sArchiveList ini Setting Contains Jargon; Manual Edits Are Removed When Launched

[Guest MajinCry]

Ah, for the first post to be about an issue. How glorious. *Achem*

 

 

Mod Organizer changes the "sArchiveList" setting to some bizarre list. Here's how it looks at the moment.

SArchiveList=aaa,aab,aac,aad,aae,aaf,aag,aah,aai,aaj,aak,aal,aam,aan,aao,aap,aaq,aar,aas,aat,aau,aav,aaw

 

And here's how it should look (pertaining to Oblivion.ini in the ol' "My Games" directory):

 

 

SArchiveList=Oblivion - Meshes.bsa, Oblivion - Textures - Compressed.bsa, Oblivion - Sounds.bsa, Oblivion - Voices1.bsa, Oblivion - Voices2.bsa, Oblivion - Misc.bsa

My guess is that MO uses the various "aab,aac,aad,etc" values as variables, which are linked to the load order and the various .bsa files contained within mods.

 

On it's own, the change is harmless. But what I want to do, is move several .bsa files to a RamDisk (with drive letter I), so as to improve cell loading and the like; this involves changing sArchiveList to, for example...

 

 

SArchiveList=I:Oblivion - Meshes.bsa, I:Oblivion - Textures - Compressed.bsa, I:Oblivion - Sounds.bsa, I:Oblivion - Voices1.bsa, I:Oblivion - Voices2.bsa, I:Oblivion - Misc.bsa

 

Which just doesn't work with MO. Because I've no clue which .bsa file the variables refer to, and I'm not sure if just adding in the drive letter, after copying the respective archive, would even work.

 

Editing the setting in MO is utterly useless as well; it reverts back as soon as Oblivion is launched.

 

And just in case this gets suggested, symbolic links don't work with bsa/esm files for Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Fallout NV (they work for Skyrim); the game looks okay at first glance, but things will be missing. Textures for the faces of NPCs, missing meshes, etc. Or the game will just plainly crash.

 

 

 

So aye. Any tips? Aside from foregoing MO, and installing my collection o' mods as we used to in the bad ol' days of not-having-MO. Don't think I need to explain why.

 

Tah in advance.

[DoubleYou]

So, moving BSAs to a ramdisk improves performance? That's news to me. At anyrate, Mod Organizer's form of archive invalidation does not allow you to do that. You would have to disable archive invalidation and invalidate it yourself somehow, if that is possible even.

[Guest MajinCry]

Aye. I seem to be the only lad that thought of using a RamDisk with yon Bethesda games. The fellows at TTW were mighty happy with the performance improvement the tweak brought, por ejemplo. Gone, or heavily reduced, be the cell-loadin' stutters.

 

I found a work around; in that Oblivion doesn't mind if it has a symlink of the entire data folder, but it absolutely hates having symlinks of individual .bsa and .esm files.

 

Luckily, the data folder for Oblivion, with all the DLC installed, comes to around 5.5GB. Just enough to fit in a 6GB RamDisk.