Max size for ba2?

[bluemoonies]

Hello there, I open this topic cause i m really confused about what the max size for ba2 is. I did search online and there s a lot of different opinions regarding it, like keeping it under 2gb, under 10gb and so on so forth.

Did anyone ever figured it out? Thanks for help)

[Zorkaz]

Not sure. The vanilla main textures.ba2s might give you a clue

[bluemoonies]

Not sure. The vanilla main textures.ba2s might give you a clue

those are all max 2gb in size but may not be an indicator from what i read

[Thirdstorm]

Speaking from experience you can exceed the 2gb size, the max functional BA2 I put together and tested was close to 4.5gb.

That said performance seemed to dip (vs smaller BA2's) and Nexus struggles with Mod downloads of this size.

[bluemoonies]

Speaking from experience you can exceed the 2gb size, the max functional BA2 I put together and tested was close to 4.5gb.

That said performance seemed to dip (vs smaller BA2's) and Nexus struggles with Mod downloads of this size.

that s great info, thanks for sharing) . may I also ask you what happens when you surpass 4.5gb? also how bad does the perf go downhill?

[Thirdstorm]

Was a little random, which was frustrating..

Some of the Beta testers saw a serious dip in FPS (Don't remember exactly the numbers), others would have textures randomly fail to render (purple, and it was verified the textures were properly archived etc, someone else could use the exact same BA2 re-uploaded by the person it would not work for) and a few people would hang during the load process if the save they tried to load was hitting that specific BA2 heavily.

[icestormng]

There is no hard limit. I have texture archives which are 14 GiB in size. But the game (probably) maps them into memory so there could be some limits on your computer depending on your operating system and system memory. The BA2 format has no hard limit that we would exceed anytime soon..

 

Just make sure to choose the correct format. DDS for textures and General for everything else. Use uncompressed when your BA2 contains Audio files.

[bluemoonies]

thanks guys, i think i'll keep them at 3gb max) . One last thing tough, do meshes and materials need to be compressed with default right? I saw some people that do compression None when it comes to the main ba2

Edited March 20, 2020 by bluemoonies

[Thirdstorm]

You only need "None" if you have Scripts or Audio files to add, and then some authors (Kinggath) have found that if you do Standard compression for all of the Materials and Meshes and then change it to none and add the scripts and audio files it will function correctly.

[icestormng]

You can totally compress scripts. You wonât gain a lot of savings but they still work. Just audio files stop working.

 

And this Mixed type archives donât really worked for me. When I change the format afterwards and add files and save, Archive2 re-wrote the whole archive with the new settings.

 

As Long as you donât mod for XB1, just use default compression without audio and no compression with audio. Makes everything easier. The used LZ4 compression wonât have any significant overhead on PC anyway.