Newbie Question Thread

[Masquerade]

For WAV audio, use MSC with Tak plugin. You can rebuild the BSA archives using BSAOpt.
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/247/

Please note if you recode the wavs to mp3 with lame, the game might not recognise them anymore.

[Ra7eN]

Originally Posted by Masquerade

For WAV audio, use MSC with Tak plugin. You can rebuild the BSA archives using BSAOpt.
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/247/

Please note if you recode the wavs to mp3 with lame, the game might not recognise them anymore.

Hi, thanks for the fast reply!
I have BSAOPT I'll have to take another look at it. I used to do this with other games that use wav and use lame to crush them down. so far no issues, except one game. I had a wav compressor at one time, however, my main issue was getting the files BACK INTO the bsa file LOL

Currently I did the usual precomp+srep basic and got 27GB skyrim to 11GB, but I am sure if I can at least get the wav files down to size, I should be able to get it under 10GB.

[murphy78]

Hi, I've been very curious about repacking games. I'm not interested in spreading my own repacks or anything like that. I am just obsessive about archiving the latest versions of my games when I download them and I want to take up very little space.

I've played with a couple tools like xtool and diskspan_GUI and they work a bit but I don't really grasp everything very well. I would like to know if it is generally a good idea to reflate, srep, and then compress the files. Could someone help me with some advice and maybe a small basic packer and unpacker script? I saw another person's example but it only had the arc/lolz combination. I admit I don't really know much about lolz. I've read a comment from someone saying that the tool was old and that people mostly stopped using it.

Thanks for any help people could give in advance.

[Masquerade]

Lolz is still in use, it's still the best compressor for game data. But, it's still old. Most tools that we use are ancient.

About inflate + srep + compress - this correct. Inflation, or precompression is the step where the compression already on the game is reversed (decompressed) so that you can apply a stronger algorithm (srep+lolz/lzma). You need to use the correct codec for the game since not every game uses the same compression algorithm. When you decompress your archive, those resources are recompressed identically.

[murphy78]

Does anyone have a compilation of commandline and ini file structure for xtool.exe, freearc 0.67's arc.exe ?

I looked around to the best of my ability but I'm having a hard time locating information. I can't find any command line information on xtool and what little information I can find on freearc doesn't seem to apply to the way people are using it with the ini files and the -m single argument passing method.

I have checked the chm file that comes with xtool and it seems to only discuss precomp. There are a lot more features that the exe uses and I imagine that there's gotta be more information somewhere.

I'm sorry if this all seems trivial to everyone. It's hard to write myself a script when I don't really have any example or documentation to go on.

Thanks again in advance.