InAComaDial999

I recently completed the Mages Guild questline and am now the Arch-Mage. Of course, most of the Council of Mages was wiped out during the quest, so the Arch-Mage's Tower is kind of lonely. I figured someone must have made a mod to repopulate the Council, but to my surprise there isn't one. (I know about the Origin of the Mages Guild mod, which does add the council, but that is way too big for my tastes). If I were to do this, I'd make the following NPCs become members of the Council of Mages a few days after the defeat of Mannimarco: - Raminus Polus - Tar-Meena - High Chancellor Ocato - Borissean - Gaspar Stegine These last two would receive a promotion to Master Wizard. I'd also promote Bothiel to Master WIzard, as she would become the new Steward of the Council, replacing Raminus. As far as Council activities, about all I would want is for them to meet once a week for a couple of hours, then return to their regular schedules. It's a small thing, but it would add atmosphere.

My mage has been adventuring in the northern climes a lot recently, what with the Bruma guild, Feldscar, Frostcrag Village, etc, and I'd really like to see more Nordic / cold weather clothing. Fur-lined hoods, clothes and robes made from wolf or bear pelts, unarmored boots and gloves that actually look like they are warm. The closest thing to that is the excellent Vahi's Wardrobe, but while her clothes are great the selection is limited.

I just finished the Mage's Guild quest earlier this week. I'm a pure spellcaster, level 21 at the time. Mannimarco was pretty disappointingly easy to kill. I summoned a Skeleton Champion to distract his summons, then hit him with Weakness to Magicka and Weakness to Fire, and then zapped him with a flurry of touch-range combined fire/frost/lightning spells. I have a "Dagger of the Leech", a plain old silver dagger that I enchanted with a 35-point Absorb Magicka at the Chironasium, so I hit him with that a few times in the process to keep up my Magicka. Down he went. Spells are by far the best way to deal with Mannimarco; remember that he's an Altmer so he's already vulnerable to it. As far as Mankar, last time I did that was over the summer with a paladin type character. I was wearing several enchanted armor bits (boots and gloves of the Atronach, etc) that helped with resisting / reflecting magic. And I had the Umbra sword. I'm afraid it wasn't very finesse heavy, I just went after the three of them and clobbered them, I probably had to quaff a few potions in the process. I remember it being fairly tough but not unbelievable.

I suggest replacing Alteration with Conjuration. Otherwise, you have all three of the Intelligence based skills as majors, which will make it much harder for you to get enough skill increases to get good attribute raises when you level up. Note that in general fighter-mage builds are pretty hard to play early on; you don't have a lot of strength and endurance, and at the same time your magic will suffer from reduced Spell Effectiveness due to your wearing armor. Later on it is a lot of fun though.

This doesn't work because esp files are "isolated" in the CS -- they can use references from esm files, but not from other esp's. This problem, and the ways around it, are described in detail in the CS Wiki De-Isolation Tutorial.

I don't think it is really possible to use showracemenu with a vampire character, the few times I tried it either crashed the game or caused weird things to happen. The game morphs your character anyway depending on which stage of vampirism you are at, so any changes you make would only last until the next time you either fed or progressed to the next stage. My suggestion would be to use the console to cure your vampirism, then edit your character, and then use the console again to re-enable the vampirism.

Actually, if you backed up the complete Oblivion directory (not just the Data folder) you should be able to copy the whole thing onto your new machine. Install Oblivion to C:/Games/Oblivion first, then rename your newly installed Oblivion folder to Oblivion.new, and then copy the backed-up folder to C:/Games/Oblivion. The only issue you may run into is if you did not also back up your INI file and you are running mods that depend on INI settings (like Darnified UI).

This is a known bug in the game: loading a save game with a female vampire character will result in the character having a male face. The workaround is to load an old save with that character before she became a vampire, then load the vampire save game. See this UESPWiki article for more details. The UOP never really fixed this for me. There are mods that fix this as well as removing some of the more unsightly vampirism effects. I am currently using Vampire Race Disabler, which removes the ugly aging and shader effect, but leaves the fangs, facial morphs, and eyes. My character looks good and loads with the proper face every time. Highly recommended.

