113 replies to this topic

[Stemin]

Ahh ... you're wanting to cut your teeth on the hard stuff. Read carefully and don't get discouraged. On a side note, you've put in a full day on this ... trying to pull more hours on here than me??

Heh. No. I just don't have the good 'ol common sense to turn off the electronics for a few mins. I haven't messed with oblivion in hours, just browsing mods in between playing Skyrim on the ps3.

I love my weekends and I jealously guard my right to do absolutely nothing constructive on my days off.

Edited by Stemin, 04 March 2012 - 06:52 AM.

[Nephenee13]

I'm mostly worried about the face. I figure the rest of me will be covered by armor. Plus the NPC's look awful.

Its not quite that simple.

Before messing with faces (which is, as Striker intimated, a major pain in the butt, get your body's sorted out.

The easiest way to do this is to install EVE Eycandy Variants Expansion for the HGEC female body, with several choices of upper and lower bodies, nude or with underwear, along with the complete stock clothing and armor replacer, and then Roberts Male for males, which...someone else will have to link to because for the life of me I can never find it when I need to link to it. Mostly because I don't do anything with male bodies myself, so I don't put much thought into them.

As for faces, there are a few mods that will make NPCs look better, though I'm not up on the exact state of many of them. I know TNR, Tamriel NPCs Reborn (Revamped? whatever) was a big one, and there is always the Xeo line, but then you have to mess with Modular Beautiful People, and thats way over your current skill level.

For the player, there are tons and tons of custom race mods available, I would suggest browsing the category and finding one you like.

Finally, I would suggest installing and learning how to use Wrye Bash and its BAIN installer, its intimidating at first, but eventually you WILL need it, and learning it now will make your life much easier down the road.

[Striker879]

LOL ... wait until you retire and everyday's a weekend.

Nephenee13 is offering sound advice. Consider the suggestion around Wrye Bash as well. I don't use it myself as I found it quite intimidating when I first started out (I'm a researcher, along with being a dinosaur). In my case, my rather modest expectations for the game haven't pushed me into territory that required WB (most commonly the need for a bashed patch ... that's how you get conflicting mods to work together). My impression of you however leads to my seconding Nephenee13's suggestion.

Something I was thinking of adding last night before i finally dragged myself off to bed ... you do realize that at some point you're going to have to break down and actually play the game. You don't want to start resembling Bben46's sig.

[galt]

Check out Nehrim (www.Nehrim.de). It's a complete overhaul of Oblivion with many of the best mods already incorporated and it's basically one file to install. Been playing it for a few months now, and pretty much the only game I've ever played that made me jump outta my chair because I was startled by some creature in one of many creepy dungeon. The only thing is the excellent voice acting is done in German...as long as you don't mind subtitles. This is not to say Oblivion modded is not worth the effort, it certainly is. Nehrim is just another excellent Oblivion experience. New world, new map, new quests, the cities and dungeons are fantastic. Worth a look.

Good luck.

Galt

Edited by galt, 04 March 2012 - 04:12 PM.

[Stemin]

Something I was thinking of adding last night before i finally dragged myself off to bed ... you do realize that at some point you're going to have to break down and actually play the game. You don't want to start resembling Bben46's sig.

I don't know who Bben46 is, but I still haven't actually installed any mods. I really just want to improve the vanilla games looks before I start playing. I don't want to get into too many game changing mods at this point. I want to learn Oblivion as I've been mainly playing Skyrim and hearing about Oblivion. I was hoping that setting it up on the PC would get me over some of the detractors that keep me from putting hours into the xbox version.

I follow this guy's skyrim mod vids on youtube: http://www.facebook.com/MxReview And he's constantly saying stuff like, 'this is an updated mod from oblivion" and "I think they had this mod for oblivion" and I've heard users on other boards comment that it's possible to upgrade the graphics in Oblivion to Skyrim standards. Mainly I'm not interested in huge DLC type mods or anything at this point. I just want to upgrade the graphics, make a character that looks a little more human and if at all possible find some compromise on the clunky user interface oblivion has compared to skyrim. Then I'm ready to dig into the game.

I may take Lancelours (sp?) suggestion later and mod the level'ing system since he indicated that Oblivion is kinda broken, but we'll see. I know I'm having a problem with that on my XBox character. I'm getting destroyed at the first Oblivion Gate and I can't seem to get my character to level up (yes I have slept).

Does anyone have any experience with the fast exit patch? I downloaded fast exit 2, but I don't see any documentation with it for installing it. It's a bunch of .dll's and such. Is it necessary? The patch documentation indicates it keeps Oblivion from crashing on exit?

Also is there any kind of favorites option in the mods library? I found a bunch of stuff in the armor section I'd like to try later, but I don't want to mess with that stuff now. Or do I just have to look for it again later?

[Stemin]

Its not quite that simple.

Before messing with faces (which is, as Striker intimated, a major pain in the butt, get your body's sorted out.

