Making extended original BSAs?

[Jelika]

Hello everybody,

 

I'm not quite sure if what I'm asking for is possible, but is there a way to extend the Oblivion original BSAs? I'm doing a lot of town mods and I love to use new meshes for it to make them more interesting. But then everytime I have to put the meshes I use in the mods into the mod and its size grows and grows. (Hope you know what I mean, I'm not quite into this stuff.) So I would want to put the meshes and textures I need for those items right into the original BSA so the CS would load it automatically. Or is there a way to tell the CS that it should also load another BSA I create? Dont care if I put those files into an existing BSA or into a new one. Just I dont want to have to put them into the mod itself to keep its size as small as possible. And it's nervkilling that I have to put itemXY, if I use it in two mods, in both of them because I cannot build one mod depending on another.

 

Any idea? Or any simple solution I'm not aware of?

 

 

And a quite silly question I guess: where do I find the CS ini file? How is it named? I just find the Obl ini file but not the one for the CS...

 

 

Thanks for your help! :)

Jelika

[Nephenee13]

Noooo don't do that. Thats a horrible idea.

 

I'm not even sure what your problem is. Big mods are big. So what?

 

Also, you should use Construction Set Extender.

Edited December 5, 2012 by Nephenee13

[Jelika]

I guess you mean extending the originals is a bad idea?

 

Well I just would like to have a way that if I use new meshes in several mods, that I dont need to put them into the CS in every single mod again.

 

CS Extender I've downloaded just today and will try out, but I'm not sure if it helps my problem.

(Oh and, yes, big mods are big, but my laptop isn't the best gamer laptop so I try to keep everything as small as possible ;))

Edited December 5, 2012 by Jelika

[Nephenee13]

(Oh and, yes, big mods are big, but my laptop isn't the best gamer laptop so I try to keep everything as small as possible ;))

 

But...this wouldn't make any difference.

 

For the life of me I cannot figure out why you would even think this was a good idea, or how it would help.

[Jelika]

Well (okay, it might not make i dif for my laptop, I dont know) it would at least save my time from always copying all the files into the object window in the CS. Or do I make any silly mistake and this is not even needed to? If I want to use dif meshes than the vanilla, I do have to put them into the CS for every mod I want to work with them again, dont I? (If not, just tell me ;)) And that time I would like to save by making kind of master BSA or anything where all the nifs, I usually use or could use, is in and I can access to. (See, if you only take Strotis, Momos and MEOs nice meshes I like to use, there are so many that it indeed takes time to copy them in again again and again and again.)

 

 

And to the point of extending the original BSAs, we can go over that, because I'm not into more than building nice things up in the CS, I dont have that much knowledge about the software more than that. THATs why I was asking if that would be possible. I understand that I shouldnt do. Still my other questin is if it is possible to make such a msterfile. Okay?

 

 

(Oh and I apologize in case I just dont get your point, I'm historian and not into informatics, I'm glad I even know what BSA, nif, mesh etc. is, so please dont expect me to have THE knowledge of everything about modding and CS.)

Edited December 5, 2012 by Jelika

[Nephenee13]

I do have to put them into the CS for every mod I want to work with them again, dont I?

 

Yes, but putting those meshes into the vanilla BSAs wouldn't solve that problem, since you still have to add them into the ESP itself

 

You could, in theory, make an ESM containing all the shared resources your mods will use, and then make your mods as ESP files dependent on that ESM file.

[mhahn123]

Are you talking about resources for mods that you are creating? If so, Nephenee hit it right on the head.

 

What you want to do is create a shared resource pack to be used by all of your mods, which is what I am currently doing. You can have the meshes and textures in loose folders or pack them in BSA, whatever your personal preference. The esm will contain all of the objects that you "create" in the Construction Set with those meshes/textures. You can then slave all of your mods to the master .esm so that they all share the same common resources.

 

It's a good deal of work putting the resource pack together, and if you're creating custom pieces like me you may end up un-packing and re-packing a few times to fix glitches. But once it comes time to build with the reources it's a breeze. Depending on how many resources you bundle up, the master files may still be large, there is no getting around that. But the file size of the mods you base off of the master can be kept reasonably small since you only have to package a single .esp file per mod.

 

On the other hand, if you are talking about making a master resource file for other peoples mods...no way. Each mod maker tends to use their own naming convention, both in their folders and in the Construction Set. So the exact same sword resource for example could be named five or more different ways in five different mods. You couldn't make all five mods "recognize" the same resource without changing the mods internal naming structures to match your resource pack.

 

Hopefully this helps clear things up a little.

Edited December 6, 2012 by mhahn123

[Jelika]

The esm resource file was what I meant :) After Nephenee mentioned it, I realized, that the BSA of course has nothing to do with my problem...

 

I'll give that a try, thank you both!

[Striker879]

Something to note regarding BSA resources vs 'loose' folders and files (and this is more of a personal opinion than scientifically proven fact, at least based on my own limited research on the subject).

 

I believe a large BSA will be slower to load individual assets than the 'loose' method (same resources and folder structure, just not packed in a compressed format). For example to render a mod added cuirass the game will need to load the mesh NIF and texture and normal DDS files. If those are packed in a BSA the entire BSA must be loaded into memory and the needed files extracted, and then the game can render them. If those files are individually available in their respective folders the needed files are read from disk and the game can render them.

 

I suppose in a perfect world where the entire BSA is contiguous on the disk and the drive is an ultra fast RAID 0, and the machine has RAM in excess of what it requires to run the game, the trade off would likely be negligible. In the real world that is seldom the case. Often the hard drive is a slower low power model (here I'm saying laptop), though 4 GB RAM and more is becoming much more common. To get the game to use more than 2 GB RAM takes some work though (from what I've read, my own machine has just 2 GB RAM total). If the 'read the BSA and use the assets in the game' operation requires the use of the swap file you've introduced another layer of slow down to the process.

 

I never considered this aspect until recently, when I was helping troubleshoot a new mod. I noticed that it seemed much smoother after I'd extracted the BSA and used the 'loose' method for installation. In writing this I've thought of another mod I use that has a BSA in which I notice a definite slowdown when I approach the door. I need to run some more experiments.

[mhahn123]

Yes you have a point on load times with BSA vs loose files. On older machines it actually does make a difference. My personal preference is loose folders anyway as I've had a lot of problems using BSA, and I'm not the only one. I've used quite a few well made mods that had issues with BSA, and the easiest fix for author was to extract everything and install resources manually. And if you make a boo boo on meshes or textures it's just easier to fix if everything isn't all packed up.