qsniyg
commented
5 years ago My primary guess is how Wine handles case insensitivity. I'm sure the Wine developers have their reasons, but if it fails to find the file, it checks every directory, without a cache. So let's say Skyrim tries to access this file:
C:\Skyrim\Data\Meshes\Actors\Character\CharacterAssets\FemaleBody.NIF
But the actual file is:
~/.wine/drive_c/skyrim/data/meshes/actors/character/characterassets/femalebody.nif
It will check through ~/.wine/drive_c/ for a directory that can be stricmp'd to Skyrim, and then check through ~/.wine/drive_c/skyrim for a directory that can be stricmp'd to Data, etc.
This happens every single time it tries to find a file.
This could be fixed with a directory cache (one is actually implemented in this script to make the VFS process go faster), but considering how long the Wine developers have spent trying to fix this issue, I'm sure there's a good reason they didn't use one (although an option would be nice).
I did try to make performance slightly faster by not renaming everything to be lowercase, which might improve performance in some unique cases where it's able to find the file directly, but it's not a perfect solution, especially when mod is looking for File.NIF, and another is looking for file.nif.
For now, I think the solution is to wait until Linux 5.2 comes with per-directory case-insensitivity for EXT4. Once that comes, in theory we should just be able to setattr +F ~/.wine/ and reap the performance benefits :)
Referring to the second point (how long it takes to build the physical VFS), I completely agree that's a pretty big pain point. I'm considering creating my own script that will hook into wineserver and replace paths dynamically (with a case-insensitivity cache of course). I think this would be the best of both worlds, until USVFS manages to work under wine again.
It wouldn't replace USVFS, but it would work like this one, where you manually specify the mods directory, and it would create the VFS from there. Another nice improvement this would bring would be that it would automatically write to the overwrite directory, so no need to copy files manually after using BodySlide (or constantly re-running FNIS).
jarrard
ajventer
I wanted to pose this question after using this script to mount skyrim-se mods on my windows NTFS NVMe drive which also has large_writes enabled etc to increase performance.
The issue I have seen is that skyrim-se takes up to 5 minutes to load up at the start, once its loaded it seems to run fine, BUT under Windows10 it takes less then 30 seconds.
DO YOU KNOW what could be going on here? is the linux symlink system slowing down something? can a alternative solution be tested for better ntfs performance? (if that's the issue, yet to test on ext4)
It's one of the main reasons I have decided to not use Linux for modded gaming atm (at least Bethesda type mod system).
Mod Organiser 2 for exmaple does some sort of trickery in the computers memory to map everything virtually so its able to process 200-1000 mods within less then a couple seconds whereas this script would take considerably longer as it has to go through each folder and file and create physical links,.