need to unpack them; the game is designed to read bsa files normally.

 

IF you unpack a bsa, all the data files (meshes, textures, animations, etc) will be added to the directories of the same name in the Data folder. If your mod manager doesn't "remember" what files it installed it will make uninstalling the mod a real headache. Also, upacked bsa resources will override all other bsa files and may cause game glitches.

Edited October 8, 2013 by Lord Garon

[MushRush]

thank you for the answer it's very helpful.. it just ticked in my head

 

Mod Organizer handle the mods in a separate folder from the Game Data folder so it's easy to delete a mod with this mod manager and check if there is a still some unpacked loose files not deleted in its folder.. I guess from your answer I get much sense now reading this fancy well written article: http://forums.bethsoft.com/topic/1354395-update-bsas-and-you/

 

so to ease up my life I can unpack all the BSA with MO and let them sort out with the overwriting priority in the installed mod list.. without that the problem come when some mods have a BSA and some come with loose files.. the loose files will overwrite the BSAs even if the loose files are in low priority..

 

would you agree with this method?

 

thank God I understand now lol...

 

thank you so much..

[Lord Garon]

First, I don't use that mod manager so I am unaware of how/why it would unpack a bsa file.

 

I have to ask, though; why do you even want to unpack a bsa file? Mod authors understand load orders and bsa/loose file priorities and package their mods to work in a specific manner. Unpacking all your bsa's to loose files (directories) WILL NOT allow load order to sort them.

 

Let's say Skyrim is trying to decide which mesh to load for a 2-H sword. Skyrim looks in three places to find that mesh. First, it looks in the skyrim.ini file for a (registered) bsa file name and If a bsa with that name exists in the Data directory, it will automatically open that bsa file and get the mesh. Next, it will look at esp files (mods) in the data directory. If there is a bsa file with the same name as an esp file (for instance, MegaSword.esp and MegaSword.bsa), Skyrim will look for the 2-H sword mesh in that bsa and if it finds it, will use that mesh instead. Notice: even if the mesh exists in the registered bsa, the one in the mod bsa will "override" it. Finally, even if Skyrim found the mesh in both the registered bsa AND the mod bsa, it will look in the Data\Meshes directory to see if a "loose file" mesh exists. If the mesh IS in the Meshes directory, Skyrim will use that mesh in-game. Skyrim uses the mesh, or any other resource, from the last place it finds it.

 

So, can you count on load order to sort the loose files correctly if you unpack all your bsa's? IF your load order is correct and you un-pack bsa's in exactly that order, yes. But bsa files can hold thousands of meshes, textures, sounds, etc, etc, etc. What if you then want to un-install a mod? All the mod managers I know of only track files, including loose files, installed by the mods, but they DO NOT track the contents of mod bsa files. Instead of removing a single bsa file, you would have to remove dozens or even hundreds of loose files scattered all over the Data directory and sub-directories. That's the very problem that bsa files are meant to prevent in the first place.

 

The only real reason to unpack a bsa file is so that you can remove a resource-only esp file when you have 250 or so (I forget the actual maximum number) mods and want to add more. Well, in the interest of full disclosure, I guess I'd have to say that there is a very small performance advantage to using loose file resources. It is so small, though, that no one I know actually unpacks all their bsa files.

 

To be blunt, if you don't KNOW why a bsa should be unpacked, just don't do it. It will probably break your mod management and cause you all sorts of problems later on.

[MushRush]

oh God

 

great you just tangeled my perplexity with more perplexity <- I hope this is a correct word lol

 

you make a good point.. specially this part:

 

Quit:

"So, can you count on load order to sort the loose files correctly if you unpack all your bsa's? IF your load order is correct and you un-pack bsa's in exactly that order, yes."

this made me think I probably need to test my game further. I do Hope because MO keep mods in a separate folder that there is no actual overwriting (deleting) happen just friendly solving priority conflict.

 

also found this in STEP: http://wiki.step-project.com/Guide:BSA_Extraction_and_Optimization

 

another down side of unpacking BSAs is they will take a huge space in your SSD

 

thank you man, this conversation really helped me..

[fifteenspades]

If you have the space in Hard drive unpacking is fine, it speeds up the load time of skyrim compared to if you left them in tack.

I use Mod Organizer and unpack any mod it ask you too, and nothing has gone wrong because of that ever.

[MushRush]

If you have the space in Hard drive unpacking is fine, it speeds up the load time of skyrim compared to if you left them in tack.

I use Mod Organizer and unpack any mod it ask you too, and nothing has gone wrong because of that ever.

 

oh greeting fellow organizer :cool:

 

thank you so much for the replay.. I guess this is the answer and am following it.

[Lord Garon]

If you have the space in Hard drive unpacking is fine, it speeds up the load time of skyrim compared to if you left them in tack.

I use Mod Organizer and unpack any mod it ask you too, and nothing has gone wrong because of that ever.

