The Elder Scrolls Trekker

TES4View Advanced esp Viewer and Conflict Detector

Utility - Forget what I said yesterday about reducing complexity.

Use TES4View with all the mods you want active in your list. Study conflicts carefully (using the filtered view if possible) and reorganize your load order accordingly.

Tips:

- If conflicting values are the same, load order doesn't matter

- Mods with Orange text win over mods with Red text. Pay attention to which value you want to 'win' in conflicts. An orange 'winner' may not be the solution you want to keep in your load order.

- Refine your load order by running TES4View after reorganizing your list. You may have missed some conflicts and new conflicts may arise from the new load order.

Using this tool, I was able to dig a lot deeper into the reason behind conflicts reported by OBMM, see exactly which record each conflicting mod changed and with which value, and finally, decide which mod I should load last.

For example it turns out some of the official plugins and mods from Unique Landscapes had undesirable overlaps with some of the other mods in my list. Instead of keep them together at the top or end of the list, I had to push some in the middle of the list, after some mods or before others. 

This resulted into a new load order much more complex than usually recommended.

Here is a list of some of the 'must-have' tools to help you troubleshoot issues with mods.

Oblivion Mod Manager (OBMM) v1.0.3

Organize load orders, update BSA files to register new textures and meshes, detect conflicts between mods, create and use omod files. 

Wrye Bash

The 'swiss army knife' for Oblivion mods. Everything you need to detect issues, change load order, repair save games, merge mods or create patches. 

Oblivion Mod Removal (OBMR) v2.01

Automatically remove all files related to a mod.

Note: watch out for files shared by several mods. You may have to reinstall something after cleaning up a mod with this tool. 

TES4View v1.1.1

Nice little utility specialized in analyzing conflicts between mods. You can select which mod you want to analyze and which type of record you want to include in your report. Perfect tool to go deep into the details of overlaps and conflicts between mods.

I'm seriously getting sick of this endless round of interferences between mods. It feels like each time I fix something, another conflict appears. It's not longer Oblivion I am playing, but a sick version of 'Wack a mole'.

I decided to simpify number of mods I am using for a while and see if I can make sense of these endless conflicts:

- Disabled Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isle until I am done with Main quest. I have too many quests to work on before I can start these standalone modules anyway.

- Disabled advanced items such as Mythic Weapons, Phenix armor etc... I will activate them one by one at a later date. For now, I have plenty of content from OOO and MMM o keep me busy.

- Disabled Soulgem and Lantern mod to see if they are replaced by OOO.

- Deleted some less important mods ; Daedric seducers (already included in MMM), Adonnay Elven Longblades (already included in Elven Weaponry), Tamrielic Artifacts (prefered to keep Old School Artefacts instead).

Between these issues and the pending arrival of final versions of Streamline, OOO and fixes to MMM, I guess all I have to do is forget about playing the game yet again and go back to quick test sessions instead. 

Another example of complex mods interactions

The Hunger effect from 'Survival Suite:HTS' kept stopping for some reason. I tried other Hunger, Sleep packages and they ended up interfering with encumbrance and other effects from 'Mighty Magick'. 

Looking at conflicts with OBMM, I found an overlap between 'A new beginning' and 'Survival Suite:HTS' around the Player object. 

'A new beginning' and 'Survival Suite:HTS' both change the Player object (HTS adds a script and ANB adds inventory - armor, weapon and clothing). Placing 'A New Beginning' last gave me the corrct inventory but the script from HTS was lost. Placing the mod before HTS resolved that, but I did not have the inventory any more.

On top of that, 'More Realistic Encumberment' calculates new encumbrance values based on the assumption that initially, the player is not wearing anything else than the sack cloth from the prison tutorial.The weight from the new inventory provided by 'A new beginning' was enough to throw these calculations off and block the encumbrance effect.

Using all three mods together made them interfere with each other.

Solution:

Load ' A new beginning' first, for the quests fixes.

Then load HTS(*), modifed using the editor to replace sack cloth by other clothing of same weight and recreate part of the inventory added by  'A new beginning' without adding more weight than the default configuration.

Finally, load 'More Realistic Encumberment' last to make sure the values are set correctly.

Conclusion:

I came across two naked NPCs after installing Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul. One was a blacksmith in Anvil and the other was in the Fighter Guild in Skingrad. 

After troubleshooting the issue for a while, it seems that, quite simply, OOO doesn't check if a NPCs have any kind of clothing before removing their armor when they sleep/wake up.

In the case of Fadus Calidus in Skingrad, that NPC doesn't have clothing under his armor to begin with (vanilla oblivion), so he ends up naed when OOO disrobes him.

In the case of Varel Morvayn in Anvil, Blackmagic's Rogue Set replaces his clothing by an armor set, instead of adding the set to his list. So then again, if that mod is loaded after OOO, the blackmisth ends up naked.

Unless OOO adds a check for available clothing before changing what they wear, you can expect to see a few more naked NPCs eventually. I ended up creating a small .esp that restores the NPCs clothing and included it in the bashed patch. Works like a charm.

For more on this issue :

[REL] Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul 1.32 RC2 - Bethesda Game Studios Forums 

I am pleased to announce that we will be hosting the CTD Help troubleshooting tool  recently introduced in the official Oblivion forum.

CTD Help - Troubleshooting Tool is an attempt at providing an automated diagnosis tool for issues with Load Order, Crash To Desktop (CTD) and other problems you may encounter when using several mods with 'TES IV: Oblivion'

This tool was created by 'verruckt'. If you have questions or suggestions to improve it, please feel free to participate to the Official CTD Help Thread on the Bethesda forum.

