The Elder Scrolls Trekker

Someone in the Bestheda forum asked for comparison screenshots of Oblivion with and without mods to convince a friend of the importance of a modded game over a console.

It occured to me that textures alone was not enough to really showcase the power of mods - most mods add subtle details that take some time to identify for an untrained eye.

So I took some images from the official screenshots - both pc, xbox and ps3 - and tried to match them as much as possible with my modded game.

Anvil docks -
-

- Mods used: Qarl Texture Pack 3 Redimized, Natural Environments, Better Cities Anvil, Alienslof's Robe Trader, Streamline
- Notice the mountains visible in the background behind the castle and the difference in texture for distant land
- The difference of colors is due to Natural Environment. I personally like the Yellow hue that NE gives to the atmosphere. Vanilla Oblivion look colder most of the time. For a Blueish hue, you can use the alternate weather system AWS.


Skingrad Fighter Guild porter -
-

- Mods used: Qarl Texture Pack 3 Redimized, Tamriel NPC Revamped, Django's Unique Features, Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul
- The Guild Porter has freckles
- Note that the elf fighter is dressed down (civilian clothes) in the morning. She is not always wearing an armor.

Imperial City view -
-

- Mods used: Qarl Texture Pack 3 Redimized, Natural Environments, Better
road signs, Enhanced water, Almost Everything Visible When Distant, HTF noise replacer, BTQ Landscape LODs,
Streamline, More immersive interface
- Notice the distant bridges (left), dock (right) and village at the top of the hill (left) from AEVWD
- The haze around the city itself and the reduced amount of grass are due to Streamline
- Notice the discrete HUD in the bottom corner from a More Immersive Interface

Outside Prison Sewers -
-

- Mods used: Qarl Texture Pack 3 Redimized, Natural Environments, Unique
Landscape Imperial Isle, Enhanced water, Almost Everything Visible When
Distant, HTF noise replacer, BTQ Landscape LODs, Streamline
- Notice the changes on the dock and the other side of the water (right) from UL City Isle
- The ayleid ruin on the other side of the lake (left) is now visible
- The blueish hue is caused by a mix between Natural Environment rainy weather and Streamline distant fog.

Skingrad streets -
-

- Mods used: Qarl Texture Pack 3 Redimized, Natural Environments, Better Cities Skingrad, Illumination Within Revived
- Notice the clutter and tiny details from Better Cities, and the illuminated windows
- Qarl's Texture pack 3 gives more definition to stone pavement and facades

Chorrol streets -
-

- Mods used: Qarl Texture Pack 3 Redimized, Natural Environments, Better Cities Chorrol, Illumination Within Revived, Beaming Sunglare, moDem City Life
- Enhanced sunglare effect
- The Orc beggar is followed by his kid (city life)

Estelle Renoit Bookstore -
-

- Mods used: Qarl Texture Pack 3 Redimized, TNR All Races, Book Jackets Oblivion, Exnem Eye Candy body replacer
- New book covers
- NPC with more character

And finally, THE main reason to use mods

Inventory system -
-
- Modded as a table (PC)

- Mods used: wz_inventory, OOO (hood), Chaindress
- Two ways to view your inventory - a list with many more items and a grid, just like Morrowind.
- The chaindress is one of many armors available only from PC mods
- The shaded hood and elven sword come from OOO (hoods and capes are not included in vanilla Oblivion).

"A new batch of beasties..."

WAC is a highly anticipated collection of wild animals for Oblivion.

The mod will include primates, zebras, gazelles, felines, pixes and even some nasty underwater animals (the list of all animals is available).

No ETA yet, but a placement map is in the works and corepc has offered to include at least some of these beasts in a future version of MMM.

A great optimization tip picked up on the development thread of Jaga Telesin's ORB - it is possible to spread your .bsa files across multiple hard drives.

Simply create a (short name) folder on other hard-drives you may have in your machine and move heavily used .bsa files to these folders.

For example, I created a : E:\TES and G:\TES folder on two of my additional drives (Oblivion itself is installed on H:\Games\Oblivion).

Once the files are copied in these folders, you still have to edit your Oblivion.ini file to add the new path to the corresponding .bsa files (edit the line with : sArchiveList=).

Here is a detailed explanation from Jaga about this tip.

ORB stands for Oblivion Resource Balancing. After the amazing Streamline 3.1, Jaga's new project aims at creating a set of .bsa files and distribute them across multiple hard-drives for optimal performance.

