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Recommendations For Repacking Optimised Textures Into BSAs


DocClox

Question

Last night I finally bit the bullet and ran DDSOpt on my vanilla textures. So far so good.

 

Now then: I've been following the thread about Mod Organizer and BSA extraction with interest, and loose files don't seem to offer the advantages under MO that they did with Wrye Bash. So what I'd like to do is repack my optimised textures into new BSA files and give each one its own mod folder under MO, each with a dummy esp like the HRDLC archives. Between that, and copying the official DLCs into their own mod folders, I hope to be able get the optimised folders to override the vanilla textures, but not any fixes in the unofficial patches (or any other mods for that matter)

 

So I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations for repacking BSAs. I know I can do it with Archive.exe in the CK (but I'd prefer not to) and I assume the DDSOpt will do it if I choose an optimised folder as my source and specify whatever.bsa as the output file. Most of the other tools I know of aren't fully compatible with Skyrim BSAs, or at least complain about unknown header values)

 

In any event I'm away from the computer in question. So since I can't experiment directly, I thought I'd try and pick a few brains. 

 

Has anyone got an easy or efficient method for repacking these things? Are there any caveats I should be aware of? 

 

Any help greatly appreciated.

 

 

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The discussion on how MO handles BSAs is still ongoing, so I haven't been looking at this much myself except thinking abut the possibilities. It's likely at this point that archive files will still be able to be used for the optimized textures, but if not BSAs can be created.

 

It's certainly safest to use Archive.exe to create BSAs. You don't need to be running the CK to use Archive.exe, it has a GUI and can be run standalone.

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Well, I gave this a shot last night.

 

DDSOpt does indeed repack BSAs. Just give the optimised folder as the source and and empty folder and non-existent filename for the BSA. Then I copied the esp from one of the HRDLC files, renamed it to match the BSA and used Wrye Bash to set the ESM flag. Moved the pair of them to a new MO folder, activated the mode ... and Skyrim crashed on startup. Repeatedly.  When I delselected the new "mod" the game started normally.

 

So, something there didn't work. I didn't have much time, so I've yet to investigate further. I'm not sure that Wrye is the best tool for false-flagging; most discussions seem to recommend TES5Edit, but I couldn't get that to work at the time. For that matter, I'm not sure if the esp is needed at all, false flagged or not. I'll experiment further tonight.

 

It may well be that DDSOpt's repacking is at fault. I agree that Archive.exe is the safest way. I just hope it has a "select all" option somewhere as I don't fancy hand selecting a few thousand archive files.

 

Anyway, I'll post an update tonight.

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Using BSAopt/DDSopt to repack the vanilla BSAs worked for early versions of Skyrim, but after version 1.6.89 there have been reports of problems when doing this. Bethesda might have made some changes to the BSA structure, or perhaps began using some features of the BSA file structure they had not been using previously. The file structure is proprietary and isn't published. Ethatron hasn't been actively working on BSAopt/DDSopt for a while so he hasn't investigated this issue. Lately we started recommending the use of Archive.exe to pack/repack BSAs. It is a standalone program with a GUI that is installed in the Skyrim directory when the Creation Kit is installed.

 

I still use BSAopt/DDSopt to unpack BSAs since I haven't had any problems with this.

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Archive.exe seems to do the job nicely. The interface took a little head-scratching but it repacked a BSA and it's loading just fine now.

 

Now for the other folders. Archive.exe didn't seem to take as long as DDSOpt either, but that might well be wishful thinking on my part :)

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Archive.exe seems a lot quicker to me also. I haven't compared the resulting file sizes, but I expect that DDSopt will produce smaller files. 

Do you think changing the compression level with DDSopt/BSAopt makes a difference? I repacked some FNV stuff at the highest setting and the game wouldn't even start. I have a theory that higher compression takes to long to decompress since the files were less that 50% their original size. Like going from raw WAV to MP3 basically. 

 

EDIt: Also, does archive.exe generate a plugin?

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Do you think changing the compression level with DDSopt/BSAopt makes a difference? I repacked some FNV stuff at the highest setting and the game wouldn't even start. I have a theory that higher compression takes to long to decompress since the files were less that 50% their original size. Like going from raw WAV to MP3 basically. 

 

Changing the compression level makes the file smaller and for most compression algorithms typically increases the processor cycles needed to decompress the file. Higher compression typically requires a lot more processing to create the compressed file.

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Mmm. Certainly there's a difference from that point of view. I think the question before us is more: is there a level of compression above (or below) which the game will refuse/fail to read archives.

 

I have no idea as to the answer, but I can see how the knowledge could be useful

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@SRB: I copied and renamed one from the HRDLC, then used Wrye Bash to "esmify" it. It seems to work, if Hert's face is anything to go by :) There's an empty plugin somewhere in Wrye's Mopy folder that can be used to create new bashed patches that could probably be used as well. The Brawl Bugs one is another possibility.

 

@Kelmych: Interesting. I guess I'll stick with Archive.exe from now on then :)

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