With recent updates (especially the latest MMM), the list reached the maximum number of mods allowed.

In order to accommodate all the mods listed, you will have to enabled Merge Patches when updating your Bash Patch. I only selected a few texture only mods (such as real lava) to bring my list under the limit.

Recent updates include :

- replacement of Natural Weather for Enhanced Weather from HTF (with optional mod Oblivion Visual Screen Effects).
- upgrades of MMM, Supreme Magicka and Reneer's Guard Overhaul
- added Really Almost Everything Viewable When Distant
- added the now indispensable Sorcery's Toll.

If your game suddenly crashes in an area that you believe should be working (either because you visited it before or because it doesn't have anything new that you have not already encountered), try this simple step before pulling your hair over a bug - reboot.

I am beginning to think that, when Oblivion crashes, some files may remain locked - either from Windows or from whatever anti-virus software you are running in the background. Next time you start your game, Oblivion may try to load that locked file and crash as a result.

You can't really be expected to reboot each time Oblivion crashes - that would be insane. But if after a crash, your game suddenly becomes unstable in 'safe' areas, remember to clear your system with a reboot before investigating a bug with your mods or load order.

The area in question was the underground city from the Vampire questline in Origin of the Mages Guild. The crashes are apparently the result of that mod combined with StarX Vanilla Vampire Revisited and possibly other mods on my list. That is not to say Origin of the Mages Guild caused the crashes - I know better than that. It could be very well other mods in my list causing a crash in that area.

Anyway - one particular side effect was to encounter, twice, a situation where the game would systematically crash. In one case, any past saved game related to the underground city would crash on load (although they were loading fine a minute before). In another case, I would get a crash each time a Vampire Warrior was killed (but not the other kinds of foes I would find).

Both situations are highly unusual in terms of Oblivion bugs.

What I believe happened is that repeated crashes left some textures or mesh files locked by the operating system (Windows XP in my case) and caused a crash next time the game tried to load these resources.

So if you are running into a severe crash in the game after a series of smaller crashes to desktop while you play - calm down, shutdown your computer and reload the game after a while. Chances are your crash will go away.

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.

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.

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.

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.

CORE 1 is already released, but it is only a preview of the next chapter in the series.

CORE 2 is still in progress with some very exciting screenshots and videos of new environments, weapons and armors.

Both projects have been under work for nearly two years now.

As of March 2008, a standalone spinoff was started around a new set of Ayleid Armor.

After installing bootcamp and migrating my files (including my customizations of Morrowind and Oblivion), I could take the game for a drive on this new machine. Multiple cores really make a difference compared to Hyperthreading, even though only two out of the 8 cores are used at any given time. Spreading the load of .bsa files across two SATA drives help a lot as well.

For now, I am going to leave most of my optimizations in place (except for re-enabling the flickering of candle light). With these optimizations and the new hardware, I am finally reaching framerates between 30 and 70 fps in some outdoors areas while remaining above 20 fps in some crowded city areas.

Still, even with the increased power, the game tends to crash a lot more if I try to play with a resolution above 1280x900 pixels. And since I had to trade my ATI card by an Nvidia, I have been confronted to the ugly Nvidia black screen bug.

The fun of troubleshooting just never ends...

Both Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul and Martigen's Monster Mod released final versions after weeks of testing. Time to upgrade to OOO 1.33 and MMM 3.5.5

Several optimization and eye candy mods came out as well. Detailed terrains, Optimized distant lands and Beaming Sunglare push the limits of what was thought possible with the game.

A discussion about little known mods revealed several gems.

Finally, corepc brings us the much awaited completion of trollf's armamentarium, turning this wonderful modder resources into loot used by NPCs.

Difficult to think we are so close to the second anniversary of the release of Oblivion.

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).

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.

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.

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...