This is one project to watch closely...

Note:

When using multiple hard drives, people should make sure that their Power Management settings are set to Never put hard drives to sleep.

It should be obvious with hindsight, but I found out that my system was set to put HDs to sleep after 20 minutes, which translated with occasional lags when Oblivion tried to access .bsa files on a drive that needed to be 'awakened'.

Also, under Vista, I saved valuable resources by disabling the Indexing service on all unnecessary drives, especially the drives hosting my .bsa files.

That did not take very long... only a few days after I finally decided I had a version of Oblivion stable enough to (finally) play the game, three major updates were announced in the Bethesda forum.

Tireless modders bomret and dev_akm unveiled the completion of their secret project - Qarl's Texture pack 3 - redimized - a complete review of Qarl's eye candy textures, reduced and optimized for better performance. The new texture pack comes at a price though - a 1.3 G download. But the result is worth the wait of a huge download.

Incredibly enough, corepc found the time to step away from his pivotal work leading the MMM team to go back and improve on one of his babies - Tamriel Travelers hit version 1.35 with vendors on horses and ... pack guars !

Finally, the team behind Better Cities Translated has released several compatibitily updates for some of the major quests mods out there.

A few weeks from its second anniversary, Oblivion keeps getting better and better...

How to configure Streamline 3.1 for better performance ?

Difficult question to answer since it depends on so many parameters : your CPU, memory, video card, hard drive, services running on your machine, other mods you selected. Any of these can require different adjustments to your Streamline configuration. There is no "one size fits all" set of parameters.

The only solution is really to read the instructions and try different settings for the oblivion.ini and sl.ini files.

Here are a few settings to look for in SL.ini to get you started (the values are the ones I am using):

set SLh.SLmode to 3 ; Memory Purge Mode (1-6) (Default: 3)

--- to change the frequency of memory purge in your system. Increase or decrease depending on your memory or if you get stuttering.

set SLfpsmon.High to 20 ; Highest minimum FPS (top of range)
set SLfpsmon.Low to 15 ; Lowest minimum FPS (bottom of range)

--- to set your desired framerate target. Streamline will try to adjust visual details to keep the framerate within these limits.

set SLv.maxVLOD to 80; Highest overall level of detail (%)
set SLv.minVLOD to 10 ; Lowest overall level of detail (%)

--- to set the limits of level of details. These values ensure that level of details will not drop to 0 (10 % minimum) but will not go to the maximum either (80% maximum). You can try 100% or other values depending on your configuration.

set SLv.MinDistanceFog to 17000; Min distance before fog starts (0%)
set SLv.MaxDistanceFog to 71000; Max distance before fog ends (100%)

--- change these values using the .htm document you will find in the documentation folder. You will have to edit your Oblivion.ini file manually to set two uGridDistant and uGridDistantTrees parameters. Mine are set to 12 and 12. If you look at the .htm file in the documentation folder, you will find values for min and max distance fog corresponding to uGrid values. Use these values here.

This is a basic overview of what you will have to do to tweak your Streamline. There's a lot more SL can do to adjust to your configuration but this should get you started.

Each mod can be a little different in how to install them.

The bottom line is this :

- create a folder on your machine (on your desktop for instance). Call that folder 'Install'.
- once you download a new mod, extract the files to that Install folder.

Now look at the Install folder.

.esp / .esm files need to go directly into Oblivion/Data folder.
Any folder such as : meshes / textures / sounds need to go into Oblivion/Data as well.

Basically, if you see a folder that already exists in Oblivion/Data, you will have to copy the content to that folder.

Now, depending on the way files are archived for a particular mod, you will find some of the following situation once you extract your files into Install:

Install / / Data
or Install / Data
or Install

You will have to explore the Install folder and find the right files and folder that you will have to copy into Oblivion / Data.

Purple textures are missing textures.

Either you did not install the full mod (sometimes, mods come as a base install and an update - you need to install both to get them to work) or you have new textures that have not been registered correctly with the game.

Which method of Archive Invalidation are you using ?

If you don't know, chances are you are not using any

Try this one : Archive Invalidation Invalidated!

Download, follow the instructions and completely forget about it for future mods.

