In search of BSA wisdom

[BFG99]

I am reinstalling Oblivion after a hiatus lasting several years. Iâm going through a lot of steps to do so: Ordenador to optimize textures, PyFFI for meshes, BSAOpt, Wrye Bash, TES4Edit, TES4LODGen, BOSS, etc.

 

My question is on BSAs. I prefer them to keep mods neat and tidy for uninstallation. (I also need the disk space...my laptop is 10 years old.). But I understand BSAs can also lead to instability. Specifically, if there are two different BSAs with the same file in the same path, Oblivion wonât know which to use, and could crash. Thatâs regardless of whether one or both are registered in the INI file.

 

Is my understanding correct? I am asking because now, I am going through the painstaking process of finding duplicate files across all my BSAs - thanks to a quick Excel spreadsheet macro I built - to deal with any duplicate assets. When done I will need to rebuild BSAs or dump files to the Data folder. There are around 1200 duplicated files (out of 205k) so I hate to do all that work if it wonât help with stability.

 

Or, maybe I should just say âscrew itâ and put everything directly into the Data folder.

Edited September 28, 2018 by BFG99

[Surilindur]

Hi, if I assume you are packing texture and mesh replacements (such as meshes run through PyFFI and optimised textures) into BSAs to keep things tidy, would that be correct? I tried packing QTP3 in a BSA some time ago, and if I remember correctly, the mod ended up not working, as in, the textures were not being replaced. Skyrim allows packing replacers in a BSA archive, but Oblivion did not seem to allow that last time I tried, which meant I had to keep my replacers all as loose files (and a lot of loose files at that). :pinch:

 

So packing texture and mesh replacers in a BSA might cause those replacers to not work. As for stability, I have no idea, I hope someone else can answer that. :happy:

[BFG99]

Correct on your assumption! Yes, I have learned that putting mesh and texture replacers in a BSA is a Very Bad Thing. At best, they are not used; at worst, they cause crashes.

 

From what I can gather, Oblivion loads as follows:

(1) Any loose files in the Data folder;

(2) Any BSAs registered in the INI file;

(3) Any BSAs with the same name as an active mod (ESP/ESM).

 

You wonât have a problem if it finds a needed file in (1), even if you have a duplicate in a BSA. The problem is if you have duplicates in (2) and/or (3). If you have files in both (2) and (3), only (2) will be used (and you might have freezes/crashes); if you have duplicates in several BSAs in (3), you WILL have freezes and crashes because Oblivion wonât know which to load. (Unlike Skyrim and unlike Oblivionâs ESP files, file modified date has no impact on Oblivion BSAs.)

 

I ended up taking a couple steps that SIGNIFICANTLY improved stability (only 1 crash in 7 hours):

(1) Combined the Oblivion, SI, DLC, and Unofficial Patch files all into one single set of BSAs.

(2) Checked for duplicate file paths between the above, and any mods I was adding. All duplicate files were deleted if they were the same, or put into the Data folder if they werenât. Texture replacers and mods with heavy conflicts like Oblivion Uncut entirely went into Data.

(3) All remaining files went into a single other set of BSAs. That eliminated all duplicates across mods.

Edited September 30, 2018 by BFG99