 

Okay, I admitted that I don't know how MO keeps track of installed files; if bsa unpacking works on the fly as you install new mods, great. I simply try to give advice that I know works in the majority of cases. People who don't have MO will read these posts and I don't want to give the impression that unpacking bsa's is a "good idea" in general for Skyrim. It isn't.

 

I have low-end game machines and I am actually testing the bsa/loose file load times trying to speed up my Skyrim. Even on my low end machines, disk I/O is a major bottleneck. It's hit or miss, literally, on Win 7. Right now, I have an unpacked Data directory and a "normal" bsa file Data directory. I use junctions (symlinks) to quickly switch between them for testing. Depending on what's in the loaded cells (which bsa files are used), I can sometimes see a small performance gain in the unpacked version. But not all the time. It looks like system disk queue management has more impact than bsa extraction overhead. Moving bsa files to different hard drives gives, by far, the biggest performance gain. Its noticable in-game. Instead of one huge disk queue on a single drive with hundreds of millisecond response times, I'm getting low teen response times across four drive queues (actually get "zero" delay from file accesses in my RAMDisk). The total delay across four queues is less than the delay for one large queue. And there is another system interaction between available RAM/virtual memory/background processes and swapfile hard page faults. If you can, make sure the swapfile is not on the same drive as Skyrim. All-in-all, simply unpacking bsa's does not give me any measurable performance gain. YMMV.

Edited October 10, 2013 by Lord Garon

[Deleted48235418User]

Such an old topic, and never properly answered. The question is MO specific, so an answer from somebody who didn't know about or use MO was unhelpful, and mostly off topic.

 

As MO keeps every mod in its own directory, and specifically provides a means of ordering file overwrites, unpacking all your BSA files causes no problems at all.

 

Also, there is one very good reason to unpack BSA... If you are a mod developer, you need unpacked scripts to build against them.

 

If you aren't a mod developer, there is no advantage in unpacking them, and in MO, no real difference if you do, or you don't.

 

Lord Garon's ramble about speed is irrelevant, likely statistically meaningless even for his own system (which he fails to adequately describe), and utterly irrelevant to a MO setup where the files are served via the virtual FS, which has its own performance characteristics. The question was not about speed, but it's fair to say that will depend on factors other and besides whether you unpacked files from the BSA or not. In my experience, the average BSA contains only a few files, and most of them quite small, so you would be hard put to notice a difference, but there are probably BSAs out there that buck that pattern. So it depends on which BSAs you measure.

BSA files, are in theory faster, especially if you use NMM, but loading off an SSD, on a 64-bit OS, the difference is going to be modest, even for extreme cases. It's really not worth worrying about.

 

The real issue is "will individual files cause overwrite/conflict problems" ? This is a real issue for NMM users who can easily get in a mess with it, but it's a non-issue for MO users.

 

MO is built to make using individual files safe and easy, so use them if you have a reason to.

 

The questioner guessed, if you are going to unpack one mod, belt-and-braces precautions would say unpack them all. That way there is no problem with loose files taking priority... The order in the left pane is the override order, no ifs, no buts. It's a safe path, but not necessary.

 

MO has a mechanism for subverting the loose-file priority rule anyway, because they thought it was a dumb issue and fixed it.

So, in MO (if you use that feature, which can be turned off), but not NMM, there is no need at all to unpack BSA files unless you actually need the individual files from them. None at all. The loose files overwrite rule does not apply if you tick the box in MO for it to manage archives.

 

You should probably just read here: http://wiki.step-project.com/Guide:Mod_Organizer#Priorities

 

The crucial text in the MO Guide is this:

 

When Have MO manage archives is checked in the Archives tab, all BSAs are treated exactly as if they were loose files. That means their priority depends solely on the mod priority order and not the plugin priority order (load order). Additionally, checking a BSA in this mode allows the BSA's assets to be loaded without the need for a dummy plugin. This means that you can, for example, load the Skyrim High Resolution Texture Pack by checking the BSAs and unchecking the plugins, effectively saving you three plugin slots.

 

So a mindset that comes from NMM does not apply in the MO space. The rules are very different.

 

But unless you are the sort of person who likes to mess around with partial updates of mods, or a mod developer, there is no benefit to unpacking a BSA.

And if you are a mod developer, you will probably have to unpack some BSAs, like it or not, and so, in that case, you might feel safer unpacking them all, but you don't have to.

Edited January 2, 2018 by Guest

[jesusristus]

Well, it's resurrected now..

 

 

In my experience, the average BSA contains only a few files, and most of them quite small

Checked my MO mods folder out of curiosity and I have 32GB of BSA files there, any guesses what that would be unpacked? "SSD:s don't grow in trees."

 

 

MO has a mechanism for subverting the loose-file priority rule anyway, because they thought it was a dumb issue and fixed it.

I think Beth are the ones to know best, how the files should be loaded in their games. TanninOne had a reason why the Archives tab was removed in MO2, even with the majestic VFS and other wizardry some things might be better left alone.

 

Do not go unpacking BSAs for no reason (if you don't need a file from it.) Some mods especially are not meant to be unpacked, like the USLEEP.