Nimboss Posted July 23, 2014 Share Posted July 23, 2014 There has been many threads about do or do not create .BSA files. So it's a matter of taste and thinking, if it is a complicated mod with lots of files a .BSA is neat thing to release, more job for you but less for the user who wants to delete it, but you needs to explain all the files the user needs to delete. Of course any kind of mod manager would take care of this, but not all want to use one. Of course if something is wrong and you needs to update the .BSA with just some few files you have to create a new one and the user needs to download it yet again. I think I heard of a kind of .BSA injector tool once that made it possible to update just certain files in a .BSA but I can have imagined that. About speed, yes! A .BSA will be faster if you compare to some hundred loose files at least on a conventional hard drive. For SSD I'm not sure I lately started to use those regularly and have not made any field tests. Most game creators pack their assets in a few big files not only for DRM purposes but for the pure gain of speed to load ten thousands of loose files otherwise to keep up with. On issues, yes some tools are better into create functional .BSA files then others and also as mentioned above not all formats works in a .BSA but work as loose files. Again I can't recall where to read up about it but some tools ( I hope they are updated now) actually created bad .BSA files for some types of content. After all Bethesda usually put all their stuff into .BSA files so it must be possible to do the same, with right tools and file formats included. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vagonumero12 Posted July 24, 2014 Share Posted July 24, 2014 (edited) Armor mod? Animation mod? -> Release as loose files, user may want to edit those kind of things.Almost everything else -> use BSA. They are not only bad in speed, but loose files also eat more free space than an uncompressed bsa. Files are aligned to cluster size in the disk. If you have 200,000 files in your Data folder, and a cluster size of 4k, you may be wasting, on average, (4096/2)*200,000 = 390M. It is actually more than that, that's only the waste in data, but the file entries also take space. It may not seem much, but if you have a small hdd like some SSD or not too much free space, it can be annoying. Edited July 24, 2014 by vagonumero12 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cdcooley Posted July 24, 2014 Share Posted July 24, 2014 The speed boost from using BSAs is mostly about about bypassing the operating system as much as possible when accessing each resource. When the game needs to access a loose file it has to go through the OS file system routines to locate the file. Effectively both the game and the OS have to keep track of the files. If the files are packed into a BSA then only the game is keeping track of them. An uncompressed BSA will perform better than loose files. A compressed BSA might perform better, but not in every case depending on your relative CPU and disk speed. I suspect that SSD users should be using uncompressed BSAs for optimal performance. Using Mod Organizer's BSA priority feature, compressing certain types of files in BSAs, and using files loose can all cause performance problems depending on the particular system. It's all because of the extra overhead of locating and retrieving files in those cases. A sufficiently fast machine can handle just about anything and that's why you get some people swearing that loose files or heavy compressed BSAs work just fine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts