Help with making a BSA

[JoKelly]

I've reached the point where my WIP is so large that saving, loading and other things in the GECK are taking a while to finish. So I want to place the loose files in a BSA.

 

I remember reading some where that compressing the BSA can cause problems, So is this true and if not what is the best compression percentage to use and is there anything else I should do during the process of making the BSA that I might not know about so I can avoid creating new problems.

[dubiousintent]

I believe you are recalling that using tools created for older games like Oblivion can cause problems when creating a BSA for FNV due to some internal format differences, even though they might be capable of extracting files from the BSA just fine. I'm sure Roy Batterian will correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the BSA tool in FOMM (Forked), which is a library, is recommended for creating FNV BSAs.

 

As for compressing or not and by how much, see the BSA entry on TESTG, which has the results of some calculations indicating that theoretically decompressing even a maximally compressed archive is faster than reading the uncompressed loose files, even for very small files.

 

-Dubious-

Edited December 16, 2016 by dubiousintent

[JoKelly]

Thanks for the info. till now all the mods I've made for my personal use were small enough that I never really bothered with making a BSA. This one is much larger and I want to get it right since this one I plan on releasing to the public.