Mod Organizer & packed BSAs - Two Practical Questions

[mikegray]

I'm playing Skyrim again after taking a longish break. In the process of re-installing and testing mods, I just realized that MO no longer unpacks BSA files. After googling some I also read through the very long thread pinned here in this forum. Without getting involved in the greater philosophical questions, I have a couple practical queries:

 

- Is there anyway to make MO unpack at least SOME mods at the time of installation or even afterwards? I'm capable of using the BSA unpacker, but it's a bit tiresome. There are a number of mods where I like to make some manual changes - e.g., swapping out the skin textures in Vilja's face - so at least in some cases, I need access to the individual files.

 

- Could it be that leaving the BSAs packed can increase load times when the entire game is on an SSD? It seems like my load screen times are a good bit longer than they used to be (like, when entering and exiting buildings), particularly for a level 4 character at a file size of 7mb. Of course, the cause could be somewhere else entirely - I'm testing several new and/or updated mods and I'm ALSO experimenting with ugrids set to 7. However, it seemed like my load times were slower pretty much from the get go.

[EssArrBee]

No you can't unpack some of the mods unless you do it manually. With something like Vilja, just put the textures in a folder with the same patch as Vilja's face textures and install them. No need to unpack the BSA if you know the texture path of the faces. Remember that files loaded later win.

 

Archives will have better performance and have been that way since we went to multithread CPUs. You're new mods and higher ugrids are the culprits since more is required to load into memory. The different in performance with an SSD between loose and archived files is not noticeable to a human though.

[kryptopyr]

You can choose to unpack some bsa files by going to MO Settings > Plugins and enabling the BSA Extractor.  When you install a mod with a BSA, MO will ask if you want to unpack it.  If you only want to unpack BSAs for certain mods and not all of them, then simply select 'yes' or 'no' as desired and make sure that the "Remember Selection" box is unchecked.

[mikegray]

No you can't unpack some of the mods unless you do it manually. With something like Vilja, just put the textures in a folder with the same patch as Vilja's face textures and install them. No need to unpack the BSA if you know the texture path of the faces. Remember that files loaded later win.

 

Archives will have better performance and have been that way since we went to multithread CPUs. You're new mods and higher ugrids are the culprits since more is required to load into memory. The different in performance with an SSD between loose and archived files is not noticeable to a human though.

 

On the Vilja solution: Yeah, that's exactly how I did it. But building the folder structure was kind of fiddly.

 

Good to know that the BSA will improve, not hurt performance, though. Since I actually have less mods in than I did before, I'm guessing that the uGrids experiment is slowing things down. I'll switch back to 5 and see if load times improve ...

 

You can choose to unpack some bsa files by going to MO Settings > Plugins and enabling the BSA Extractor.  When you install a mod with a BSA, MO will ask if you want to unpack it.  If you only want to unpack BSAs for certain mods and not all of them, then simply select 'yes' or 'no' as desired and make sure that the "Remember Selection" box is unchecked.

Thanks!! I HAD had a look at the plugins list, but I only just now realized that I can change the "enabled" setting from "false" to "true."