Scripts in BA2s?

[drevviken]

Just a simple question: does scripts actually gain something by being loaded in a BA2 on older/weaker systems or in general?

 

I'm always balancing on the BA2 limit and have started to extract small BA2s that only contain scripts etc. Haven't noticed anything yet but I'd still like to get a clear answer on this if anyone knows.

Example: automatically lowered weapons. Without knowing how it works I assume that script must be running constantly.

[greekrage]

Just a simple question: does scripts actually gain something by being loaded in a BA2 on older/weaker systems or in general?

 

I'm always balancing on the BA2 limit and have started to extract small BA2s that only contain scripts etc. Haven't noticed anything yet but I'd still like to get a clear answer on this if anyone knows.

Example: automatically lowered weapons. Without knowing how it works I assume that script must be running constantly.

if we are talking NON vanilla scripts that belong to the mod then i think that they need to be in the Ba2....

[LarannKiar]

I'd also recommend you to put them in a BA2. I'm pretty sure the game loads archives smarter than loose files (there must be some kind of difference in optimization). Besides, archives that contain scripts are usually compressed so they take less storage space too. And you can always merge BA2s if you have too many of them.

[drevviken]

Thanks for the replies. It's the difference in optimization I'm interested in. Like I wrote; I've been extracting certain mods and they work fine without being in the BA2 but I did notice a delay in functions when I extracted XDI so I restored that archive. The conclusion seem to be that certain scripts definitely need to stay in the BA2 and some doesn't. Mods like Persistent Volume Sliders and Auto Close Institute Doors can be extracted without problems....

 

Edit: is it true that if a mod has one ba2 it still counts as two, for some reason?

[niston]

Seeking, accessing and reading files has certain overhead: Directory needs to be looked up, file handle created, blocks must be found on disk and read into memory, etc.

This is most evident on mechanical (spinning) drives, where the heads need to be positioned and the platter must revolve for the desired sector to arrive and pass underneath the heads.

These seeking operations are very slow in particular, as seek times are in the millisecond range at best.

 

You may have noticed that spinning drives can have good performance when sequentially reading large amounts of data, but the performance takes a nosedive when randomly accessing and reading individual blocks. Hence also the need to defragment spinning drives, so as to align blocks of data in consecutive order for good read performance and doing away with the need for continuous seek operations.

 

An archive is a single file (from the viewpoints of the filesystem and drive).

It can be opened and read into memory all at once, in a single pass - if so desired. Furthermore, accessing the data in the archive will require one file handle only.

 

I think the amount of overhead got much smaller with NVMe solid state drives: Seek times are mostly negligible and data transfer rates are up 100x or more, compared to spinning drives w/ SATA interfaces. However, many handles and IO operations are still required to access many individual files, even with SSD drives.

 

 

As for scripts, just remember: Loose files will override any files in BA2, which can lead to very strange problems when updating mods and you forget to extract and update loose files.