JinixElder

I've used oblivion's construction set for years and have an enormous mod that crashes when I play my mod or go to a certain area that has tons of things to load in. This also happens in the CS when I go to the same area. I can -in the game - get close to the area from the surrounding areas but if I get too close it crashes. - I'm assumming it's a memory thing. I have 6gb but it occurred when I got a new video card nVidia GeForce GTX 760 With 4gb video memory. my windows7system has 6 gb ram powered with intel 2quad Q9300. My question is: What is the optimum way to set up memory so that Oblivion and it's CS maximize ram? Is my Video Card too new ? I'm assumming that new cards are to play the very latest games - but I don't have any 'new' games other than Skyrim which I don't like modding as much, because the CS is too much of a tronlike maze to me. Windows performance tool report the card and video memory have a subscore of 7.9 ?

In response to post #23836199. #23839154, #23845829, #23853369, #23858174, #23858619, #23868714, #23869794, #23870749, #23874494, #23889664, #23897239, #23907889 are all replies on the same post. It's not so much the getting paid bit - it's the legal crappola that goes along with it.... and the direction that takes. The copyright infringements etc... for instance each 'model' would now be owned and no modifications made without a lawsuit. No simple retexturing without signing legal forms and getting permission for changes etc... Eventually the big games will have to deal with modders forming into companies trying to reign in modders for profit. From love of modding to greed for money.

I have found the mod and will have a go with the heads and post my thoughts later.

I downloaded the mod but from what I read it is for Tamriel but I use my own worlds so not sure if its applic' to me.... however I will give it a try and see if I can use the ideas somehow. As that one really dark SS is what I want.

I guess I am the OLDEST member... I am in my 74th year. Born in 1941 Used Morrowind/Oblivion construction sets since they were released. I spend at least 70 hours a week with my mods... sometimes more. My NPCs are my sole friends and I have personally formed each one of the 1200 or so, to keep me happy and amused whenever I visit them in the new worlds I have made plus the MooCow Islands world. I thank the makers of the game for hobby they have given me and all the modders and modelers for the inspiration and bits and pieces that I have commandeered into my mod to use as is or chopped up, remodelled and retextured and used in my hobby. I can't imagine what a boring retirement I would have had to live without it. I shudder when I think of seniors my age who sit watching TV or/and gossiping all the time.

umm? okay I'll try that. I've just reinstalled Morrowind Vanilla and put back my own mod that adds new lands in the North and rebuilt Balmora and other places with my own textures and objects etc. I am going to stick to what works for me.

You will have to bite the bullet and learn Blender for the modelling. Of which I suggest using Youtube vids to learn the program. I, fortunately, have 3dsmax version 8 . Which is how I make models and is perfect (as far as perfect goes) for modeling. For textures and retexturing I use Paint.net to make the textures and NIFskope to apply them. NifSkope does a ton of other things and also requires a great deal of learning and Youtube Vid watching. It requires spending (for me anyway) many, many hours of what can be tedious learning thru' trial and error. Plus it's really a waste of time as less and less support is out there as everyone moves on to the next way of doing things. NEVER update either your 3d program/texture programs once you have everything working.as updates are useless for these old beth games.and are made to do comp[letely different things. However for me it is a hobby I have played at for many years and I have mods thats I contantly work on that no one will ever see and are larger than the original games - between Morrowind and Oblivion I have 40 gb of data growing as I add more models and textures etc. Plus I'm not clever at all and my meshes are way to 'heavy' and slow down the mod to a crawl in places. One mod now crashes when I near the town which has 500 NPCs - all with individual AI that keeps them busy all day running around doing things that can crash - I fix - add more etc. So my Mods never are complete. I must have detail - lots of detail - no 2 houses alike - no crates and barrels alike - plants must have variation in color and size. Interiors, of which I have hundreds of, must all look different - all paintings and furniture must be textured differently and windows must all look different. I also make lots of Interiors that are exteriors so you can walk in and out without opening a door and see thru the windows. I also make Interiors 'public' so that anyone can and does show up in them. I can (and do) spend hours 'watching' my creations live their lives and with such huge variety I often discover places and people I had completely forgotten about over the years. Lately I have made dozens of different races so I can have completely different looking people. Playing the game for me is to go into my mods - and spend hours watching the action and interaction between NPCS. I could go on and on but it's rather pointless as no-one else could care less I'm sure. So my advice to you is to do this for your own enjoyment and learn for fun's sake - without expecting any rewards except your own pure enjoyment. I'm old and retired and have nothing better to do. My next major step is to learn animation so I can make NPCs do what I want them to do. Spend a LOT of time watching Youtube vids thats a major source of help with modeling and texturing... and goodluck with your modding.

