Hionimi Posted February 10, 2012 Share Posted February 10, 2012 Hi, been messing around a little with *.bsa files, for instance, I noticed how most mods and DLC tends to add files rather than overwriting existing ones, causing loads of memory consumption, this be bad for my Solid State Drive... So, I extracted them all, then put them all together putting files of which some may be overwritten first and then applied any 'updates' on top. This was only done with Texture *.bsa files by the way. All went fantastic I must say, made sure they remained below 2 GiB as I learned that's the limit and added them to Skyrim.ini so they got loaded instead. Also, I compressed them, causing what normally would be 3 GiB to be 2 GiB. I do think load times are a bit longer but that might be just imagination. So, with that explained, the questions... Q 1: Can any difference be noticed actually between a compressed *.bsa and a non-compressed one? And with this I mostly mean load times and in-game texture quality. Q 2: Does anyone know what the limit is of the [Archive] section of the Skyrim.ini file? I noticed that when having more than 10 *.bsa entries caused my sounds to fail, as Skyrim - Sounds.bsa was last on the line. Q 3: The Skyrim.ini file also shows there's two line actually, 'sResourceArchiveList' and 'sResourceArchiveList2', it's clear that there is a limit per line, but can for example a 'sResourceArchiveList3' be made and actually work? (That last question may seem a little useless, but it's pure curiosity.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Brasher Posted February 10, 2012 Share Posted February 10, 2012 Experts have argued about the pros and cons of .bsa files. In-game texture quality would be exactly the same with a .bsa or without one. When the game consults compressed textures, it has to take the time to decompress them before using them. Some people say that it takes an excessive amount of time, but computers are so amazingly fast that the time does not seem to be measurable. So other people say that it is just fine to use .bsa files. (This of course is Bethesda's position. In practice, it works pretty good. Using .bsa files is the set-up that all unmodded copies of Skyrim and Oblivion use.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nosisab Posted February 10, 2012 Share Posted February 10, 2012 (edited) I take all mods at SW are made into BSA? If so I foresee serious problems dealing with load order and mainly "install" order ... let's hope the mess can be worked around by whatever new Skyrim load system. In the end something will need to go into the /data if not for any other reason to grant inter mods patches to work, what is still more "screaming" with mods overwriting files one of the other (did someone thought textures?). The ESP fighting... the horror, the chaos... :) Edited February 10, 2012 by nosisab Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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