batch decompression of ba2 archives?

[AndreChau]

Has anyone worked out a way to decompress the ba2 files from mods en masse, rather than individually?

I had a lot of mods, I decompressed them one by one with archive2, and then I had to update them which overwrote the loose files with the ba2 files again.

So I can go through it all again, one by one, which will take many hours, but I was really hoping there was a way to just run some sort of batch file that would decompress them where they are in the directory structure.

I am using vortex and I don't know if it would have a fit at that sort of behaviour.

[showler]

I don't recall ever seeing such an option because there would be very very few cases where you would ever want to do that.

[KikiVelika]

Has anyone worked out a way to decompress the ba2 files from mods en masse, rather than individually?

 

If you willing to fiddle with PowerShell, you can use something like:

foreach ($file in get-ChildItem .\*.ba2) {& ..\Tools\Archive2\Archive2.exe $file.name -e=".\uncompressed" }

Assuming you are inside your Fallout\Data\ folder and have archive2.exe installed at the default location of the CK, all your .ba2 archives will be extracted into a new subfolder called "uncompressed".

 

However this won't resolve file conflicts, since that 'foreach'-loop goes through the files in alphabetical order. It's pretty much only useful in cases where you want to unpack a whole game. I haven't really tried to delve deeper into generating individual folder for each archive, but unless you want to spend time to create a batch file that mimics your load order, you are probably faster going through your mods manually outside of any mod-manager to clean/optimize the assets and create proper individual archives to get rid of loose files.

 

If you happen to be an annoying perfectionist like me, you always can just create your own dummy-archive bundles. For example, most of those tiny clothing mods with loose files usually get ESL-fied, but instead of clocking up my /meshes, /textures, etc. folders, all their assets are stored into two huge compressed archives, one for general files and the other for textures, which are then loaded via dummy plugin. This speeds up load times massively and if you switch a lot between load orders you don't have to worry about loose files anymore, it's now just a single plugin.

Built bodyslide meshes for armor and clothing are stored separately in another archive with another dummy plugin at the bottom of the list which allows me to switch the shapes of my whole load order with a couple of mouse-clicks if I want to. :cool:

 

Literally the only loose file I still have, is the background music for the loading screen, since that one is a pain to archive properly.