.BSA pros and cons

[VanZen]

making and unpacking .bsa files are a new concept to me i have noticed

 

instead of filling my mesh and texture files with countless documents i

 

could inturn make a simple bsa containing all of these.

 

my question is this. would i benefit from making all my mods into .bsa

 

files?

 

also would that effect the function of these said mods and would the

 

load order matter if i did that?

 

the reason i ask is because it seems so much cleaner to do it this way

 

can someone let me know if im about to make a huge mistake?

 

VanZen

[yosecretsquirrel]

Well I'm not a modder I just play one on tv, but as a mod user I can say BSA files are a dream to use. Simply they do not overwrite existing files in the data folder as they provide a unique container for data pertaining directly to an individual mod. This mean easy error free installation and more importantly, uninstallation. I never hesitate trying out mods that are in the BSA format.

[VanZen]

fantastic!!

 

ok so say i wanted to (bsa) lovers and better cities together and they have no conflicting factors i could bsa them together and it should work fine as long as i have the ESM, ESP & ini documents in place in oblivion data and active. am i correct in assuming that?

 

or better example.

 

and lets say im frequently in and out of my DATA folder and i would like to (BSA) all of my monster girl data so i could remove quickly if i had to. and to have all the monster girl data in one .bsa

 

the idea of it sounds hot!

 

VanZen

[mrpouit]

There are some annoying things with BSAs though (at least, for Oblivion):

• you can't overwrite vanilla resources (e.g. you can't do a BSA for QTP3, you need to repack Oblivion - Textures.bsa and Oblivion - Meshes.bsa)
  
• you can't have several mods provide the same file either (I think the first BSA to be loaded wins, but I'm not sure)
  
• you need to be careful with the bsa filename, especially when you want to use several BSAs for a single ESP (I remember reading some discussions on the official forums: oblivion does weird things depending on the ESP name, e.g. whether it contains spaces or not)
  
• Oblivion won't load a BSA corresponding to an ESM file automagically, only works with ESPs.
  
• the list of BSAs to forcefully load in Oblivion.ini is limited to 255 characters.
  
• the Oblivion engine apparently has a somehow hard limit of 350~400 ESPs+ESMs+BSAs. There was a topic from Wrye on the official forums about that: beyond this limit, it will start to do some hd trashing (it will go crazy and do stupid things like repeatedly reading recursively all files in the Oblivion folder...)
  

That's what I recall from my memory, so it could be wrong of course, feel free to correct. ;-)

[prideslayer]

That all sounds correct to me for FONV as well.

 

The "weird things with spaces" is just for modders who want to load multiple BSAs with their mods and stuff like that. The space in the ESP/ESM name serves as a wildcard when applied to BSA names. Few mods need multiple BSAs though so most people won't run into that issue as long as they name the two files the same except for the extension.

 

What allows is for the mod to be called something like "mymod .esp" and then have multiple BSAs named "mymod - sounds.bsa" and "mymod - textures.bsa" and so on. Not really a reason to do that unless the BSAs are really large and you want to make them available as individual downloads.

[Atreyu]

Basically, you can't put files from multiple mods into a single BSA and expect everything to work fine. The BSA has to be the same name as the esp. The only way to do more than one mod is if the esps are merged and named the same as the BSA.

[prideslayer]

Right, you can't do multiple mods sharing a BSA -- but you can do one mod with multiple BSAs.

[Siouliusn]

Bsa pro : easy to install, easy to remove, no clutter in your data folder, smaller filesize(?).

Bsa con : one mod/bsa, not convenient if you like to often modify a mesh/texture (recolor/alpha;....)

 

But it's quiet good for big mods that aren't meant to be changed often.

[yosecretsquirrel]

When I first replied to this thread, I was under the assumption that Vanzen was interested in useing the BSA format to publish his own mods, not repack existing mods. I'm no expert but repacking other peeps mods sounds like a road to failure, as I suspect the mod would have to be constructed with BSA in mind. I also suspect the effort required to make it work would exceed the resulting benefit. But if you got nothing better to do, give'r.