Pretty much agree with Trey5511. I'm playing a pure mage right now (custom class, see below), currently at level 17. My combat magic strategy is to use Conjuration a lot, and to make custom Destruction spells using the spellmaking altar. You can make your own Destruction spells that are a lot more effective than any you can buy. Spells that combine fire,frost, and shock damage in one spell rather than just a single effect cost less mana to cast (i.e. 20 fire / 20 frost / 20 shock costs less than a 60 fire damage, but does the same total damage). Likewise spells with a smaller damage magnitude but a 2 or 3 second duration will do more total damage for the same casting cost than spells which do all their damage at once (i.e. 20 points with a 3 second duration costs less than a 60 point spell, but does the same total damage). So, I always have 2 Destruction spells hot-keyed: a ranged one with the 3 elemental effects, a 3-second duration, and area effect, which helps with the aiming problem; and then a touch-ranged one with no area effect for when things get up close and personal. Also, Illusion magic is extremely helpful, especially against multiple opponents. Invisibility and Shadow are good for sneaking, Turn Undead and Demoralize are really good for thinning out crowds if you get mobbed, and Command Creature / Command Humanoid basically turn enemies into temporary allies. I never wear armor and I don't rely on weapons to cause damage as such. However I always carry a weapon for blocking, and a one-handed weapon enchanted with Soul Trap or Drain Magicka can be really handy. I train up my Heavy Armor and Armorer skills so that I can raise my Endurance, and sometimes my Blunt or Hand to Hand so I can raise my Strength (needed for encumbrance). I also don't recommend playing any of the stock classes, due to their leveling issues. The class I'm playing now is this: The main design feature of the class is that it has two of the three skills governed by Intelligence, Wisdom, and Personality as majors, leaving Mysticism, Restoration, and Illusion as minor skills so that I can have additional skill increases on those attributes.

I just use Vampire Race Disabler. Takes away the horrible aging and skin effects, but leaves the eyes and bone transformations. That way you can actually have decent looking vampire characters. Count Hassildor looks like a distinguished gentleman again -- a scary one with red eyes and fangs, but distinguished :)

There is an Asari race mod.

Another thing to keep in mind is that Oblivion's game engine processes events and scripts on a per-frame basis. If you have a lot of mods that use scripts that run every frame, then that processing will necessarily impact your frame rate. I would think though that with the processor and GPU you have, you should be able to hit more than 60fps pretty consistently. My machine (Core i7 920, 6GB, Radeon 5870) has no problem keeping 60 FPS pretty much everywhere, indoors or out, in Oblivion at 1920x1080 with details maxed out (I always run with vsync enabled). I use a bunch of mods but nothing that globally replaces textures or places excessively complex meshes in the game world. But like I said there are plenty of things that can hit your FPS, stuff like CM Partners companions and all their scripting in particular are bad about that.

What frame rate are you getting at 63% utilization?

Low GPU utilization is a sign of video memory thrashing. That is, your video card is constantly swapping textures in and out of video memory. This causes the GPU to wait idle while the textures load, which is why you're seeing such low utilization. The cause of this is obvious: you're using a texture replacer with huge textures. Switch to one of the resized QTP versions, or just stick with vanilla textures.

@Rededge - yes, that's just how a lot of these mods are. The game engine is just not suitable for having lots of high-polygon models on the screen at once. That is why in vanilla Oblivion the cities are their own worldspace, because otherwise the number of models gets too large for even the fastest machine to cope with. Mods like BC are especially bad because they include so many other mods and it's hard to know what is causing the FPS drag. A big problem typically is new structures, like custom buildings or ships (I love Mr Siika's ships but they are just way too polygon intensive) that bog the whole game down. You haven't been "duped" by the screenshots exactly. But you have to understand that a lot of people put in a lot of mods just to take screenshots. Personally I find a lot of the stuff people recommend, ends up making the game unplayable for me, because I want it to run at 60fps all the time. FWIW I'm running a i7 920 with 6GB RAM and a Radeon HD5970. I run at 1920x1080 with HDR and 4xAA / 4xAF and I normally get 60fps everywhere. But just dropping one of Mr Siika's custom ships into Anvil harbor will drop my FPS there to 45 or so.

Sounds like a corrupt spawn point. Try going into an interior cell somewhere, wait (with the T key) 24 hours, five times, save your game, restart and reload, and try going there again. Waiting five days will clear the cell, so if it's something like a corrupt spawn point that should get rid of it. Also: are you running any mods?

Make a copy of your Oblivion install directory (c:\program files\Bethesda Softworks\Oblivion or wherever you installed it) as well as your My Documents\My Games\Oblivion, reinstall the game, copy out the esp you want, then delete the new directories and rename the copies to their original names.