All the grass, weeds etc have collision and I cannot walk thru them. To walk around morrowind I have to use the console tcl or levitate over the grass. NPCs get stuck in the grass and cannot follow their AI. Is there a way to REMOVE collision from VURTS grasses/weeds/swamp plants etc. I removed anything with his name on it but all I got out of that was thousands of yellow triangles error markers in every exterior cell. Which I then deleted thousands by hand in the CS. I cannot find any reference to a similar problem so I wondered if someone else may have discovered why the landcovers have collision?

Thanks for the answer: That's interesting but I don't want weather mods. No clouds and perfect weather is what I want but black nights. Can you tell me more about the .ini tweaks? Is there a 'dark' filter that can be used? Can one make their own sky so there are no stars or moons?

I want to create true to life dark nights - like unable to see more than a few feet ahead unless there is a light source. I would have thougt this easy but obviously it is not as there are no simple instructions I can find. Does any one know of a way to make the outside like an interior so you can actually remove ALL light except the ones you want to add? Are there tweaks to ini files or graphic settings that can do this? Thanks for any responces.

A Playable Goblin Race ? I love goblins and I would like to put them as NPCs in my mod. How majorly hard is it to "adjust" goblins to "people". I mean if there can be elves, orks, lizards and tiger people why not ethnic goblins? They seem almost like normal NpCs already but can't be set up with packages as other NPCs. Any one else like goblins? When I was a small kid I always liked goblins and hated fairies - how strange is that?

Thanks again... Well I can just open any old texture change it to a dds - resize to 512 or 1024 and 'paste' it to a head - the head is humanhead.nif but I can call the texture anything I want. Also, I can 'paste' and texture without _n.dds maps to any body nif and have done it with dozens of faces, ears and bodies. In the last few days I have made over 20 different races using different textures All without doing anything with a _n.dds file.... BUT, I have not been able to do it with clothes. So I'm sure that you are absolutely correct about normal maps, but it does not seem to be a requirement for faces and bodies. I AM going to follow your instructions until I can do clothes. I have 100s of different faces etc but their clothes are getting boring...

Here is something I have found out that has helped, but not completely ended ... my NPCs shuffling has subsided radically since I installed the " 4 gb patch". So it seems to have helped my "extremely overcrowded with activity" world with a ram boost, so maybe it has something to do with the priorties of the game engine that are depending on allotting memory space to proceed.

Thank you so much for the helpful advice ... the first thing that made it all work was the ""...Compression: DTX5 - Tick the Generate Mipmaps flag - OK..."" I am using paintdotnet and my saves were in DTX1 and no mip maps. Having noticed that...and making the changes... all my textures now fit on heads, ears and bodies. Whatever face I want to make and any body skin with any textured ears...(all without normal maps) However, clothes are still the unsuccessful part, but I know what to do as it is just the matter of making .n maps...which I would have done by now if I didn't have a couple of days of recovering after some major crashes and lock outs from the CS. But all is well now and I'm adding lots of new races and faces and making everything far more interesting in my world. Not to mention a renewed interest in 3dmodelling with an old version of 3dmax 8 on a recovered hardrive. So thanks again.

Why thank you for that helpful page, I have jotted it down for reference while playing with my mod. ...I still would like to hear about maximum wander distances if any one else knows who reads this. Ta

Thanks for replying IkeCoast,... I'll explain the "enormous issues' later... The 'bipod' bit is like this... I can easiely change textures in Nifskope, but the problem occurs after I have saved it and then get the error about bipod when the CS loads them. Can you give me a simple step by step to make a shirt red instead of green using a lower shirt as an example? Such as load shirt in Nifskope, change texture, save, open up CS without error message., apply to NPC and view with game. I about to try the maps using gimp.. I'll post my results after....

