Hi,
I like my PC nice and tidy^^ so usually games are installed in D:\Games every one with its own folder.
It's easy to get where you need to and saves you a lot of time navigating while installing/testing/... mods

Steam kinda destroyed my evil master plan. Even if you remembered to install steam to D:\Games\Steam (And not C:\Program Files(x86)) you still need to navigate to D:\Games\Steam\steamapps\common\skyrim *uaaaaaaa* ^^
(BTW this should also be helpful for people who mybe want to install some steam games on their SSD and some not)

So what did I do?

I use a nifty small feature of Windows Vista or newer (or UNIX/LINUX for an eternity but there is no steam there ) called "symbolic link" (there is something similar for XP but it has many limitations)

What it does is it basically creates a directory that points anywhere on your computer, but contrary to a normal link it behaves exactly like a normal directory towards programs.

Now we can use this for two things.

• Shorten our way to folders that lie deep within the file structure (this is what I am going to do)
  
• Fool programs to save their data somewhere else (even if they don't want to) e.g. move some steam games out of their original install location (space speed whatever)

Now after much blabla how do you do this:

• Open your start menu and start typing: cmd
  
• in your list of programs cmd or cmd.exe should appear, right click it ant select run as administrator
  
• Congratulations now you got one of those ugly command lines normal users avoid like the plague
  
• (Paths are examples only you have to adjust them for your needs) Type: mklink /d "C:\Games\MyGreatSkyrimShortcut" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\skyrim"
  
• Hit enter... aaand you are done. Now you have 2 folders on your drive pointing to the exact same stuff.

As I said before you can also use this to for example move your Skyrim from C:\... to D:\...
Simply move your skyrim folder to its new location and create a link from steamapps\common\skyrim to for example D:\SkyrimOnMuchLargerDisk

Yeah, symlinks are tops. Had Skyrim symlinked into my Games folder for a while now. Glad to see it get a little more publicity!

Is that really all that different from creating a shortcut, or setting a favorites? That's all I did. Though I'm sure it's useful for some people.

Oh yes. With a symlink, apps treat it as a real folder. You can physically move Skyrim into games and symlink it into Steam and Steam will treat it as though it's still where it's "supposed" to be. You could even migrate it to a much faster drive (SSD, for example) and Steam still won't know the difference... and Steam will still be able to update it and such as normal.

http://gsm.duncsweb.com/has a Steam Spreader function built right in.

Since I only have one 30GB SSD for my OS + ONE game, I keep Steam installed on a separate set of drives, then symlink Skyrim to my SSD, then symlink AGAIN my BSAs back to the drives (as a SSD wouldn't really help them much anyway).

My computer is full of a ton of symlinks I made personally.

I thought about linking skyrim to my 128GB SSD but somehow I have an aversion to putting games on there ^^
And with 16GB of RAM; after I started the game once everything is cached in RAM anyway (starting Skyrim 1st time a day 30 sec loading aftert that 2-6 )

You should consider setting up a RAM Drive.

I just installed Steam as a whole into my C:\Games folder. Its been that way for five years now. lol

I did, but my usage profile chages often. One time I need RAM for games on others I need insane Amounts for Photoshop and similar stuff. So reserving a large chunk might not be optimal.
And Windows basically behaves like a RAM drive (keeping freed stuff in RAM until more free RAM is needed).

Maybe I will have a closer look at this RAM drive stuff in the future though

Oh yeah. I forgot about the whole idle standby ram thingy...

http://www.gamesave-manager.com/ I use it to move my data folders to my SSD, I do not put the whole game on the ssd, ssd's are better with smaller loose files, so I place the textures and mesh folder on the SSD and extract the bsa archives to them, for texture and mesh modding it's a simple matter to extract the new mods(textures/mesh) to the ssd, this also means the drive only gets written too when updating updating those assets.

Edit: Game saver manager has a feature called Steam Spreader, you can select the entire game folder or select custom folders.

Right -- the SSD won't do much for those BSAs, but if you unpack them and/or use lots and lots of texture mods (like I do), you get quite the noticeable gain of shorter load times and transitions.

Here's a batch file I've made which works perfectly (works very similarly for Oblivion and the Fallouts).

• Download http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896768 and drop it in C:\Windows.
  
• Ctrl+X Skyrim from the Steam folder and Ctrl+X to drop it in its desired location (Must be NTFS).
  
• Copy the below to a notepad document.
  

  @Echo OffEcho Create Skyrim symbolic links?PauseMD "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Steam\SteamApps\Common"MD "%CD%\Link'd\%ComputerName%"MD "%CD%\Link'd\Saves"Junction "%CD%\Link'd\%ComputerName%\Saves" "%CD%\Link'd\Saves"Move "%UserProfile%\Documents\My Games\Skyrim\Saves\*.*" "%CD%\Link'd\Saves"RD "%UserProfile%\Documents\My Games\Skyrim\Saves"Move "%UserProfile%\Documents\My Games\Skyrim\*.*" "%CD%\Link'd\%ComputerName%"RD "%UserProfile%\Documents\My Games\Skyrim"Move "%LocalAppData%\Skyrim\*.*" "%CD%\Link'd\%ComputerName%"RD "%LocalAppData%\Skyrim"Junction "%UserProfile%\Documents\My Games\Skyrim" "%CD%\Link'd\%ComputerName%"Junction "%LocalAppData%\Skyrim" "%CD%\Link'd\%ComputerName%"Junction "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Steam\SteamApps\Common\Skyrim" "%CD%\"Pause@Echo On

• Save and rename the .txt file Skyrim Links.bat
  
• Move Skyrim Links.bat to your new Skyrim folder and double click.
  
• Done.

The batch file will consolidate all of the Skyrim saves (shared if multiple PCs), .ini files (computer specific), renderer info (computer specific), and Plugins.txt (Computer specific) in a Skyrim\Link'd folder. Anything else you might have in there like bash settings stuff will tag along for the ride and also be moved. My Skyrim install is on a 24GB 34mm ExpressCard SSD and, using the above for both rigs, I can maintain but one installation and play it seamlessly on my desktop or laptop utilizing the same saves and mods, yet keeping the config files separate. Theoretically, you could play Skyrim from an SD card.

Unpacking them doesn't make a difference, as Skyrim's .bsas aren't compressed.

Some BSAs are compressed (Skyrim - Sounds.bsa and Skyrim - Textures.bsa for sure).

Packed BSAs: 5.22GB
BSA content unpacked: 7.34GB

It still better to extract the archives to an SSD and use NTFS compression, tests have shown that it takes less time to load the files because they are smaller, with a decent cpu decompression time is practically none existent.

Even if they weren't compressed, having them loose means the engine still doesn't need to do any special parsing.

But as said before, it's mostly about the loose files from *mod*, not the BSAs. You only shave off 1-2 extra seconds from an already quick load time by unpacking them.



I'd like to see these tests. In fact I'd like to see how that'd work with Skyrim, which is already a rather CPU intensive game.

Skyrim is hardly cpu intensive considering the bottleneck coding, my quad core barely rises above 50% while running Skyrim, I'll see if I can find those tests, but it is logical, the smaller the file the less to read, even more efficient if the file fits neatly in a 4k unit.

Would anyone know of any methods to reduce texture sizes en-mass for Skyrim?

Edit: Whoops. Intended this for the optimized meshes thread. >.< Disregard.