so, no bsa should be more than 2 gb. dont package animations and loading order of dummy plugins matter. regarding cao, do you use the 'bsa uncompressable files' option too? also, i assume this means there is to hard limit on numbers of bsa files my modlist can have like esps and esls have? and how much difference can packaging most mods into bsa can have on performance and on what part? like loading times or frame rate?
No, I don't use the “separate incompressible bsa” option, I prefer to have everything packaged together to reduce the number of files.
Regarding file type limits, the limit is 255 for ESP/ESM, while for ESL/ESP-L (light plugins) files it goes up to 4096, which is why it is advisable to convert to ESP-L whenever possible. As for BSA files, although there is no set limit, it is recommended not to exceed 200-250 to avoid instability in the game engine.
That said, it is best to reserve packaging for large mods and not abuse it. An example of when not to package is
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: 1 BSA slot wasted on packaging a single script.
As for the advantages of packaging in BSA, let's say that apart from those I've mentioned, they make the job easier for Creation Engine (the game engine) since these files are optimized and compressed so that the engine can read them more efficiently. For it, it is much easier to process tens or hundreds of thousands of files packaged in a few BSA files than the same amount of files being loose.
The frame rate will not change due to packing, as this is already influenced by other factors, such as ENB/CS with heavy plugins (SSGI, PBR and SSS), saturated VRAM or excessive draw calls. Loading speed will improve, although this is usually more noticeable on mechanical hard drives. It is equally interesting on SSDs because you save space, avoid extra fragmentation, and reduce I/O operations, which is beneficial for machines that have a limited lifespan due to total read and write usage.
