.BSA Files, should I use them? & Game performance?

[Striker879]

I've always made my own BSA files just for the organizational benefit. I've never used a mod manager and never will so I had to make BSA's because the Unoficial Oblivion Patch trashes the data folder. Here's what I think I've found, to be taken with a grain of salt.

 

1. Oblivion Mod Manager is good for browsing and extracting from BSA's but has a bug when creating if there is a single international character (à å ä ç č é è í í ò) in the file names. It acts like it made a good bsa file but it won't work.

 

2. I go along with what snargel said. I extracted Oblivion - Textures - Compressed.bsa and repacked it with no compression using BsaCommander and the tiny little bit of stutter I saw at the very beginning after starting the game has gone away. It's not going to hurt anything so when in doubt, why not.

 

3. With the OBSE plugin called SkyBsa I think you could pack all the loose files of the Unoficial Oblivion Patch into a bsa. You don't need UOP if all you play are quest mods so I haven't tried it.

 

4. I like Drake's point that Bethesda uses bsa files for a reason. Surely it's significantly easier to open and close a single file than 18,000 files.

 

5. I'm not sure if this goes against conventional wisdom but here's what happened. I've been using a map replacer that was a loose file. C:\Bethesda Softworks\Oblivion\Data\Textures\menus\map\world\cyrodiil_resized.dds. After I decompressed the textures bsa file the new file had a new modern date and the cyrodiil_resized.dds in the bsa was overriding the loose file.

 

What happens if you use a utility like File Date Changer to change your repacked uncompressed Oblivion - Textures - Compressed.bsa to year 2006?

[chambcra]

 

I've always made my own BSA files just for the organizational benefit. I've never used a mod manager and never will so I had to make BSA's because the Unoficial Oblivion Patch trashes the data folder. Here's what I think I've found, to be taken with a grain of salt.

 

1. Oblivion Mod Manager is good for browsing and extracting from BSA's but has a bug when creating if there is a single international character (à å ä ç č é è í í ò) in the file names. It acts like it made a good bsa file but it won't work.

 

2. I go along with what snargel said. I extracted Oblivion - Textures - Compressed.bsa and repacked it with no compression using BsaCommander and the tiny little bit of stutter I saw at the very beginning after starting the game has gone away. It's not going to hurt anything so when in doubt, why not.

 

3. With the OBSE plugin called SkyBsa I think you could pack all the loose files of the Unoficial Oblivion Patch into a bsa. You don't need UOP if all you play are quest mods so I haven't tried it.

 

4. I like Drake's point that Bethesda uses bsa files for a reason. Surely it's significantly easier to open and close a single file than 18,000 files.

 

5. I'm not sure if this goes against conventional wisdom but here's what happened. I've been using a map replacer that was a loose file. C:\Bethesda Softworks\Oblivion\Data\Textures\menus\map\world\cyrodiil_resized.dds. After I decompressed the textures bsa file the new file had a new modern date and the cyrodiil_resized.dds in the bsa was overriding the loose file.

 

What happens if you use a utility like File Date Changer to change your repacked uncompressed Oblivion - Textures - Compressed.bsa to year 2006?

 

Then the loose file goes back to taking precedence. This is without SkyBsa installed. Somewhere I got the idea that it was a hard rule that loose files always trump what is in a bsa no matter what because the loose files are loaded last and so regardless of date they win. Now after all these years I find out it's really because the loose files have a more recent date.

[Striker879]

 

 

I've always made my own BSA files just for the organizational benefit. I've never used a mod manager and never will so I had to make BSA's because the Unoficial Oblivion Patch trashes the data folder. Here's what I think I've found, to be taken with a grain of salt.

 

1. Oblivion Mod Manager is good for browsing and extracting from BSA's but has a bug when creating if there is a single international character (à å ä ç č é è í í ò) in the file names. It acts like it made a good bsa file but it won't work.

 

2. I go along with what snargel said. I extracted Oblivion - Textures - Compressed.bsa and repacked it with no compression using BsaCommander and the tiny little bit of stutter I saw at the very beginning after starting the game has gone away. It's not going to hurt anything so when in doubt, why not.

