April 2008 Archives

Lore in Oblivion refers to the background story of civilizations, gods and heroes of Tamriel, spanning over millennia. Mods try to enrich the Lore, complete it and in many cases, simply ignore it and focus on improving the game itself.

Modder giskard has been working on expanding on the Lore with several extraordinarily detailed mods :

- Kvatch Aftermath
- The Origin of the Mages Guild
- The Necromancer
- Fighters Guild contracts
- The Elder Council and its Temple of the One add-on.

These mods are essential improvements to storylines dropped by Bethesda during the course of making the game.

News from corepc, creator of the indispensable Tamriel Travelers.

The good news is that the travelers are now roaming the Shivering Isles !

The bad news is that, due to pressure from real life, corepc announced he will be retiring soon from Oblivion mods. Hopefully, this will be temporary as his contribution to Oblivion has been immense. I simply wouldn't be playing the game now, two years after its release, if it was not for his work on Tamriel Travellers, MMM and Living Economy.

Best of luck to him.

It is possible to run Oblivion with 150+ mods and no crash to really speak of (except when I don't let my game breathe and try to push it too fast).

I know for a fact Oblivion is very sensitive to system bottlenecks. Meaning that you have to think about anything that may get in the way of Oblivion running - antivirus software, background job, fragmentation of hard-drive, resolution too high for your configuration, etc.

For example, I used to have a crash every couple of hours or so, until I looked at memory usage while I was playing and found out Oblivion crashed when it reached 2 Gb of memory (on XP). So I went back to optimization mods, including streamline 3.1, to try and shave as much as possible from my memory load. The result - 15 to 25 fps on an old Pentium 4 3 GHz with 3 Gb of RAM and 512 M of VRAM.... and maybe one crash every play session (not counting crash on exit).

Now, after I moved to my new Mac Pro (with 8 cores), I found Oblivion doesn't crash anymore. I used to crash on exit a lot (well... duh ! you might say). The main difference is that the new machine can handle the load of files loaded into memory a lot faster than the old one. So I tried to ramp up my settings to see if I could make it crash again and sure enough, by increasing the display resolution of the game, I went back to one crash every play session or more.

Try playing Oblivion in Window mode, at a lower resolution, with as many optimization mods as possible to reduce the load of the game on your system. Learn to 'listen' to your system and get a feel of when it is trying to catch up with you. If you are running all the time, slow down when you hear your machine is loading new areas. I installed a Fatigue mod just to get a better rhythm and force me to walk once in a while.

Let your machine breathe.

The latest issue I had to troubleshoot is worth mentioning.

Returning from the Shivering Isles, I noticed that vendors in Cyrodiil were no longer aware of Living Economy rules. They were back to an infinite supply of gold.

At first, I blamed the recent install of both Creeper and Tamriel Travelers SI edition, but running the game without these mods after a clean save did not resolve anything - Living Economy was still broken.

So I traced back my steps and found an earlier saved game where the economy system was still working.

It turns out the issue came from the way I traveled back from the Shivering Isles this time. I used a spell to Teleport directly to Frostcrag Spire instead of using the portal from the Isles back to Cyrodiil.

It looks like teleporting out of the Isles causes indirect effects on other mods - including Living Economy.

Conclusion - be careful where you teleport from and save often. You never know when you will have to go back in time to avoid an issue that corrupts your game.