I will use this section for a list of ideas of mods or fixes to Oblivion I would love to see. Feel free to contact me if you know of mods that already exist around these ideas or if you feel like taking on anything from this list as your own mod.

1) Aging

Age your character and make him/her take more wrinkles as years go by (although character last rarely for years in the game).

2) Hair, nails and makeup

Allow to change some of the features in-game such as haircut, beards, make up or tattoos.

3) Visible sickness

Change the facial feature when sick and restore it afterwards when healed (a little like the vampire face).

4) Imperial legion and forts

Something I would love to see is a mod around those Imperial Guards patrolling the roads. Where do they sleep ? on their horses ? where do they eat ? do they even take breaks from their jobs ?

I have seen a thread a long time ago asking for forts to be rebuilt, and someone even released a mod that does just that for one of the forts, but what I would like to see is more than just one fort.

How about some barracks in key locations on the map ? make the patrols return to the barrack periodically and leave them again later.

How about some Legion camps in the wilderness ? with tents neatly organized in rows and some wooden fortifications around them (like the defenses around Kvatch). Some NPCs could be there too to provide support, cooks, merchants, etc... what about their girlfriends, wives, children ?

What about the guards ? outside of attacking the stray creature or bandit trailing you, they don't seem to be doing much. Make them work ! lock the city gates at night and have the player talk to the guard to open the gate in the middle of the night. Price could vary depending on speechcraft or fame. If you are wanted, forget it and sleep outside. The same thing could go for castles.

5) Treasure hunt

I have seen a couple of mods with hints to a treasure but I would really love a challenging full scale mystery on the footsteps of the DaVinci Code or movies such as National Treasure, Indiana Jones or Lara Croft. 

What I would like to see is clues leading to other clues, riddles, dead ends, misdirections and most important, a background story centered around some sort of grand prize.

The prize itself is not important - it may even have been already plundered by the time you get to the end. The fun of the quest would be in the discovery of the riddles.  

6) Easter eggs

A fun mod that would simply add cameos or references to well known stories from Arthurian Legends, Monty Pythons movies, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, etc...

7) Corpse Decay

Along the same line as 'Aging' this mod would gradually replace the various 'roadkills' of outlaws, bandits, and other collateral damages, first by the decaying corpses of zombies, then by a skeleton, and finally, by small bones (for humanoids). For other species, bones would suffice.

So it took a year and a half to get Oblivion playable again. The release of Streamline 3.0 beta made it possible.

After creating a new character with A New Beginning, the first time I explored a ruin (the fort just south of Anvil), I realized that I had no torch but I was there, so I kept going and hoped I would find a couple of torches inside. I did eventually... but only after I had to experience a few pitch black room and fights in the dark with a couple of outlaws.

It was creepy not being able to see if there was a trap ahead or someone around the corner.

Stats restore - a useful utility to fix a broken game.

Keep that in mind in case of emergency.

Since I started using 'A New Beginning', I noticed that the Hunger effect from 'Hunger, Thirst, Sleep' was no longer working properly.

Sleep and Drink effects were working fine but the Hunger effect kept getting stuck, unaffected by the food or time.

Running Oblivion Mod Manager (OBMM) showed a conflict between HTS.esp and anb.esp. 

Moving HTS.esp after 'A new beginning'  in the Load Order seem to have fixed that problem. 

The Quest for a playable Oblivion is starting to feel like going after the Saint Graal.

After a year and a half, almost 20 Gb of downloads, hours of debugging, testing and countless crashes, I have yet to play with a steady character for more than a few weeks. Sometimes the goal seems almost within reach... so close I become hopeful ... only to be disappointed again by yet another conflict between mods, a yellow square in the game or more crashes to desktop.

The good news is that finally, I have reached my most stable mix of mods to date. Crashes are now relatively rare. Conflicts between mods are still there but significantly more manageable. Still.. I am waiting for a final release of Oscuro's Overhaul and a few fixes to Martigen's latest version. A few more weeks of wait hopefully and the wait will be over.

Yet.. for all this trouble, I still feel it is worth it.

The potential to turn Oblivion into a decent RPG is still intact. I have come down my initial enthousiasm for the game only a few weeks after installing it for the first time. Without mods, the game is simply too 'simple' to be worth playing. Running around and kill, kill, kill in dungeons stops being fun after 10 minutes. Mods bring back the pleasure and challenge of playing this game.

Looking at the amount of mods produced since the release of the game, I am not the only one to feel Oblivion is worth saving. The sum of work from the modding community is simply amazing. A year and a half after the release, almost all the major issues with the initial game have been addressed in some way.  

I still find it difficult to think about a comment I read in an interview of someone at Bethesda at the occasion of the release of Shivering Isle. While he acknowledged the work of the modding community, he said they did not see any user developed mod worth including with the official extension (?!!!)

How about one of the vastly superior user interfaces or the hundreds of bug fixes from the Unofficial Oblivion Patch just to name a few ?

Fortunately, they did release the tools that made it possible to make this game worth playing, so I can't really be mad at them for ignoring what has been done with these tools. Let's hope they will redeem themselves with TES V. 

Tonight I had a good example of how interactions between mods can look like bugs.

I was trying to find a way to fix an issue between the lightning effect from 'Storms & Sound' and the rain effects from 'Natural Environments' (sometimes, the whole sky stays bright after a lightning strike).

In the process of my troubleshooting, I ended up changing the load order between these two mods.

I forgot about it after I gave up tryng to figure this out, and while I was playing some more, I came across a systematic crash when using transportation from 'Cyrodiil Transportation Network'.

Oblivion would just crash each time I selected a travel destination.

It turns out the game crashed when trying to apply a new weather pattern after I selected a destination to travel to. What looked like a bug in CTN was in fact caused by a wrong load order between weather mods.