Here is the hardware I have to deal with:

• CPU: Pentium 4 with HT, 3.2 GHz, 3 Gb of RAM
  
• Video card: ATI HD 2600 AGP, 512 M of VRAM
• Resolution: 1280x768 in windowed mode
  
• Graphics options: HDR, Tree Canopy shadows, fixed trees LOD
  
• Oblivion installed on dedicated SATA 10,000 RPM drive
  

I want to play with these 'heavy' mods:

• Almost Everything Visible When Distant (standard version)
• Qarl Texture Pack 3 redimized
  
• Unique Landscapes, better Cities mods
• OOO + MMM
• Illumination Within Revived
• City Life + Cats + Dogs

To help absorb the load, I installed the following optimization mods :

• QuietFeetMax
• Low tri-poly grass (from RPGBlackDragon, levels s-2).
  
• Natural weather only (no optional Natural Environment mod, only the weather)
• Enhanced Water (low resolution)
• Texture, meshes and sound .bsa file distributed on three hard drives for load balancing.
  

• Anvil docks: 9 to 15 fps
• Anvil city: 10 to 25 fps
• Road from Anvil to Kvatch: 10 to 25 fps

I did a thorough check with TES4View and made several discoveries which caused me to move some mods around.

• I had to remove Persuasion_Overhaul_MMM as it overrides several changes from Persuasion_Overhaul_OOO.
• There are several mesh conflicts between AlienSlof's Dogs and MMM. We need a compatibility patch to add Slof meshes to MMM dogs.
• Same thing, we need a compatibility patch to add meshes and textures from Better Book Jackets to books from More Books Teach
• There are several conflicts between Atmospheric Oblivion sounds and Harvest containers from OOO. A compatibility mod would be welcome there as well.
• It looks like AlienSlof robe trader contains changes to several non robes pieces of armor. These changes conflict with OOO and other armor related mods. We need a cleaner version of that mod with Robe replacements only (no armor changed) ... I will check it out with TESsnip now that I know how to use it :)
• Old School Artifacts mod contains several references in German. It also conflicts seriously with loot from MMM. I'm considering dropping it from my list if I can't find a way to resolve that.
• Origin of the Mage Guild conflicts with NPC Julienne Fanis over CT-Torch_Compendium (I will have to check if this NPC is vital to Origin)

And I thought I was almost done with that list.... back to work to bring the issues to the respective mod owners.

The past few weeks have seen some exciting developments in the little world of Oblivion mods, and from the looks of things, the next few weeks will be just as exciting.

Under the tireless lead of corepc, Martigen's Oblivion Mod reached the milestone of a new release - version 3.5.3 - with an open beta testing already available for 3.5.4.

Dev_akm and the Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul team have been hard at work as well, releasing a new version - 1.32 RC 5 - and improving the compatibility with MMM.

It is a pleasure to see both mods survive the departure of their original authors and slowly move towards improved gameplay, balance and stability.

Ismelda Lasombra led an effort to translate and improve on Banasplit's Better Cities. The project is now known as Better Cities Translated and includes other translated city improvements mods, several modders at work and compatibility plugins.

Most importantly, the past few weeks saw the return of Jaga Talesin and the much awaited completion of a massive update to Streamline. Streamline 3.1 (now in open beta testing) is possibly THE single most important piece of software for anyone who wants to run Oblivion with a significant number of mods. The latest version includes Streamsight, a new feature that hides distant object behind a dynamic fog and results in a impressive gain in performance.

These are only highlights from the dozens of active projects currently in development by the modding community. One can never thank them enough for giving Oblivion its full potential as a playground, more than just a game.

(loosely copied from my post in the Bethseda forum).

For a change, this is not a cry for help for a review of a load order but rather the opposite.

After about two years of trial and errors, tests and troubleshooting, I have reached what looks like a stable version of my load order, so I spent some time making a colored version of the list, with notes about the purpose of each mod and why they are in that particular order.

Annotated Load Order
Other mods (non-load order related)

As a rule of thumb, I tried to group related mods as much as possible. Patches are loaded after their respective mod (with the exception of the Unofficial Shivering Isle patch that can be loaded before the corresponding .esp file since that file is only a place holder anyway).

I left out some optional mods as well, most of the time for performance reasons on my system (for example, I kept only the Natural Weather mod from Natural Environment and left out all the other optional mods in that set).

Some mods are oddly placed before or after the area you would expect in the list - this is usually due to a reading of the mod conflicts with TES4View and a decision as to where the mod makes sense in that load order.

