Improving Load Times
Info
This procedure provides the following benefits:
- Approx. 500MB Saved Drive Space.
- Improved file load times by ~2x.
- Cleans up game folder.
Warning
The BFS files produced by this method are incompatible with unmodified vanilla game.
The FlatOut 2 Mod Loader makes use of custom BFS files, with a better compression algorithm (ZStd) that provides significant improvement in the speed of loading files from disk.
More specifically, these BFS files are on average 75% of the size with data decompressed at around ~214% speed, compared to the unmodified files; leading to improved load times, especially on SSDs.
This guide shows how to repack game's stock BFS files to use the new improved BFSes, and merge them into a single BFS.
Download The Tools
Unpacking Game Files
Info
Here we merge multiple BFSes into single data folder.
Go to your game folder and drag files [in your game folder] over extract-fo2-bfs.bat
in the following order:
fo2a.bfsfo2b.bfsfo2c.bfspatch1.bfs
After unpacking all files you should have a data folder around 4GB.
Repacking Game Files
Info
Repacking will take a while. Don't be impatient.
Once unpacked, drag the data folder over build-fo2-modloader-bfs.bat.
This will produce a file called data.bfs. Delete the original BFS files listed in unpacking section.
Open filesystem file with a hex editor, and modify it so it looks like this:
data.bfs
Open patch file and remove line with patch1.bfs. If this results in empty file, delete the file.
Result
Your game folder should resemble something like the following:
