Are you supposed to BIFF in BG:T?

[Arthas]

You are asked while installing BG:T

[Jarno Mikkola]

BG:T ? What the hell is that ?

In BGT-weidu, you are not asked... but it's done by default.

A BWP/S feature removes this biffing from BGT and a lot of other mods and it's done by the Generalized Biffing, this is to address a few things, the old style biffing was not able to be uninstalled in a chain of uninstall of several mods, and to spare space of several biffings of the same resources... as several mods edit the same files, and when biffing, it's packaged in to archive style file... which if there are many just the last one is used.

Edited September 4, 2019 by Jarno Mikkola

[Arthas]

Nope in Baldur's gate trilogy I currently have I'm asked to install biff or not.

[Vlan]

Is biffing even important if you have a SSD and a CPU with a good clock frequency?

[Jarno Mikkola]

23 minutes ago, Vlan said:

Is biffing even important if you have a SSD and a CPU with a good clock frequency?

In the old engine: YES

In the new engine: No

Does SSD or CPU speed help. Maybe a little... But not really. The data read+write speed is a logarithmic scale process. So the game takes 1.5GB's in vanilla, you add in the 3 GB's the BG1 takes, and you have 3 times space, and you need 1000 times faster processor for the exact same speed.

Besides, the game runs on a one CPU, not multiple, so your CPU speed, the single core is not so much of help anyways.

50 minutes ago, Arthas said:

Nope, in BGT-weidu, I currently have installed, I'm asked to install biff ? Or not?

Punctuation, I am not a mind reader ! The edit in the above is my best guess, on what you meant.

Answer: You are not asked, it's done by default ! At least on a regular PC install...

Edited September 4, 2019 by Jarno Mikkola

[Arthas]

Whatever...  I already told you that BG:T asks you if you wish to biff or not, and actively hints to not install BIFF if you are going to install a megamod.

[Jarno Mikkola]

Ahh... I got your meaning off by a MILE, as you hadn't bothered to used punctuation before the last post and you neither told what you were doing, either ... which I am now assuming is some form of a megamod/multi mod install on the old BG2 engine game. Now you should biff the media files in that context, which includes animation files, added maps, music, sounds and so forth. Now, as the latest BGT-weidu allows you to install a separate component that does this kind of biffing, which is intended to be installed on a regular BGT-weidu install, the answer to your question comes from facts such as, do you think you install other mods that add those and if so, would they severely hit the performance ... and if that is the case, you should just install those first and not do the BGT-weidu's biffing, and then install the Generalized Biffing.

So, it's not just:

2 hours ago, Arthas said:

Whatever...

Edited September 4, 2019 by Jarno Mikkola

[Arthas]

k. So the biff integrated inside the BG:T is the same biffing that is done by the utility? Was wondering if maybe things had been improved and maybe BG:T had a old version of biffing.

[Jarno Mikkola]

Well, if you consider things... they have been improved. A few frames of reference:

1. BGT was an actual overwriter mod(or so called full conversion mod), made by Bardez. The download size was in 500+ MBs.

2. BGT-weidu came out long in the past and switched from overwriter mod to a patching of old and new resources from the BG1 game to make the complete game, without too much of overwriting, just converting. The Download size was something like 15 MBs originally, it more than doubled later, but that's nothing in the size comparison. This was lead by Ascension64.

3. Then the Generalized Biffing came out and made it possible to biff things so they won't fail at uninstall without .bat uninstallers, and this was due to advancing weidu functionality... as the Generalized Biffing was direct result of that the times author of weidu programmer: The bigg. 

4. There is no such thing as BG:T.

5. And now there's the EET, and soon the IWD-in-EET, a project that was originally again a 500+ MBs, but is that no longer. It's about half that... but the original resources from the BG1EE are there no longer...

Yes, the above is all to do with biffing, or kind of, as you can copy the games .bif files and do with them as one likes, with Bardez utilized. ...

Edited September 5, 2019 by Jarno Mikkola

[n-ghost]

@Arthas

Don't biff things until you are done with your mods. If you are playing BGT, install all the mods you need to, then start a new game at chateau Irenicus. If game runs very slowly, then yes, you need biffing. If not, you can probably do fine without it, although you might want to check it out inside larger areas as well.

 

Use Generalized Biffing instead of the one built into BGT. You can install and uninstall some things after biffing as well (i.e., BGT-music).

[Arthas]

okay thanks a lot.

[Jarno Mikkola]

2 hours ago, n-ghost said:

You can install and uninstall some things after biffing as well (i.e., BGT-music).

Thing to note about the BGT-music, is that it doesn't effect the sound files, so to speak. But just how the engine uses the ones it already has... aka you patch a tiny table, not a large sound files.

The not quote part is advice about saving space on your hard drive... and perhaps a tiny portion of speed enhancement due to the saved space.... but you might as well biff everything, and multiple times too, the effective speed increase is definitely worth, if you compare it to NOT biffing anything.

[Vlan]

Is it possible to biff an already biffed BGT install? My override folder has gotten pretty big over the years, and it's probably time to biff again.

[Jarno Mikkola]

Possible ? Yes. Does it waste space a bit, yes. Is it worth it, most likely.

[Vlan]

On 9/6/2019 at 10:19 PM, Jarno Mikkola said:

Possible ? Yes. Does it waste space a bit, yes. Is it worth it, most likely.

If I want to biff again without reinstalling "Generalized Biffing" (because that is not possible anymore), would I have to move every file from the folders here:

"D:\games\Baldur's Gate Trilogy\generalized_biffing1\prod\0\biffs"

to the override folder, and delete the "tb#genx.bif" files in

"D:\games\Baldur's Gate Trilogy\data"

?

I tried reinstalling it by renaming my old generalized_biffing with all the old files in it to generalized_biffing1 with all the old files it, renamed the setup and started it. End result was that things in the game were going corrupt or missing (changes that I personally made were reverted).