BSA creation tips?

[Lanceor]

BSA's are giving me heartburn at the moment. I want to use them to make mods easier to install and uninstall, but some players are saying they aren't working.

• OBMM BSA creator on medium compression generates random missing textures.
  
• BSA Commander, default compression results in a file that's unreadable for many players.
  

I'm going to try OBMM with no compression now. The size of the BSA becomes a whopping 136MB so I'll have to 7zip it to make the upload bearable.

Are there any tips for creating BSA's for maximum compatibility?

[Hanaisse]

Have you tried TES4Files? It creates bsa's and packages your entire mod up for you.

[Lanceor]

I already have all the necessary files in one folder so TES4files is probably not the right tool for the job at this stage. (I have to say it's an extremely useful tool though!)

The random missing textures were somehow due to the way OBMM was creating the BSA. Anyway, the uncompressed 136MB juggernaut seems to be working fine (on my machine at least). Hope the players don't mind the extra disk space usage.

I did find out something else interesting though: It seems that Oblivion will attempt to find close matches for incorrect folder names. Renaming "meshes/mymod" to "meshes/mymodX" didn't break the mod. Renaming it to "meshes/mymodXXXXX" did break it.

[Vince]

You can create .bsa files with BSA Commander using the default compression that are readable by all. I've used .bsa's created with BSA commander, following the steps listed on the CS Wiki at: Creating BSA Files with BSA Commander for my Abandoned Mountain Shack. At present, the .bsa is around 75 MB uncompressed and just under 40 MB compressed. There have been more than 20K downloads so far and, although there have been hundreds of comments, there have been no complaints about the .bsa.

If you find OBMM works for you, that's great. I just want people to know that BSA Commander is a reliable option for those not using OBMM.

[Khettienna]

I have made a lot of bsa files. Hundreds, easily, because I package all my mods bsa-style, plus I've re-packed my stock bsa files a few ways a few different times, and plus I make bsa files for all mods I install that aren't replacers. The only exception to this is for mods from which I frequently borrow resources (hi, Vince!).

I have made all my bsa files with OBMM with no compression. Uncompressed bsa files will be read faster by the game, and so the performance return is always worth the extra file size. I've only ever had one bsa go wrong, and that was one I made for UL Ancient Yews; for some reason, the texture for the fog would never be recognized from the bsa. The same was true no matter how I packed it or with which utility. Really, no idea, there. But that's one case out of a few hundred, and I never did check the mesh.

I find it strikingly odd that you were able to rename your meshes subfolder without consequence. I cannot reproduce this.

In any case, my recommendation is to pack with OBMM without compression. Make sure you also reset the bsa timestamp before you zip it all up (you can do that in OBMM via Utilities > Archive invalidation, there's a button).

Edit: And for the record, I had no idea I was posting over Vince as I was typing this.

Edited January 18, 2011 by Khettienna

[Lanceor]

Thanks for validating my decision to use an uncompressed BSA Khett.

Vince, BSA Commander is a very well regarded tool and I was quite surprised that it created an archive that was unreadable. It looks like this particular BSA was an isolated error, or I may have clicked something funny without realising it.

Anyway, no flames in the past hour, so it looks like the new one might be okay.

[AndalayBay]

Don't know if it helps or not, but I've never been able to get BSA Commander to work under Win 7. Worked for me fine under XP, but I had all sorts of problems after upgrading to Win 7, so that might be part of the reason for the different in behaviour. Didn't get any obvious errors, but the BSA's were unusable. I use OBMM or TES4Files. If I the mod is large enough I will use compression, usually about 80% or so. I appreciate the performance boost using uncompressed files yields, but the 6 hr upload time is a killer

[Lanceor]

I happen to be using Windows XP, so I guess is a case of "try different things and see what works".

The file size wasn't a concern after I used 7zip on it - it got reduced from 136 MB to 25MB, which is much smaller than the BSA with medium compression in a using basic Windows zip archiving (45 MB).

Edited January 18, 2011 by Lanceor

[auryga]

What's the exact problem your users have with the BSA? I've packaged all mods I installed into BSAs and so far only had 2 problems:

1. NIF files with wrong texture path characters. There are several resources, especially often creatures and armor/clothes, which contain '/' instead of '\' in their texture paths. This works fine as long as the NIF is NOT in a BSA file. But if the NIF is loaded from a BSA, the engine no longer finds the texture and it's getting pink, or in some cases a whole part is invisible.
   
   If you got a lot of this files: optimizing the NIFs with PyFFI for instance also fixes this 'slash problem'. Think there's even a special PyFFI option to fix only the slashes without doing other changes.
   
   
2. NIF files that overwrite files from the vanilla BSAs. On my first try with BSA packaging I also put all resources of the Unofficial Patches into a BSA file, and they obviously nearly only contain replacements of vanilla resources. After that my game was crashing about every 10 minutes or so, at least that was my impression. Luckily I shortly after that stumbled into a Beth thread, were somebody mentioned this known problem: BSA file content should not overwrite vanilla BSA contents. shademe even did a tool (http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=29342) to split your resources in 'completly new' and 'replacing' resources. Since I unpacked all this replacing resources from the patches again, my game is running better than before. Although I still have to look over the other BSA files I made, there might be more replacements in other mods too.
   

I always use OBMM to create BSAs, and the only problems so far for me came from the resource files within the BSA. Never had a problem with the BSA file format itself. And I too use uncompressed BSAs only.

And OBMM only because it was the first tool I found and I used to it now, not because I have any problems with BSA commander

[Lanceor]

My latest BSA (version 1.31) seems to be working fine - no reports to the contrary in the past 24 hours. :-)

But previously...

Version 1.20 was created using OBMM on medium compression. There were a two missing textures.

Version 1.30 was created using BSA commander on default compression. The BSA could be unpacked without problems, but could not be read by Oblivion for some reason.

I've ruled out forward slashes (none found in the meshes, especially the two with missing textures) and archive invalidation (no replacement meshes or textures in the mod).

I does sound like a number of you are making uncompressed BSA's with OBMM. Since that is working, that's what I'll keep doing.

[schatten]

Does TES4Files check the esp for uses of resources?

Example:

You have mesh A and later mesh B. In the esp you used A and later B. Does TES4Files only use B in the BSA or A, too?

[Hanaisse]

If you delete the resource mesh A entirely, not just out of the reference window, then yes, it'll just pick up mesh B.

It also grabs every file in your mods folder, and if it's not used will spit out errors. Good way to clean up.

[schatten]

So I have to delete un-used files manually. I though TES4Files checks the esp. Good to know, thanks.