Hi mentat72,
About biffing, here's a pretty good round out from berelinde. See here for the actual thread:
http://forums.gibber...s...11904&st=0#berelinde, on Oct 9 2007, 12:02 AM, said:
I have read about some people with overfull overrides biffing to increase performance, but I can't offer any advice there. You might actually have some luck going somewhere where extremely full overrides are commonplace, i.e. Mega-Mods Help at SHS, and running a search on biffing. Please note that this not always a good idea, however some folks who routinely use mammoth installations seem to find it helpful.
You certainly sound like you know what you're talking about, so it's possible that you can sort out your own batch files. I'm not that savvy, so I'd want to look at an example. Also, since you run on a Mac, I'm not sure you can run a BAT file. But you probably know about Mac alternatives.
Having done so myself just now, I've got a couple things for you to look at.
Here is the first. Please pay careful attention to CamDawg's advice on the subject.
Erebusant has something to say about those question marks. Read carefully. Something might have gone awry. I don't know much (read "anything") about Macs, but I do know that file structure changes that result in ????? are not promising. It seems to mean that you installed a new version of something that was trying to uninstall the old version and that the files didn't match up, so it didn't know what to do. In other words, you'll have remnants of an old installation lingering, and your dialog.tlk is almost certainly messed up. If it were me, I would follow erebusant's advice here, or start over, uninstalling the game and simply deleting the entire game folder, which will probably take about as long.
And after about half an hour searching, serious paydirt. Read every post in that thread, and follow the links.
In short, yes biffing is supposed to be a process that is independent of the mod-installations, so you can use it in practically any installation. As for the biffing commands to use, that one you'll need to figure out a bit. I've not done it for SMM because gaming is priority for me. I'm prefer playing not modding
In principle, however, it seems better to leave biffing to the expert modders of specific large mods like
TDD etc. If you notice most of the mega-mods already have biffed up files. If you check your <data> directory, you'll see biff files starting with
TDD, SOS, ROT etc.
From a technical side, if I understand the logic behind it, it seems to me that biffing is really most useful in reducing the clutter in your override directory. Speed improvements may be limited because the same number of memory params/variables still have to be loaded in the game with/without biffing, and the same game scripts have to run. I suppose any speed improvs really occurs during loading of saved games / map transitions cos the windows file alloc table (FAT) is accessed during that time. Having more files = searching through a longer index list to get the files you need, eg maps/cre/dlg etc. which can perhaps affect a good second or so depending on your computer stats.
Hope that helps!