I got tired of having to switch DVDs whenever I wanted to play a different game, so I did this as well. Note that I did this with a legitimate, store-bought copy of the game. I had already installed the game from the DVD as per normal. 1 - download and install ISO Recorder v3.1. Once you have it installed, insert your Oblivion disk into your DVD drive. Open up My Computer, right click the DVD drive, and select "Create Image from CD/DVD". You will end up creating an .iso file of your Oblivion DVD, which is about 4 gigabytes in size. Once this is done, eject the Oblivion DVD. 2 - download and install Virtual CloneDrive. Once you have it installed, open up My Computer. You'll see a new DVD/BD-Rom drive icon, which is the virtual DVD drive. Right click the drive icon, select Virtual CloneDrive, select Mount, and browse to the ISO file you created in the previous step. 3 - The virtual DVD drive will now look like a mounted Oblivion DVD. Double click it and run the Oblivion launcher. You need to actually start the game from the launcher on the virtual DVD one time, as this will tell Oblivion to always look for the Oblivion DVD at this drive letter in the future. And that's it. Now you can start Oblivion the normal way (i.e. with the OBSE launcher, or just via the link on your desktop, etc) and it will work fine. I've done this with several other games, Virtual CloneDrive lets me easily switch between DVD images without having to mess with my drive or worry about scratching discs.

What I mean is that to get rid of microstuttering, your Master section in OSR.ini should look like this: Master = { _comment = You can turn on or off each distinct feature from here. bManageFPS = 0 bHookCriticalSections = 0 bHookHashtables = 0 bReplaceHeap = 0 bLogToConsole = 0 bFix64Hertz = 1 bFlushLog = 0 iSchedulingResolution = 1 iMainHookPoint = 0 } In other words, you don't need the FPS cap or any of the other stuff to remove microstutter. Setting the timing resolution to 1 and enabling the 64 Hz fix takes care of the microstuttering.

A real common cause of CTDs on startup is having an .esp enabled that depends on a .esm which is not enabled. But it's just one potential cause. Why don't you post your actual load order?

Really the stutter is caused by the 60hz problem. That is, your monitor runs at 60hz, but Oblivion wants to render at 64hz, and the resultant skipping causes the microstutter. All you normally have to do to get rid of it is enable bFix64Hertz = 1 and iSchedulingResolution = 1 in the OSR ini file and leave all the other settings at 0. The other stuff OSR does can lead to problems. You definitely don't need to enable the FPS cap to get rid of microstutter. And just about all the stuff the "tweak guides" tell you to do will lead to problems.

There is no merging because the AWLS team wants their mod to remain compatible with every other mod without requiring patches. IWR's light sources are static objects, they are always in the same spot and not attached to anything. If you have a mod that moves or adds buildings, you can end up with light sources floating in the wrong spot. The only way to fix that would be a compatibility patch for IWR that moves the light source to match the new layout. Maintaining compatibility with every mod out there would require an insane number of patches. The approach AWLS took requires none of this. Also, one clarification. You said: The README file is referring to the Illumination Within texture pack for AWLS, not the Illumination Within mod itself. When you install AWLS, you really install two things: a set of meshes, and a set of textures. There are several different texture packs available, and one of them uses the textures from IWR. And, once again, you should not use IWR with AWLS, they don't work together.

AWLS uses animated meshes to create illuminated windows. It replaces the window meshes that are used by the various building types, with ones that have a "lit" and "unlit" state. It does not modify the buildings themselves, just the windows, so it will work with any mod that uses the stock window meshes (which is basically all of them). So if you have a mod that adds a new village, house, cathedral, etc, they will have lit windows. AWLS controls the timing of the lighted windows using scripts which monitor the time and weather and set the state of the windows accordingly. This is where the CPU hit happens with AWLS. On the other hand, IWR replaces specific windows, not all of them. It also places light sources at specific places in the world. This means that it works fine with vanilla buildings and towns, but will not know about structures added by mods. And it has a much higher performance hit because of the real light sources, which cast shadows, reflections, etc, and really tax your graphics card. AWLS does not use "real" light sources, so its FPS impact is much less than IWR. Even the most complex AWLS script, the "advanced" one, has a much smaller framerate hit than IWR. These mods should not be used together as they conflict.

It is possible to use a 360 or similar controller with Oblivion, but it won't really work the same as on the 360. You really need a mouse to play the game properly on a PC. Most people who have played both on the 360 and on the PC, myself included, feel that the mouse + ASDW keys combination on the PC is quicker and more intuitive than playing with a controller on the 360.

Use OBMM and move Hentai Mania.esp above the Xeoex.esp in the load order.