 

3. With the OBSE plugin called SkyBsa I think you could pack all the loose files of the Unoficial Oblivion Patch into a bsa. You don't need UOP if all you play are quest mods so I haven't tried it.

 

4. I like Drake's point that Bethesda uses bsa files for a reason. Surely it's significantly easier to open and close a single file than 18,000 files.

 

5. I'm not sure if this goes against conventional wisdom but here's what happened. I've been using a map replacer that was a loose file. C:\Bethesda Softworks\Oblivion\Data\Textures\menus\map\world\cyrodiil_resized.dds. After I decompressed the textures bsa file the new file had a new modern date and the cyrodiil_resized.dds in the bsa was overriding the loose file.

 

What happens if you use a utility like File Date Changer to change your repacked uncompressed Oblivion - Textures - Compressed.bsa to year 2006?

 

Then the loose file goes back to taking precedence. This is without SkyBsa installed. Somewhere I got the idea that it was a hard rule that loose files always trump what is in a bsa no matter what because the loose files are loaded last and so regardless of date they win. Now after all these years I find out it's really because the loose files have a more recent date.

 

 

Ya Steam users find out that pretty regularly from what I've seen. Redownload the game and they get BSA dates that are dated the day of the redownload.

 

I'm not certain, but I thought I read somewhere that Wrye Bash takes care of redating the BSAs to 2006, but I'm on the disk version so mine have always been year 2006. When I went looking for the info much later of course I couldn't locate it (I really don't have a clear idea of where I saw it ... makes for a rather large hay stack).

[KatsAwful]

@chambcra

The rule that's supposed to happen is that loose files overwrite the BSAs because the BSAs should always be the youngest files (installed from DVD of course). Not only does this date precedence mean Steam and GoG releases don't work properly, it also only sorta functions so archive invalidation was needed. SkyBSA removes the date precedence outright, reverting back to the original intention/Skyrim rules among other fixes

Bethesda didn't test out this system in the slightest, they just used dates for everything and called it a day :/

[Striker879]

@chambcra

 

The rule that's supposed to happen is that loose files overwrite the BSAs because the BSAs should always be the youngest files (installed from DVD of course). Not only does this date precedence mean Steam and GoG releases don't work properly, it also only sorta functions so archive invalidation was needed. SkyBSA removes the date precedence outright, reverting back to the original intention/Skyrim rules among other fixes

 

Bethesda didn't test out this system in the slightest, they just used dates for everything and called it a day :/

 

Actually once GOG was told about the problem that the new BSA dates caused they corrected the problem. All the GOG file dates are correct now from what I'm told (I'm a disk dinosaur). Steam knows about it too ... just a different culture there I guess.

 

- Edit - For anybody sitting on the GOG vs Steam fence and would like some more info on what others have experienced, go to the Oblivion Character Overhaul version 2 mod comments and look up the post by zariel on Sept 17, 2020. I think you'll find it a rather enlightening read.

[KatsAwful]

Still a good argument to always have SkyBSA :p

[chambcra]

I didn't even think about Steam, GoG, GOTY or anything else. I need to say now that everything I've said only applies and has been tested on a bargain bin version that was packaged together with Bioshock.

 

@KatsAwful If "SkyBSA removes the date precedence outright" then what sort of precedence is there? Something has to come out on top. Right?

 

It was this mod (https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/49652?tab=posts&BH=0) that got me thinking about the decompressing thing. I have repacked the meshes bsa without compression now. I can always imagine that it's working better. The new Textures bsa is slightly over 2 GB but I think that limit is probably actually 2,147,483,648, similar to the way 1 K is really 1024 as far as a computer is concerned.

[KatsAwful]

Anything that overwrites the vanilla BSA gets seen. BSAs are still ordered by plugin (if you somehow have multiple BSAs addressing the same files), and loose files always overwrite regardless of BSA. This is the Skyrim's rules

Per SkyBSA's mod page:

 

 

In Skyrim, "loose files," or files that aren't packaged in a BSA, will always override files in a BSA. Moreover, BSAs that are loaded later will override BSAs that are loaded earlier, in the event that different versions of the same file exist in multiple BSAs. There are no exceptions to either of these rules.

Edited September 20, 2020 by KatsAwful

[chambcra]

Okay, sounds good. Thanks