Skyrim Mod talk:Archive File Format

I'm not convinced that the TES5 and TES4 BSA file formats are "nearly identical". I have a small program that un-archives BSA files and it seems to run just fine against the Oblivion data. When I run it against the Skyrim textures file, it loads all the meta data up correctly, but none of the textures contain zlib compressed data. The data in the Skyrim BSAs seems to be quite different. I have a consistency check for the metadata where I check that the last data item in the BSA does actually finish at the end of the file, so the metadata does seem to be nearly identical (if not identical) to the Oblivion metadata.

When I look at my extracted Skyrim DDS files (after turning off zlib support because the compressed data isn't), I can see that each file seems to start with a bstring containing the complete name of the file that I have just written out.

MadLloyd 05:24, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

The format of the BSA files is pretty much identical, but this says nothing about the format of the contents. rpeh •T•C•E• 08:13, 10 December 2011 (UTC)