Well Skyrim's all preloaded so now I get to dig around in the files and see what's there. Since the file structure seemed similar to Oblivion's I thought I'd go ahead and do some comparisons in regards to filesize. This is just raw data and doesn't take things like compression into account. Not all files are included, just the ones I thought were relevant enough for comparison.

Meshes.bsa
-Oblivion: 675,355 KB
-Skyrim: 1,485,254 KB

Textures.bsa
-Oblivion: 1,189,309 KB
-Skyrim: 1,356,315 KB

Sounds.bsa
-Oblivion: 322,689 KB
-Skyrim: 931,432 KB

Voices.bsa (2 files each)
-Oblivion: 768,920 + 981,453 = 1,750,373 KB
-Skyrim: 1,424,320 + 12,712 = 1,437,032 KB

ESM
-Oblivion: 271,001 KB
-Skyrim: 243,527 KB

I thought it was interesting that Skyrim's meshes take up significantly more space than Oblivion's. Voices are obviously lower due to compression. Probably similar to comparing wavs to mp3s but that's just speculation.

While you're at it:
-Can you open the bsa with the BSA-Browser from FOMM / OBMM?
-Can you open the Nifs with Nifskope?

Does this mean more polygons? I certainly hope so.

I was so waiting for someone to say "My file sizes are bigger than your file sizes". lol

On topic: Is that the measurements of the files before the game is actually playable? I'd like to see this again after the game unlocks.

Likely both: more polygons and more models.

People have tried to open BSAs and it doesn't work, yet. We won't know until after decryption, at least for the preloads. Even the ini files are unreadable.

Better texture compression too.

Better compression all round.

Does anybody know how big files Xbox has? That would be the best comparison.

All the files are still encrypted, you can't open anything. I also tried the several ini files, the BSA archives, the ESM files. Fun fact: Skyrim.esm is about 30 MB smaller than Oblivion.esm. Probably due to the smaller sized worldspace, and also probably because of compression.

Kind of knocks the supports out of the conjecture that this game is lacking in content and graphics over Oblivion. Well, the graphics concern anyway. We all knew the content is there.

There's a whole lot more audio compared to Oblivion.


Textures looks about the same.

MESH - I assume is art content/3D models? Looks like more than double Oblivion's.


But then, they may just have multiple versions of the same assets, just at different resolutions for different hardware setups.

Not sure you can do that, I think the BSAs are still encrypted due to how steam releases work.

EDIT
Aaaaand, ninja'd >_>

Surely it's not how big it is, it's what you do with it?

that's what she said

I'm going to get crucified for saying this, but the texture comparison hurts. But I guess it couldn't have been any other way. Yes, texture quality matters to me. I hate to be one of those people who greedily demand mods, but I can't wait for the first good texture overhaul.

Thanks for this, I've been trying to wade through 20+ pages of the steam predownload threads to see if anyone took the time to the file sizes. 60+ voice actors into a smaller voice file then Oblivion? Pretty impressive, hope there's no loss of quality in whatever compression they used.

Compression good sir. It's lossless compression. The textures even on the 360 footage of Skyrim look considerably better than Oblivion.

I'll add the .esm stuff to the OP. There could be any number of reasons why it's smaller but I don't think it's due to a smaller landmass. If there's one file type they have absolute control over it's the .esm. It's only natural that they would find a way to compress it better.

uh its called compression. They have greatly improved their methods. These numbers represent literally nothing since we dont know how they did it, but for every value that is greater than OBs, whoa buddy. Improvement.

I'm a team leader of MERP so from experience I have a fairly good idea about what kind of data takes the most space, and all the data together forming landmass takes the lion's share of the space in esm's. I don't think it's because of compression that it's smaller.

Those are three very welcome letters. Means we may be able to unpack them shortly after release. I was hoping they would be similar to Oblivion's.


I think that's with Shivering Isles. The vanilla ESM is 235MB if I remember correctly (I'm at work. )

It should also be noted that the 360 version of the Skyrim .esm is much larger, well over 300 meg. I can only guess this is some sort of optimization so the 360 can run it better. Maybe the PC's better at compression or something.

.......meh?

Your avatar... What is it? And what the hell is it doing?

He has to lose 20 more pounds or he'll never be pretty!