The easiest way to do this is to install EVE Eycandy Variants Expansion for the HGEC female body, with several choices of upper and lower bodies, nude or with underwear, along with the complete stock clothing and armor replacer, and then Roberts Male for males, which...someone else will have to link to because for the life of me I can never find it when I need to link to it. Mostly because I don't do anything with male bodies myself, so I don't put much thought into them.

I will take your suggestions on these.

As for faces, there are a few mods that will make NPCs look better, though I'm not up on the exact state of many of them. I know TNR, Tamriel NPCs Reborn (Revamped? whatever) was a big one, and there is always the Xeo line, but then you have to mess with Modular Beautiful People, and thats way over your current skill level.

I'm not sure if I should be offended or not. I mean I'm not an expert and I'm new to modding Oblivion, but I did use to program for MUD's back in high school using C. As long as it wasn't the core socket code for the network I did ok. I did have some trouble with pointers, but I have heard this is common and that's why they don't use them anymore. I'm not like completely ignorant to how these things work. I've also done some 3D modeling in autocad, which is obviously not the same as blender or 3d Studio Max, but it's a good primer. I've used Blender in the past for some really really basic stuff. Cut me a little slack here buddy

For the player, there are tons and tons of custom race mods available, I would suggest browsing the category and finding one you like.

Are you suggesting that using a new custom race is going to be easier or more what I'm looking for than mods for existing races?

Finally, I would suggest installing and learning how to use Wrye Bash and its BAIN installer, its intimidating at first, but eventually you WILL need it, and learning it now will make your life much easier down the road.

I looked at the documentation for that I think. That's the one that's supposed to somehow make mods more compatible with each other and do some kind of crash management for Oblivion?

[Stemin]

Check out Nehrim (www.Nehrim.de). It's a complete overhaul of Oblivion with many of the best mods already incorporated and it's basically one file to install. Been playing it for a few months now, and pretty much the only game I've ever played that made me jump outta my chair because I was startled by some creature in one of many creepy dungeon. The only thing is the excellent voice acting is done in German...as long as you don't mind subtitles. This is not to say Oblivion modded is not worth the effort, it certainly is. Nehrim is just another excellent Oblivion experience. New world, new map, new quests, the cities and dungeons are fantastic. Worth a look.

Good luck.

Galt

I'll look at it. I'm not really looking to replace Oblivion. I still want to play the game and get to know all the characters and places that are referred to by others who've played and NPC's and history from Skyrim. Also the German sound clips is a definite detractor from the immersion.

[Striker879]

One of my pet peeves with Wrye Bash is that the documentation is hard to locate before you install it, and the download page here at least has diddly for installation advice. It is a program with particular requirements (install order and version for Python for example) as well as different 'flavours' now being available (standalone, self installer etc.), something that was developed at least in part due to the number of people who had problems installing in the past (it always flabbergasted me why a simple step by step install procedure couldn't be included on the download page ... you had to search through countless forum postings looking for anything of that ilk).

Anyway, enough Bash bashing. For graphics improvements I like to point people towards Nitefox98's Noob up and running, a very well documented journey. The Wrye Bash section on Wrye Musings and alt3rn1ty's Wyre Bash Pictorial Guide are my choices for WB.

If you let me keep you bogged down with links to follow you'll never actually need to play the game.

- Edit - Bben46 is one of the moderators here ... he posted on comment on this thread back at post #21.

Edited by Striker879, 04 March 2012 - 08:16 PM.

[Stemin]

For graphics improvements I like to point people towards Nitefox98's Noob up and running, a very well documented journey.

I was reading this before when I was installing the patches... Quarl's texture patch. I thought I read that this was so processor intensive that it was screwing up people's game?

I have a pretty good system, 16gb ram, a quad core processor, 1gb video... But if the Oblivion process only uses so much ram it doesn't matter what my system has. I applied the 4gb patch to the oblivion.exe, but I'm not sure if I need to apply it to obse_loader or something else? Or if it's even necessary. Maybe quarl's is ok?

[Striker879]

The game doesn't use modern hardware to it's advantage. Things like the 4 Gb patch can help on the RAM usage front, but there's not much can be done to make this old game use multi-core processors. What Oblivion wants is a fast processor, which goes against the grain of modern developments on the CPU front. Pretty well any decent modern video card offers all the game will ever use, but more video memory (like you have) will allow things like Quarls, OBGE and antialiasing.

As far as I know the obse_loader calls Oblivion.exe and injects it's extra code so I think you'd apply the 4 Gb patch to Oblivion.exe only, but there may be other's with a more definitive answer to that question.

Something to keep in mind on the performance front is that this game is an RPG not a FPS title. It's still playable if you dip down below that 30 fps magic mark, where a lot of FPS players would be getting antsy if they dip below 60 fps. Oblivion is more about enjoying the nice scenery and then "Oh sh*t" when you get jumped by a bandit or two. Frames per second can become an issue when you start adding overhaul mods that put a lot more enemies into the game, but you'll seldom see more then a couple at once in the vanilla game's outdoor areas, and dungeons and ruins aren't as taxing for the system (and in some of those you don't have to work too hard to get a handful or more of enemies to fight at once when you're not careful).