Jenrai

Yeah, but theres one more ( I think) that it freaks out later on. There is a patch available to fix it but rather than adding anything else to this already highly complex mod I just turned off the soulgem features, then turned it back on after. Jen

Don't use the no DVD crack. Don't. The word Crack in anything is never good. Ever. Bone China. Your wrist. Your car's spare tyre when you are returning from holiday. Don't don't don't do it. If you must use a no CD version, virtually mount the game somewhere. Much easier, much better performance, much less chance of it borking your game and your mods. Back on track. If you have Shivering Isles, do not install the oblivion 1.20416 patch. Don't do it. It won't work. It'll get clipped by the installer. Install the Shivering Isles 1.20416 patch instead. Ya know. Like it tells you to on the website... ho hum. If you don't have Shivering Isles, use the basic 1.20416 patch. And get Shivering Isles. Seriously. Lord Sheogorath will not be amused if you don't. And its probably the single best add on for anything Beth have ever made. Probably. If you have the Game of the Year (aka GotY) edition, you have the latest patch, but only if you've installed Shivering Isles from that edition. For some bizarre reason, Beth put the patch on the SI install, not the Oblivion one. Finally - Fire up the game. keep your eye on the bottom left corner of the screen. See the numbers? Thats your version number. If that says 1.20416, you're not going to ba able to install the patch. Coz you've already got it. Jenrai

All at the same time and without playtesting? Thats generally a bad idea. Install a couple at a time, tops. And then play for a couple of hours. I have one pretty much maxxed out charector I use for testing everything and looking for obvious problems everytime I install more than 1 or 2 mods. Good call on all three. Decent utilities. Excepting OBMM's conflict detector - it flags anything that changes anything in a cell that another mod already changes as a conflict. 209 pages? :D I bet my conflict report for the IC Market district alone is double that. Put it this way - if a mod drops a potion at one end of a large exterior cell, and another mod drops a knife at the opposite end, OBMM will show them as conflicting mods. Usually as 'red' conflicts. Took me a while to realise this wasn't actually anything serious too. See previous comment. The worst thing about OBMM is that conflict detector. It flags anything and everything. Boss reorganises your load order. It can avoid problems (and lots of them, many of them major ones) by doing that, but it doesn't change any of the mods. At all. If OBMM's dodgy conflict detector flagged em as conflicting before you ran boss, they'll still conflict after it. The reason is simply that they are altering the same cells/folders whatever as one and other. (I don't mean to give OBMM such a bad press, and indeed the conflict detector can have its uses if you know one of a pair of conflicting mods it makes it a sinch to find the other, for example - but its executed badly... all those scary red letters on the report make people panic) Basically, what I'm trying to say is thus; Go for tried and tested (and preferably small) mods first until you get used to installing them. Play test them a little. See if you get a marked increase in glitches/CTDs... (hey, its Oblivion. You are going to have CTDs. And glitches. Mods or no mods) ignore OBMM's coinflict detector until you think you have a problem. Then it can be of use to find that problem. But don't expect to have problems just because OBMM's conflict detector says you will. Experience is the name of the game with modding Oblivion. The more you do it, the better you'll get at it. Jenrai

The no-cd cracks generally work exactly the same way as the pirated versions. No Obi ESM or an altered one = No Mods, as Oblivion ESM is a requirement for every mod out there. They all gotta start somewhere, and thats where they start. Forget steam and Ebay though. Go to your local second hand game shop. Gamestation in the UK have Oblivion for like £6 so no 2 year download (gotta love Steams DL servers. :| Not. ) and no chance of getting a dodgy disk. And if you do they'll swap it for you if you take it back within a couple of days. Jenrai

Its a known issue with Unnecessary violence because of the Soul Gems modifications that mod makes. Turn off that feature in the UV ini (the document that you have to edit to enable the mod or it kills ya) and you'll be able to do it. Jenrai

