Check main description under "CPTA DLL Configuration". Then check under "Batch Script Example" for an actual example of how batch (.BAT) file could look like. ASCP_INPUT is an environment variable that needs to be set before starting Archive.exe. Typically this is done using batch file script, and never starting by double clicking on the exe. Also in batch you will want to set the other two env vars, ASCP_OUTPUT_BSA and ASCP_CONF properly. Hope that helps you.
This looks very promising, thank you. Just one question: is there a way to make the archive.exe create multiple BSA archives according to the 2.5 limit? Like once the first archive reaches the limit, it creates a second one and third etc?
Hi. I think best way to do this would be to use utils outside TESArchive+CPTA-Dll. For example, code shell scripts that split input directories into 2.5G parts and then call TESArchive multiple times, consecutively, each time with different input dir plus BSA name pairs.
TESArchive has problems with creating BSA, closing it, then creating another. It crashes sometimes. So implementing this kind of automation into CPTA-Dll is something I would rather not do,
What I think would be possible to do, is to make it to take, as input, a list of files. A second mode, as an alternative to the single input dir mode. Either way, it will be required to create scripts or use utils outside of TESArchive+CPTA-Dll. I'm thinking shell scripts like Python or Perl (because I would rather not be doing this in poor old Windows Batch).
Let me know if this makes sense and jf you or anybody are interested in using it the new way.
EDIT: New mode has been added: text file input with list of file paths. Check version 1.2.
Thanks for your work! I'm going to give this a shot.
Quick question i hope isn't a dumb question: I've been building BSAs for myself from self made texture packs and such for my own game. I did this as like a baseline "these are the textures i need for any playthrough".
In my experience, to build a successful BSA i needed to copy all my textures for the desired bsa to the data directory and then use archive.exe to locate that data directory to then build the bsa.
Perhaps this is due to mo2 or something, but is this normal? Or can i just create a data folder to put the textures inside of that is located on a another drive and still create a successful bsa?
In my experience both archive.exe and the CK gave errors if i didn't use the actual games data folder?
i created a folder on my desktop and named it data. I simply put the files i want in the bsa in that folder and run the archive.exe and name it according to the esp that accesses the files. works every time.
Hi. Typically, path to meshes and textures, that needs to be put into BSA, should end with the folder actually named "Data". Otherwise TESArchive may create strange directory structure withing final BSA. Before using this CPTA DLL, first, use TESArchive the normal way, add your "Data" directory and check if structure it shows in its list is as you expect.
Generally, there are a few things that need to be remembered as a good practice when building BSAs: * Make sure you have considerable free space on drive C * There is a limit on BSA files size, it looks like they cannot be larger than 2GiB. Limit itself, on the size of disk files, before BSA compression has been used. * Make sure paths doesn't contain any special characters. Spaces seems to be OK, but Unicode characters from other languages than English, not.
I'll do some further testing soon as I need to update my bsa project with a few more new textures, but i think when I created this before, I triedto simply have a data folder the textures and meshes were inside of and it created a bsa, but didn't show in game.
However, these textures I'm building the bsa from are large in size altogether. I spent a lot of time categorizing them into folder structures that kept them under the limit. My research and testing have shown that 2.5gb is the limit, and that i can use a "- textures" bsa to load extra textures per ESL flagged esp. These are all working correctly now. However, i couldn't seem to get it to work simply with each pack having a data folder at its base. Instead, i was forced to copy and paste each set of assets to the real data folder before launching archive.exe to get the bsa to work in game.
Of course this could be my own error so I'll test further soon. Regardless your tool should work and ill be happy to use it, thanks for your work!
13 comments
Where can I get it or what am I doing wrong?
I think best way to do this would be to use utils outside TESArchive+CPTA-Dll. For example, code shell scripts that split input directories into 2.5G parts and then call TESArchive multiple times, consecutively, each time with different input dir plus BSA name pairs.
TESArchive has problems with creating BSA, closing it, then creating another. It crashes sometimes. So implementing this kind of automation into CPTA-Dll is something I would rather not do,
What I think would be possible to do, is to make it to take, as input, a list of files. A second mode, as an alternative to the single input dir mode. Either way, it will be required to create scripts or use utils outside of TESArchive+CPTA-Dll. I'm thinking shell scripts like Python or Perl (because I would rather not be doing this in poor old Windows Batch).
Let me know if this makes sense and jf you or anybody are interested in using it the new way.
EDIT:
New mode has been added: text file input with list of file paths. Check version 1.2.
Quick question i hope isn't a dumb question: I've been building BSAs for myself from self made texture packs and such for my own game. I did this as like a baseline "these are the textures i need for any playthrough".
In my experience, to build a successful BSA i needed to copy all my textures for the desired bsa to the data directory and then use archive.exe to locate that data directory to then build the bsa.
Perhaps this is due to mo2 or something, but is this normal? Or can i just create a data folder to put the textures inside of that is located on a another drive and still create a successful bsa?
In my experience both archive.exe and the CK gave errors if i didn't use the actual games data folder?
Typically, path to meshes and textures, that needs to be put into BSA, should end with the folder actually named "Data". Otherwise TESArchive may create strange directory structure withing final BSA. Before using this CPTA DLL, first, use TESArchive the normal way, add your "Data" directory and check if structure it shows in its list is as you expect.
Generally, there are a few things that need to be remembered as a good practice when building BSAs:
* Make sure you have considerable free space on drive C
* There is a limit on BSA files size, it looks like they cannot be larger than 2GiB. Limit itself, on the size of disk files, before BSA compression has been used.
* Make sure paths doesn't contain any special characters. Spaces seems to be OK, but Unicode characters from other languages than English, not.
I hope that helps.
However, these textures I'm building the bsa from are large in size altogether. I spent a lot of time categorizing them into folder structures that kept them under the limit. My research and testing have shown that 2.5gb is the limit, and that i can use a "- textures" bsa to load extra textures per ESL flagged esp. These are all working correctly now. However, i couldn't seem to get it to work simply with each pack having a data folder at its base. Instead, i was forced to copy and paste each set of assets to the real data folder before launching archive.exe to get the bsa to work in game.
Of course this could be my own error so I'll test further soon. Regardless your tool should work and ill be happy to use it, thanks for your work!