I'm making my final decision now on whether or not to compress my mod's BSA, and I figure I could get some input on it to make one final, informed decision.

So far my tested has revealed the following:

If I do compress the BSA, it's about 400mb, and if I pack it into a 7z with a few other things (ESM, video, etc.) it's around 390-400mb.

If I do not compress the BSA, it's about 800mb, but when I pack it into a 7z with everything, it's about 300mb.

The question is, do I compress or not? Bigger file on disk, or bigger file to upload/download?

There was also talk of how fast it's decompressed by the engine, vs. loaded by the HDD. But the numbers were pretty old (From Oblivion). I'd assume now that loading more is faster than decompressing at this point, with how fast HDD have gotten?

I've also heard that the DLC are not compressed. Is this true? Perhaps Bethesda only compressed Skyrim to fit it on a disk, but with the DLC they had the room so they didn't. Does that mean uncompressed is better?

I hate to bring this up for the 3,000th time, I just would like to have one final discussion before deciding and laying it to rest forever. I'd like to do the option that's best for the most people.

Thanks,

AJV

No, then 7z it with LZMA2.
Random (aka already compressed) data is more difficult to compress than ordered.

Probably makes bugger all diff if a bsa is compressed wrt loading times tho.

If I try LZMA2 it says "The system cannot allocate the required amount of memory" and fails. It says it needs 2.2gb, but I have almost 5gb of RAM open, so it shouldn't be erroring out?

EDIT: I do have the CK open so I'll try again later when it's closed.

But it sounds like you definitely think uncompressed is the way to go.

The DLCs shipped with uncompressed BSA files because they include string files. A BSA cannot be compressed and still have working string files in it.

Advances in the engine for Skyrim have probably rendered the load times issue moot.

Plus as other threads have shown, apparently there are other issues with compressed BSAs, like that one with the FUZ files not always working right.

Might be best to go with uncompressed. 100MB less to download is going to be significant even for those folks with high speed connections.

Okay, so it appears the ONLY upside to compressing is that it's a smaller file on disk, but with HDD easily being multiple TB, I'm not going to worry. I'll let that guy who still uses a cluttered 50gb HDD worry about that himself.

Now I just need to figure out the LZMA2 thing, I've been using 1 because it was the default, but apparently 2 is a bit better, and faster to compress as it can use all 4 cores and not just 2.