Marauders are added by the vanilla game, same as bandits. They're just tougher with better equipment and stuff. And they don't really like Bandits - IE where they are both found in the game world they're usually beating each other witless. There's a cave near Bravil that I hit early on in every playthrough to kill off the survivors and get all the kit from like 20 bandits and marauders by just wiping out the three or four guys who survive. Theres also a Fort but I've never been able to find that one again. Barbarians are added by MMM and I think are similar type of enemy, just tougher still. There is (I believe) a version of MMM for Frans (or vice-versa) that will cut down this problem. Failing that, get FCOM. If you are using Frans and MMM, but not the especially compatable versions, you likely will have a lot more enemies in open worldspace as both add more spawnpoints as well as more enemy types. Jenrai

Actually, DON'T get the Oblivion Patch if you have Shivering Isles. Shivering ups the base install of the game to like 1.16 something. (Whatever it was its not the newest) so you only need the Shivering Isles 1.20416 patch. The Oblivion patch won't install if you have SI as you already have some of the files needed in the patch in the SI install. That might be why your install got shot down. Jenrai

Best way to copy a spell over would be to use the CS on the original mod to find the spell, then I think you copy (export) that item, in this case the spell, to the other mod. I'm not sure how well this works with magic. I've only tried it with items and weapons to copy all the freebie stuff into my own weaponshop mod. (for me and me alone. Won't be being released as seeking all the permissions for some 75+ mods would take me an age, I just like don't getting stuff for free) Alternatively, if its a mod you are changing for yourself, you can simply open that mod, cut out the rest of the clutter around it and then start building your mod upwards from that spell. As for OBSE enabled mods... no, they won't work if you don't use the OBSE launcher. Your mod should appear though, as long as it is checked in the launcher (whichever one you use) OBSE doesn't change load order or what mods are loaded. Jenrai.

Do you mean the directory is missing completely? As in its installed somewhere else, or what? That is the default installation directory if you didn't change anything during in the install process. Jenrai

You're welcome Valkree. We've all been there (some more recently than others. :) ) and if it wasn't for help from the community then a lot of us probably wouldn't have got into modding/playing mods at all. The guys here at the Nexus are particularly helpful. To answer your quick question about ESPs/ESMs without using all the terminology and stuff, the easiest way I find to remember it, would be ESM = Master File - adds scripts, resources, programs for the larger mods that use a lot of none-vanilla data. ESP = Program File - Actually makes the mod work... activates it, if you like. As long as its partner ESM is present, if it has one. Many don't. Generally you'll find the larger the mod the more likely it is to have both an ESM and an ESP, but some mods (body replaces, usually, but a couple of others too) have neither, and just replace a couple of textures/meshes from the vanilla game to slightly change things. I know thats not "literally" correct, but its the most sense I've managed to make of it without giving myself a headache or making my eyes bleed reading all the jargon. Jenrai

Bah. I didn't. Beth have really dropped the ball killing off the official DLC site. :( Anyways... briefly back on topic for the OP - Get a few small mods... say R19 of Saiden Storms Akatosh Mount (just because its a rockin steed) and a few weapons and armour mods (for ease of testing something that you don't have to quest for but just find - Gizmodian has released a belting little weapon set just lately but I'll be damned if I can remember its name) & install them manually, just for practice purposes. Fire up the game, check the esps, and go find em. If they are there, quit the game, uninstall the mods (usually you'll only have like 3 - 4 files with a single weapon or peice of armour to hunt down and delete - remember to keep your original zip files so you can identify what file the mod placed where for ease of uninstalling) and then make your omod out of em and try again. If they are still there, you dun good, grasshopper. Experimenting and experience is still the best, if not the only way, to find out what mods work and what don't for you, and the all important bit of wether or not you like the mod in the first place. But get used to installing small mods first, and manually, before you move onto the larger mods and the installers like Bain and OMOD. It'll help you spot problems before they occur and in some cases, fix broken mods without breaking a sweat. Jenrai

