How to get uncompressed BA2 Texture archives to work

[El Rizzo]

Hi everyone,

after reading about the slow decompression throughput of BSA archives (except SSE ones) due to the use of zlib in a comment by Zilav made over on the STEP forum's xLODGen beta thread I did some searching and found out that Fallout 4 also still uses zlib and therefore somewhat negates the benefits of having a fast SSD + CPU for loading times. Thus I wanted to create uncompressed BA2 archives to make better use of my m.2 PCIe SSD and started unpacking and repacking my texture mods with no compression selected in archive2.exe, but when I booted up the game and tried to load a savegame, I got into an endless loading screen and I had to kill the game via Task Manager. This happens 100% of the time and also on a new game with only 1 texture mod enabled which contains an uncompressed BA2 texture archive.

My procedure to generate uncompressed archives is as follows: unpack BA2 archive (either texture or main) from mod into empty folder with archive2.exe -> go to "file" -> "new" in archive2.exe and select either "general" or "DDS" as format (depending on whether I wanna archive textures or meshes/materials/scripts etc.) and select "none" for compression and click ok. My settings for a texture archive would thus look like the attached screenshot. Then I simply drag and drop the "textures" folder into archive2.exe and save the BA2 with the proper name (espname - Textures.ba2).

I have also created the same texture archive using BSArch, but the result was exactly the same, the game simply stays in an infinite loading screen and also won't load the objects usually rotating on screen (not black loading screen though!).

Do any of you have an idea as to what I'm doing wrong or what is going on? Or is it simply not possible to use uncompressed texture archives in Fallout4?

Cheers and thanks for any helpful replies

[zilav]

Even though Fallout 4 is x64 and BA2 internal files table also uses 64 bit integers, the game still probably has a limit on max BA2 size seeing as how all vanilla textures are split into several BA2s each not exceeding 2.5Gb instead of a single textures archive.

There is also a possibility that the game doesn't support uncompressed textures, kind of similar to how it doesn't support compressed sounds/voices for example for whatever reason. You can easily test it though using only a couple of custom textures.

[El Rizzo]

Thanks for the quick reply zilav! The mod I tested with was well below 1GB in size as an uncompressed BA2 (~600mb), but I'll test with a small one and report back.

[El Rizzo]

Okay so I've tested with a single set of textures with a total size of ~8mb and it still gives me infinite loading screens when trying to start a new game, I guess uncompressed texture archives are not supported for Fallout 4 . But why does BSArch and archive2.exe even offer the option to create uncompressed texture archives when it isn't support? @zilav

[zilav]

If you are absolutely sure that the problem is not the textures themselves or anything else, then looks like it is yet another bug of Bethesda. What a suprise.

BA2 texture archives technically can to store uncompressed data, and even Archive2 allows to create such archives. But I have a feeling that programmers of Archive2 and the game itself were different, and the game always assumes that textures are compressed without checking the actual data in dds BA2 and tries to unpack it.

I guess this can be fixed by a F4SE plugin if someone knowledgeable bothers to check that BA2 dds streaming code.

[El Rizzo]

7 hours ago, zilav said:

If you are absolutely sure that the problem is not the textures themselves or anything else, then looks like it is yet another bug of Bethesda. What a suprise.

 

Well I can open them up with Irfan View or Gimp just fine and the game loads if the archive is compressed or I load them as loose files, so I'm fairly certain it is not the textures themselves. I've used the textures found under "props" from this mod and I've also tested with a selection of textures taken from the official High-Res DLC and the result was the same, so I'm quite confident it isn't the textures.

 

8 hours ago, zilav said:

I guess this can be fixed by a F4SE plugin if someone knowledgeable bothers to check that BA2 dds streaming code.

That would be awesome, though I somehow doubt that anyone will do this

[lmstearn]

They have to fix the program. Do you have an account at Bethesda.net? Here's a support link.

[El Rizzo]

8 minutes ago, lmstearn said:

They have to fix the program. Do you have an account at Bethesda.net? Here's a support link.

You mean archive2.exe or the game's lack of support for uncompressed texture archives?

[zilav]

15 hours ago, El Rizzo said:

You mean archive2.exe or the game's lack of support for uncompressed texture archives?

The game lacks the support if you are absolutely sure in your tests.

[El Rizzo]

Like I said, even with textures from the official High-Res DLC I get the infinite loading loop, so I'm fairly certain, yes.

[wellden]

2 hours ago, El Rizzo said:

Like I said, even with textures from the official High-Res DLC I get the infinite loading loop, so I'm fairly certain, yes.

Thanks for bringing this up El Rizzo as I am in the middle of it too...however I do not have the ILS when loading uncompressed texture archives. I have only tested this with output from xLodgen though. Thank you for all the help zilav!

[El Rizzo]

May I ask what tool you used to create uncompressed archives and the settings you used? I'm also using xLodgen for Fallout 4 so I can test my output files with your setup to see if that works.