Does anyone know the Fallout 3 status on this?


Evhmovover: the bsa's won't load if you have more than like 150 characters combined in the names
FO3Phalanx: wha
Evhmovover: they used to, did they fix that?
FO3Phalanx: so all .bsa names have to have their total number of characters be less than 150 total characters, all added up?
Evhmovover: supposed to
Evhmovover: unless they fixed it
FO3Phalanx: .....thats horrible? I'll ask in the geck forum

I have now heard this:

This mess is confusing, I hope someone who knows posts in here soon. I keep hearing different stuff.

Can't you just create a simple BSA that has a file name that is 151 characters long and try to use resources from it?

I wanted to get a sense of what the background is, etc. I guess one could try making an obscenely long .bsa/esp name and see what happens.

Yeah it seems like an issue that is easy to overcome through name simplification.

Miaxs_Awesome_Mod_OMG_You_Have_To_Play_It_NOW.esp would not be a good example.

it seems to me that a file-name limit of 150 for a BSA name wouldn't be an issue - or are they really talking about a limit on the pathnames for files inside the BSA?

The issue is that there's a 255 character limit on entries in the ini files, such as Fallout3.ini (I think it's fairly common to allow 255 bytes for strings such as this). For BSAs, the entry in question is SArchiveList in the [Archive] section of Fallout3.ini. Details on dealing with this are explained in issue #1 in http://www.fookunity.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1155.

EDIT:
I guess I should also note that you don't need to have all BSA files listed under SArchiveList in Fallout3.ini, so this is unlikely to be an issue for most people. If the BSA filename begins with the name of an ESM/ESP file it will load automatically, so there's no need to add it to the ini (or select it in BSA Manager). If I recall, the "Fallout - ..." BSAs are an exception to this, due to hardcoding in the exe and/or other settings in the ini files.

So unless you have BSA files that aren't associated with an ESM/ESP data file, it's likely the only BSA files you need listed in the ini are the Fallout ones, and assuming you're using mods that use new assets, the AII! BSA file, which should be first in the list.

The other reason you might need to explicitly include a BSA file in that list is if it contains assets that replace vanilla (or another BSA's) assets. The BSAs that load first take priority (opposite to data file load order, where those that load last take priority), so in this case, you'd want to place the BSAs with any replacing assets toward the beginning of the list.

Fallout3.exe v1.1+ will auto-load .bsa's provided their names match a loaded plugin(s) such that if ModX.ESM/.esp is loaded, ModX.bsa will also be, so Evhmovover might be using FakePatch or maybe just hasn't updated to 1.7? The only reason ArchiveInvalidationInvalidated!.bsa (I renamed mine AII.bsa to shave the character count down) must be added to sArchiveList is because there is no corresponding plugin.