Eh... maybe I'ma gettin confused... but if you used the steam launcher with some product or other it shot it apart if you had modified the game directory. That said I never had Oblivion or any add-ons from steam. So chances are it was ETW or something. My bad. As for D2D... really? Hmmm... suddenly feeling tempted to get the rest of the DLCs from em... (they do the KotN version with all the DLCs) if its not going to break my mods. From a lot of the "Heeeeelp meeeees!" threads on here and other Oblivion Mod forums I was under the impression that it would. Guess thats me jumping to conclusions again. :D Jen

Generally, invisible body parts come from one of two things. Either, as above, the mesh is not in the right place, or you're equipping it on the wrong type of body. Yeah, I know this usually just leads to clipping, however, trying equipping Apachi's shadow cloak on a Roberts male body and all you get is vanishing hair. Equip on a female using HGEC and it works just dandy. Jen

Alternatively, give her them, then go start a fight. If they are stat/ability booster rings she will likely equip them before or during combat. Not sure how often the scripts run and I'm not using CM at the minute, though I do have it installed somewhere. If they are pose/animation rings, scratch all that. She's not gonna be much use to you if she starts dancing when the ten Bandits jump on you. Though it would look bloody funny. Jenrai

Yeah, I agree with Ben... one other thing to watch out for when using OMOD & the add archive feature is that some mods contain more than one Archive. Make sure you've got all the archives you need, and unzip them to the same location, add everything (textures/meshes/sounds/esm/esp) to the one data folder and then Omod that. I know you can add multiple archives to the same omod in the creation phase, but this way is quicker, more thorough, and more likely to show up any potential conflicts with existing mods. Plus, in the case of larger mods, how do you know you've not missed an archive if there are seven or eight? The creation panel only shows the ESM's/ESP's that are in the archives you've selected. OBMM's OMOD, just like Wrye Bash's Bain, is a fantastic installer utility, but ideally you want a little basic knowledge of installing mods manually before you become over-dependant on these. Jenrai

Take any original item off of her that she has equipped in the same slots... that should make her switch. Usually, CM's usually automatically use whatever they have that is best for the job in hand. Jenrai

Two very silly questions; 1 - Where did you get your game from? If its D2D or Steam, more often than not there own copyright protection systems block attempts to mod a game. If its hacked, forget it. Cracked Oblivion ESM = No mods. 2 - Have you definately checked the boxes for the mods in whatever launcher program you use. The number of times I've spent ages looking for things in game, then quit in a huff to examine the mod in the CS, found nothing wrong and launched again only to realise that I hadn't checked it in the first place... well, lets just say I can't count them all on both hands. Jenrai

Ahem... bump... :) Sorry, but this vanished off the first page in like a couple of hours. Not gonna get any answers if no one sees it now, am I? Jen

So, I'm running through a new toon trying a few different things, including Region Revived, Lake Rumare (ace mod... first time I've tried it) but with a slight problem... it conflicts with 2 of my "constants" ... namely Unique Landscapes, Imperial Isle and Ruined Tails Tale 3.0. These are both mods I love, and I'm not sure which ones i would want to deactivate (if any) I have a couple of little side projects I'm working on to make all the mods and patches work together in my 'main' game already, and would love to add RR to that game, but before I add something else to my seemingly never-ending "to do list", does one already exist? I have the RR/UL patch, but I still seem to have a lotta land tears and the Inn added by RTT sits right on top of one of the new houses from RR... so i thought I would ask you lovely fellas here at the Nexus if there is a patch that would get all three working comfortably, side by side? Thanks in advance. Jenrai.

You're welcome. Wish I coulda helped a bit more. Tends to be easier when you're actually sat there. heh. As for the card, make it £60 (as I said, I know money don't grow on trees) and find your nearest Maplin. You can pick up those 1gb MSI Nvidia cards I mentioned for around £70 at the moment, so if you've got a wait on your hands they'll have likely come down more. I can grab them a little cheaper from my wholesaler, but thats not a right lot of use to you, unfortunately, considering he shouldn't really even be selling to me. Jen

To be honest, I expected worse... I don't see an obvious reason that would be slowing your system down too much. Theres nothing there thats gulping either memory or processing. Hmm. Confused. Is it just Oblivion that seems to run slow or do other games/programs seem to be spitting feathers too? Does your computer seem to be running hot? Silly questions, I know, just trying to help. :confused: :wallbash: Theres certainly nothing there that would be inhibiting your processor too much. There are a few things I don't recognise, but hey. Not sure if the search index one is the same one as I was ranting about. heh heh.

