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Dealing with Mods that use BSAs


mikegray

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I'm planning on re-optimzing all the mods in my load order. Though I have a powerful system (i5 + r9 290x + 16g + ssd), it's difficult to get a stable combination of STEP AND a generous selection of demanding gameplay/content mods. (Including: PerMa, OBIS, Sands of Time, Creature of Skrim, Frostfall, Helgen Reborn.) I'm also usign a beautiful ENB Preset (Vividian) that ahs some textures that might stand a little more compression.

 

SO: my goal is to go back to my original backups and reduce EVERYTHING to 1k with .5k normals and see how the game runs then.

 

One probelm: At some point I let MO to start installing mods without unpacking BSAs.

 

Can you guys give me a little insight on how to handle these mods?

 

I mean, do I need to use BSAopt to manually unpack all of them - and then re-pack after I'm done - or is there some easier way of doing it?

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Thanks a million, hishtup!

 

MO really is an amazing piece of work. Every time I think I know everything about it, I run into a new surprise like that.

 

Question: If I want to ddsopt stuff in, say, Skyrim Immersive Creatures, what is the best practice? I'm thinking the following:

 

1) Extract the material into the SIC directory.

2) Archive original .bsa.

3) Run ddsopt on contents.

4) Play Skyrim.

 

Or should I do it differently?

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but I dont thing that you need to optimize them...

Do you mean that you don't think that you need to optimize the SIC textures because they are already optimized?  I was thinking of doing something similar with SIC and potentially other mods not in STEP that use BSAs to hold texture files, but keeping high resolution (up to 2048x2048) instead of reducing it.  I guess my main purpose would be to set the proper mipmaps and make the files possibly smaller and more efficient, rather than to reduce texture quality.

Edited by oqhansoloqo
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When you are optimizing you make sure you are only optimizing the mod you want to optimize. DDSopt remembers the folders used the last time you optimized, so make sure to change the input and output folders when you optimize, and make sure these folders don't have any other mods in them.

 

DDSopt and BSAopt work well in extracting the textures from BSAs for any of the Bethesda game (Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, and Skyrim), and DDSopt works well in optimizing the textures. A few mods use a fomod script for installation, and with these mods any BSAs may need to be repacked so the fomod script recognizes them. For Skyrim mods it's not a good idea to use DDSopt to read a BSA, optimize textures, and recreate the BSA in a single step. DDSopt and BSAopt don't always create usable Skyrim BSAs since these BSAs can have a slightly different format. If you need to repack optimized Skyrim mod textures into a BSA we suggest using the "archive.exe" program from the Skyrim Creation Kit to create BSAs for Skyrim. The suggested procedure when optimizing Skyrim mod textures into BSAs is to use DDSopt or BSAopt to extract the contents of a mod BSA, optimize textures with DDSopt, then remake the mod BSA with "Archive.exe".

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What I have trouble figuring out most often is what types of mods containing textures should or shouldn't be optimized.  I've always found that to be the most confusing since I really don't know crap about textures beyond knowing how to follow the directions in the STEP Mods and Optimization part of the Skyrim DDSOpt Quick-Start Guide.  Is it a good idea or a bad idea to find all of my non-STEP mods that contain textures in BSAs, extract the BSAs, optimize all the textures with DDSOpt, and then remake the BSAs with "Archive.exe"?  I pretty much already did it with most of my non-STEP mods that have loose textures in them...  I just never know if I'm really messing something up or not just because I don't really know much about texture files.  I know that with STEP mods you have gone through and pointed out which ones are worth optimizing and which ones aren't.  I don't have the knowledge to be able to figure that out.  I do have a rudimentary understanding of exterior textures, body textures, etc.  Though very rudimentary - just to know that some of the tools know how to separate these different types into separate folders so that DDSOpt could apply different optimization methods to the different types.

 

So, do you recommend that I optimize all non-STEP mods, leave all of them alone, maybe just leave the BSA archived ones alone, or somehow figure out which ones and optimize only those?

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