Love this, but might I suggest you add in links to which of your mods are supported on the Description page? Since you have a bunch of mods released after this pack and it'd be easier to click the links to the supported mods than trying to figure out which ones are or are not supported! Admittedly I do not know how easily Nexus would allow that!
That said, love your work keep up the good work, currently using Grathok, Super Mutant Colony and the Institute Courser ones and they're great!
"You do not need to have each of my mods for this to function properly. The assets from the mods you don't have will be there, but they will not be used by anything."
does this mean that i 'could' paint ANY bot with some of the mod paints even though i don't have the Companion mod installed.?? i get a little over whelmed with companions and tend to crash my games because of having 6-7 companions running around with me. so with bots i love the paints but have TOO Many people with me.
No. The companion mod is what contains the records for the paint as well as the companion. BA2 archives are literally just .ba2 files which do not interact (as far as the user is concerned) with the game in any way. They contain .dds textures, .nif meshes, and all that stuff. Game logic is contained within esp/esl files.
"but they will not be used by anything." means that they will not be used by anything. You need an esp/esl to use assets ingame. This mod is purely for the purposes of BA2 limit for people who have a bunch of my mods installed.
Do note that just having the companions installed will not start crashing your game. At least not my companions. That's gonna be an issue with the multiple companion mod. You also do not have to have them as active companions to use the paint once you recruit them or whatever. You can straight up shoot them or stash them at a settlement.
roger roger, and since you offer esl versions i think i can plug a bunch of them into my settlements. thanks for the reply and adding some more character to the game.
one of my joys is making Starlight as a specialty theme settlement. first time it was a Power Armor Hoarders Haven. This time it's to be filled with Companion Mods, and YOU will get front row seats me thinks
So, is this like LarannKiars companion all in one, where in you install the mods you want, then this, then delete the other mods .BA2s leaving only the ones from this? read below, new question, does this include your newer mods like the Mutant 3 pack and Gary(GARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRY!) as a companion as well?
It would be impossible for it to do so, since I haven't updated it yet . It includes only the ones before its release for now. (Uploading stuff to nexus is already a nightmare, so updating a separate mod every time I make a mod at the rate I'm dishing them out would be a headache) Eventually I'll get to it - but I'm waiting for some time to pass to ensure the newer ones are bug free.
Mighty nice and thoughtful of you buddy, thank you very much for doing it. I wish some of the other authors would do the same as they sadly seem to think we have infinite amount of plugin (and BA2) slots to use.
Also good-to-know [per Morg's discussion w/ elijahkennedy1995 below] that un-packing the .ba2s from Morg's companion mods work fine. I've done a lot of that to save .ba2 room, so load screen performance has taken a bit of a hit (from accumulated dumping of many small mods' .ba2s, not fr. any of Morg's mods, per se)... I'll have to test to see if there's any observable difference between using this AIO .ba2 vs. the loose files.
love your mods dude, lol. i personally always unpack your mods, due to the small file size. have had no trouble at all :) I'm sure this is super helpful though! Thanks for being so cool to the community
You're welcome. Side note: There should be no issues unpacking the files; that's pretty much how I keep them during my playtests and during development.
I forgot to mention that the extracted files take priority over archives. So if I update a mod, or if you use this "behemoth", your extracted files will take priority :P (they're called loose files, btw). Generally you'll run into performance issues only when there are a lot of them*.
A potential alternative for your approach, (especially for larger mods) is using a tool that merges the ba2 archives. Vilance's BA2 Merge Kit works well for that. Easy to use (essentially just putting the archives into a folder, clicking two executables, and then renaming and moving the newly created archives), and it preserves the benefits of using ba2 archives**.
* Under most circumstances, a ba2 is going to have better performance, though, due to the way the game handles them and loads them into memory (it's essentially made to work with them in mind since all of the game files are by default in huge archives). But yeah, when you unpack small mods, you'll probably not notice an issue. (Maybe a little bit of time added to loading screens, but again, it depends on how many loose files there are)
** Even a massive archive shouldn't have any issues. For example, the Ultra High-Resolution DLC is separated into 16 files encompassing a total of 58.3 GB
Lol, yeah, that one was a bit of a gag, to be honest Cause I was like "I can make the model in Blender in under 5 minutes, the texture is already done cause I used to play Minecraft, and the rest will take under an hour." And I was curious how out of place it would look like lol.
Unexpected but well appreciated. Does it mean if I just don't wanna use one of those companions (the minecraft one ain't my cup of tea, others are just great), I just have to avoid installing and enabling the corresponding .esp? Or is this done with a FoMod installer?
This mod is essentially just the ba2 archives put together, so the Minecraft one won't appear in your game if you don't have it installed. All of the mods are still installed through their respective pages / mod files (esp/esl), but you can delete the ba2 archives that come with them, as those files are contained within this mod. The installation of the mods remains the same, you can just manually delete the ba2 archives from them in /data folder.
To further explain why it is so:
NPCs, mod logic, quests, etc. and other mod-related things are within the .esp / .esl. Ba2 archives contain voice files, textures, meshes, and so on. You could essentially put anything withing those archives, and it won't appear ingame as long as it isn't used by an esp/esl.