The Shivering Isles. No wait... Bloodmoon. No... definately the Shivering Isles. Because Lord Sheogorath is a comic genius. Jenrai

Is that with 'show processes from all users' selected? About half the ones on my list are 'svchost.exe', which shouldn't be messed with. I have that... about 4 times, iirc... And no, I don't touch it. I might be being generous saying 20, but basically, having spent many a long and arduous hour killing things in my computers over the years just to see what it actually does, I now use the "run -> msconfig" command prompt to kill almost everything once my computer has started up for the first time. Has 2 very noticable effects: 1- It starts up like a damn whippet. turn it on, turn around to look for something, glance up and its there, impatiently tapping its virtual foot waiting for a password so it can carry on. 2- Finding problems when they occur (when - not if. This is windows afterall) tends to be sooooo much easier. If you're only firing it up for gaming purposes a lot of things can be disabled. Java, for example. It don't drink much unless its actually doing something, resources wise, but every little helps, right? Update schedulers are another one. As long as you remember to run them every once in a while, theres no harm in killing those. Adobe programs - everything from reader to paintshop pro) tend to start automatically. Apple programs do. Quicktime. Always always always seems to find a way to force itself to start up though somehow that one. Soundmanagers. Absolutely tosh. They do nothing unless you actually want to change something anyways so launch em by hand if you do. 3rd party media players - one or two of these start up automatically and run in the background. Personally I just go for winamp anyways, which doesnt autostart, but hey thats not always to everyones tastes. Windows Indexing. Lord WHY? Why oh why oh why did they put an indexing system (only in certain versions, admittedly) of windows so it can keep track of what is being put where and then make me have to use the search command anyways? It doesn't even make searches any damn faster. You get the idea. heh heh. We'd be sat here an awfully long time going through every single process on everyones computer trying to do this, and at the end of the day, you will have things that I have no idea what they do so I wouldn't say yay or nay to disabling them anyways. The fact that shutting off Norton bought you a few FPS does tend to make me lean towards the idea that your computer might just have a little too much to do at once though... but that could be an easy mis-diagnosis, and like I said, Norton is an exceptional processes glutton. Jenrai

heh heh heh. Yeah... they are thick, aren't they? Tell me, these wouldn't be the two by Bruma's west wall, would they? Everytime I get up into the mountains, those two are kicking the snot out of each other. I've "inherited" about 10 Silver bows and countless arrows from them, not to mention a whole boatload of armour which I've then sold off for a tidy profit. I think the best suicide I've ever seen was the Highwayman who spawns on the fencless bridge across the river near the IC. He ran at me to ask for my money, tripped, fell off the edge of the bridge... (at least thats what I told myself. Obviously it was just appauling pathfinding) He would likely have survived, too, but he hit one of the legs of the bridge on the way down... and seemed to bounce off it. He was dead before he hit the water. Jen

I dunno what game booster is, tbh, I've always preffered doing it by hand. Things like cftmon (useless programming for voice recognition commands that starts when windows does- why? not a clue) can be safely killed, even though it is part of windows. I try to keep my active processes list below 20 if I'm gaming/watching movies, though that is a very, very skeletal set up, and I know my system can handle more but I like to have it running at top quality without negatively impacting performance. Is your comp set to apply its own virtual memory? You have 4gb of ram so you should have plenty of VM, but sometimes it just decides to use an imaginary user defined number that is so small it kills performance - I've seen this a couple of times and think it might be a hangover from spyware/viral infection. Never seen it on my system but I have on others that I've been fixing. Another silly one just occured to me - do you use any RAM monitoring programs? There are some out there that whilst they do free up RAM, munch through processing resources so they actually negatively impact performance instead of boosting it. Jen