Biffing the override folder

[Fyorl]

After installing a bunch of mods I started having some noticeable performance issues. The actual game runs fine (unless I turn on party AI) but the new game and load game screens take much longer than before. Saving's only a teeny bit longer but there are lots of temporary freezes for a few seconds when moving and equipping stuff in the inventory as well as selecting characters, spells and other actions.

 

I'm hoping that biffing my override folder will magically solve all of these things but I don't really know what's involved in it. If anyone could give me a few pointers it'd be appreciated. For starters, apparently NearInfinity can biff things for you but I can't seem to locate the feature, I should be able to use WeiDU though I would imagine. Also, are there any size guidelines to the size of the biffs or can I just dump the entire override folder into one biff and stick it in the data directory? Finally, do I need to mess around with chitin.key at all?

[the bigg]

If you're on Linux, I'm unsure that biffing helps really - I got sub optimal gameplay even with biffed WAV files. Which file system are you using (FAT32, NTFS, EXT3,...)?

 

Somebody will come soon with a Windows procedure, I'll translate that to Linux if you need.

[Fyorl]

Ah dammit. Yeah, I am using Linux, is there no other solution? I'm pretty sure I'm using EXT3.

 

Edit:

I can't see where else the problem would lie. Would it be possible to replace the core game files within the original biffs with the override files? I know mods add their own files too but I would think that a lot of the stuff is just patched game files.

 

Unless the problem is just coming from the extra AI stuff it's needing to do. Any complex AI scripts do tend to kill the game. I generally leave party AI off until a battle at which point I'll put it on and things seem to slow down enough (in terms of script iterations) that they will work smoothly until the battle ends.

[the bigg]

Yes, from what I recall a large override can cause reduced performance on EXT3 (total file size matters, file count does not). IIRC, ntfs-3g had the best performance of all of EXT3, FAT32, NTFS on large override.

 

Can you give file count and total size for your override folder, as well as total RAM space? Also, somebody should come with a biffing procedure sooner or later.

[Fyorl]

Well when I get my new external hard-drive, it will probably be NTFS formatted so is it worth formatting it to ntfs-3g and running bg2 off that?

 

My override is only 202MB (10858 files!) which doesn't seem like much to me but then again the clean override I have is only 31MB (771 files). I've got 512MB of RAM.

 

As for the biffing procedure, I've been all around the various modding forums but people only seem to mention that you can do it but not exactly how >_<

[the bigg]

External hard-drives are much slower (USB has a much smaller throughput than IDE or SATA), so it won't work. IIRC, a 202MB override was acceptable on my laptop, which had 512MB of RAM.

 

The basics of making a biff is as follows (change stuff in bold according to need):

 

# backup chitin.key. Run only before any and all biffing.
cp chitin.key chitin.key~
chmod -w chitin.key~

# make a biff from some files. repeat as needed, with different folders each time;)
# according to common claims, biffs should be <= 70 Mb in size, but there's no hard data to justify this rule.
# we assume that fj#bif1 is your biffing folder, so you can then use fj#bif2, etc.
# to allow a small degree of uninstalling mods, biff only .wav and .tis files.
mkdir fj#bif1
mv override/<files> fj#bif1
WeiDU --make-biff fj#bif1
# do the latter only if you want to trade backup ability for disk space
# rm -r fj#bif1

# undo all your biffing, if you didn't remove the directory before.
rm chitin.key
chmod u+w chitin.key~
mv chitin.key~ chitin.key
# repeat the following for all your biffed files.
rm data/fj#bif1.bif
mv fj#bif1/* override
rm -r fj#bif1

[Fyorl]

Hmm, how were you playing BG2? With Cedega or Wine? Cedega should be optimised for games but I have heard that Wine is better with IE games.

 

OK, thanks for that, I assume that the WeiDU --make-biff option automatically adds to the chitin.key file then?

 

Edit:

I've been looking through my override folder and I'm seeing a lot of .ogg files. I'm pretty sure it would be a bad idea to biff them and the engine should ignore them in the override folder? Should I remove them or will it make no difference?

[the bigg]

Wine. And yes, biffing involves your chitin.key, otherwise your files will not be used by the game (and besides, due to the internal format, a .bif without the .key doesn't even contain the file names).

[Fyorl]

That could be my problem then, perhaps I'll try running it with Wine. Although I'm not sure it will work from a Cedega install...

 

Edit:

No, it doesn't run from the Cedega install. Ugh.

 

Thanks for all your help anyway ^_^

 

Edit II:

Success! 3 biffs later and it's reverted back to the performance I'm used too. Many thanks once again.