This mod exists because there is a limit on how many ba2 files you can have active, sort of how it is with esp files. Most of my mods come with an esp/esl + 2 ba2 archives (titled Main, and Textures). That's the way it works if you don't use loose files, which are hell to organize. Let's say I have 40 mods, and let's say that's 60 ba2 archives. You can only have around 255 (2^8-1) loaded, after that the game can start crashing just from the number of ba2s. Even though this mod contains all of the assets from those, that's just size of the archives, but the actual number of them is 2 instead of 60.
In reality this mod is just an empty esp/esl and 2 full archives. That empty esp/esl will, however, cause all the assets to be loaded from those two archives, which means that the other mods will be able to access them. The way loading esp/esls and ba2s works is that the ba2 is named after the esp/esl + " - Main" or " - Textures", the game is then able to access the files as if they were within the /data folder rather than within the ba2 file.
Thanks to this approach, you also avoid any dependencies, which means the archive literally doesn't care if you have anything else installed, as it will just put those files in your game for other mods to use, but it will not do anything with them.
Many thanks for your exhaustive reply (I didn't say exhausting!). This was simply explained and understandable for that tiny brain of mine. I salute you gratefully, sir.
25 comments
That said, love your work keep up the good work, currently using Grathok, Super Mutant Colony and the Institute Courser ones and they're great!
The assets from the mods you don't have will be there, but they will not be used by anything."
does this mean that i 'could' paint ANY bot with some of the mod paints even though i don't have the Companion mod installed.??
i get a little over whelmed with companions and tend to crash my games because of having 6-7 companions running around with me. so with bots i love the paints but have TOO Many people with me.
"but they will not be used by anything." means that they will not be used by anything. You need an esp/esl to use assets ingame. This mod is purely for the purposes of BA2 limit for people who have a bunch of my mods installed.
Do note that just having the companions installed will not start crashing your game. At least not my companions. That's gonna be an issue with the multiple companion mod. You also do not have to have them as active companions to use the paint once you recruit them or whatever. You can straight up shoot them or stash them at a settlement.
thanks for the reply and adding some more character to the game.
one of my joys is making Starlight as a specialty theme settlement. first time it was a Power Armor Hoarders Haven. This time it's to be filled with Companion Mods, and YOU will get front row seats me thinks
So, is this like LarannKiars companion all in one, where in you install the mods you want, then this, then delete the other mods .BA2s leaving only the ones from this?read below, new question, does this include your newer mods like the Mutant 3 pack and Gary(GARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRY!) as a companion as well?Thank you again, respect.
Also good-to-know [per Morg's discussion w/ elijahkennedy1995 below] that un-packing the .ba2s from Morg's companion mods work fine.
I've done a lot of that to save .ba2 room, so load screen performance has taken a bit of a hit (from accumulated dumping of many small mods' .ba2s, not fr. any of Morg's mods, per se)... I'll have to test to see if there's any observable difference between using this AIO .ba2 vs. the loose files.
A potential alternative for your approach, (especially for larger mods) is using a tool that merges the ba2 archives. Vilance's BA2 Merge Kit works well for that. Easy to use (essentially just putting the archives into a folder, clicking two executables, and then renaming and moving the newly created archives), and it preserves the benefits of using ba2 archives**.
* Under most circumstances, a ba2 is going to have better performance, though, due to the way the game handles them and loads them into memory (it's essentially made to work with them in mind since all of the game files are by default in huge archives). But yeah, when you unpack small mods, you'll probably not notice an issue. (Maybe a little bit of time added to loading screens, but again, it depends on how many loose files there are)
** Even a massive archive shouldn't have any issues. For example, the Ultra High-Resolution DLC is separated into 16 files encompassing a total of 58.3 GB
Does it mean if I just don't wanna use one of those companions (the minecraft one ain't my cup of tea, others are just great), I just have to avoid installing and enabling the corresponding .esp? Or is this done with a FoMod installer?
To further explain why it is so:
NPCs, mod logic, quests, etc. and other mod-related things are within the .esp / .esl. Ba2 archives contain voice files, textures, meshes, and so on. You could essentially put anything withing those archives, and it won't appear ingame as long as it isn't used by an esp/esl.
This mod exists because there is a limit on how many ba2 files you can have active, sort of how it is with esp files.
Most of my mods come with an esp/esl + 2 ba2 archives (titled Main, and Textures). That's the way it works if you don't use loose files, which are hell to organize. Let's say I have 40 mods, and let's say that's 60 ba2 archives. You can only have around 255 (2^8-1) loaded, after that the game can start crashing just from the number of ba2s. Even though this mod contains all of the assets from those, that's just size of the archives, but the actual number of them is 2 instead of 60.
In reality this mod is just an empty esp/esl and 2 full archives. That empty esp/esl will, however, cause all the assets to be loaded from those two archives, which means that the other mods will be able to access them. The way loading esp/esls and ba2s works is that the ba2 is named after the esp/esl + " - Main" or " - Textures", the game is then able to access the files as if they were within the /data folder rather than within the ba2 file.
Thanks to this approach, you also avoid any dependencies, which means the archive literally doesn't care if you have anything else installed, as it will just put those files in your game for other mods to use, but it will not do anything with them.
I salute you gratefully, sir.