As far as color coding goes :
- Mods in green are cosmetic mods (sounds, textures, weather, water, scenery)
- Mods in blue are new content for the player (armors, weapons, accessories, quests, houses)
- Mods in yellow change the rules of the game (gameplay mods, spells, NPCs)
- Mods in orange and bold are the 'absolutely necessary mods I could not play without'
- Mods in white and red are patches to other files in the list
- Mods in gold are official mods

I'm posting this in the hope it could help someone else with Load Order issues.

I will use this entry to keep track of mods I had to customize manually and why.

Note that none of these customizations are available for download yet. If you are interested in any of these, let me know and I will get in touch with the original owner of the mod to get the permission to do so. The links provided here are links to the original, not-customized mods.

Cyrodiil Transportation Network - Edited for Compatibility with Better Cities Anvil / Skingrad, Origin of the Mage Guild

• Anvil: Moved stairs to travel ship to the right to keep the captain of the ship from falling in the water because of boxes from BCC blocking the way
• Skingrad: Moved carriage on the other side of horses area. Rocks from BCC were overlapping with carriage.
• Origin of mage guild Anvil - Moved Guild guide door to dining room (conflicts with Guild Basement door ).
• Moved door in Bravil and Bruma : clutter from OOO in front of doors
• Skingrad : Path issue for Guild Guide (runs into wall)
  

• Inside Anvil: Moved benches and lamp post next to the pond to other side of the street to avoid overlap with wall and rowboats from BCC
• Outside Anvil: Moved bench near painter to avoid conflict with bench from BCC
• Leyawiin: Added clothing to NPCs Paervil and Rheena Marcene to keep her from being topless in morning (compatibility with OOO)

• Customized to tweak chances of diseases (Magic -> LevelledSpells:
  increase Chance None to reduce likelihood of disease)

• Customized to remove immersion breaking note from campsite storage
  

• Anvil: Added missing civilian clothing to Anvil weaponsmith Varel Morvyn to keep him from walking around naked at night

• IC market: Customized to move 'special items' from IC Market street into Fighting Chance
  basement

• Anga: Added copy of the armor inside corpse in Anga (look for Namira's shrine)
  

• Near waterfall: Raised ground to fix floating rocks and stairs to Ayleid ruin.

• Inside Bruma: Removed ugly city gate from middle of the street

• Several NPCs names still in German (TRanslated by Ismelda Lasombra).

• Created new NPC (Juliette Fanis) to remove conflict with Origin of Mage Guild over NPC (Julienne Fanis). Juliette is Julienne's older sister and will correctly sell Welkyn torches in addition to her sister's inventory.
  

• Added a free chaindress in Fighter Guild of Anvil to compensate for loss of chaindress at Best Defense vendor (replaced by Ordinator armor)

• Replaced transparent battlemage cuirass by Alienslof's Elaborate robe (male battlemage) and BlackLuster Blood robe (female battlemage)

• Moved Apophis Hammer from  IC Market street to a tomb in Sancre Tor

• Removed entrance to Hotel (hotel bedroom floor is full of 'cheats' and causes a crash with my mix of mods)
• Added an altar to Dibella statue

• Moved deleted bench from Better Cities Cheydinhal in from of Mage Guild and made it Persistent
  

• Skingrad: Added clothing to one member of Fighter Guild to keep him from walking naked in the morning

• Moved chest to Foc'scle private rooms in Anvil. Who knows what is going on with those sailors behind closed doors ?!
• Added silk clothing to members of the Sirens gang
  

• Moved chest to Fort Cedrian crypt to make it more difficult to reach
  

• Moved location of armor to Assassin related place instead of out in the open in the IC Market Place (Cheydinhal)

• Customized to move cave entrance and guardian north of Underpall Cave, west of Bruma (didn't make sense to keep a level 20 guardian next to my starting area in Anvil)

• Set iVampirism,AgeOffset variable to 0 to disable aging effect
  

• Fixed a bug (missing else statement) in KIVampire script
• Changed period between ages to 30 days increments for all ages
  

• Disabled start quest to add new items directly into inventory
• Placed items into 'lost' Ayleid chests hidden along the coastline of Anvil.
  
• Renamed items to unique names (instead of generic names from original mod)
• Enchanted each item with small, constant enchantment, consistent with Mage garments
• Fixed special effect with staff
• Assigned correct mesh for red shoes
  
• Replaced meshes for Red outfit by Sinblood's Elven Wizard (red)
• Replaced meshes for Black outfit by Sinblood's Vampire Dominion and Lucrecia Navarre