How do I 'measure' how far it is between cell borders? Is a sq cell a sq acre or sq mile? What is the maximum distance that you can set a NPC's wander at? I've done 100,000 but can never tell if that actually works or not... any one know?

Thank you for your help I can now easily change the texture face of all the races especially my own races, without black faces - I also have been able to change the ear textures too - BUT... I am having enormous problems with body textures even 'tho I have used normal maps. I did succeed with one race but cannot reproduce what I did... are there more texture conditions for bodies? When I change clothing textures I get a warning that it needs to have biped slots selected in the editor. But it all apears to be correctly chosen? I have not stopped modding my races since starting this post. .. it's amazing what else I have accomplished 'tho. I cannot think of a better way to spend my senior years than working on my mod. My mod which I have worked on since TESCS was released - yep! same mod - thousands of hours of my time... I'll drop dead of old age in front of this computer and no-one will ever see it, let alone play it... but I cannot stop or I'll croak from boredom.

Fantastic help! Thank you both! I have copied these answers to a text file and I'm going to see what I can do now --- I'll let you know if I can find success with my blackies now....

Last night I ran into a major problem when some of my NPCs had black, textureless faces and ears. It took me ages to finally track down and fix the problem. But a question remains that has me baffled... To change a texture on a human face: Imperial nif and any old texure/image for a face sometimes it works but... most of the time I get just a black face and ears. Even tho' size, path.etc., is correct. Question: If all the nifs of my races faces are imperial can you just use ANY texture image to overlay the face part nif.? I have done it with success a few times for instance just to see I overlaid a book texture and it lit up the face great, but when I put an exact sized carefully crafted face image I get black-no texture? I 'll work some more on this but maybe I have too many homemade races - 14 so far.

I'm sure you are right, however I now find them doing a shuffle "miles" away from anyone else, outside in a wilderness area... eventually they may move and continue their journeys ...or not. I over burden my poor people too much I know some of them have at least 6 different things to do with lots of travel, wander, eat and sleeps included. It's not as fatal as what happened next..... see my next topic about black faces.

Thanks everyone for the answers. Unfortunately, I still have the walking in one place problem and altho' I have paths and xmarkers etc everywhere - I even find myself doing it as I walk around in the mod. In the case of a crowded hotel with 20 guests or so I find they can spend all night trying to find a bed they like even tho' I have placed lots of sleeping areas They all find a sitting place in the bar or restaurant without much effort but in a crowd they shuffle a lot - looks like they are working a treadmil... It's probably my own unique problem as my mod is way too big with many hundreds of NPCs mingling and crossing paths - all with different AI, so anything is possible.

Okay so i have a problem where sometimes either myself or NPCs are walking but not getting anywhere. Eventually they get going but can be stuck walking like when they are against a wall in an open space with nothing around them. They just do this silly shuffle., It's not a pathing thing nor does it appear to be a collision thing. Also is it necessary to path a small interior?

I looked at the screenies. I think that is really different and interesting and wish you goodluck with it. I have a huge mod that I have put thousands of hours into since Oblivion's editor came out. It contains hundreds of "homemade' graphics and models with hundreds of new NPCs with different shedules and thousands of situation possiblities. Interiors packed tight with things so it looks more lived in - with clutter and mess galore. I've had hundreds of problems, errors etc over the years and certainly had it slow down in many places - I never get the speed of the 'game' back to vanilla speed. For me it does not matter because I would never release it - it's for my own fun. I add things and then go play it for a couple hours and then mod it more and start playing again. The mod has no "play" value at all - no quests etc. Anytime I go into my world it could take at least 30+ hours of playing just to go everywhere. My NPCs are so varied in where they go and what they do that everytime I watch them they are surprising me with the lives they are into and what they end up doing. I am a true puppet master with about 500 "puppets" that 'pull' their own strings. For me my world is truely 'my' world and the only thing I can add to help is to make backups of your mod - I have hundreds of backups and can go back to any backup for over 8 years (all the same continuous mod. My Oblivion folder (not counting ANY mods -just textures, models and music) is over 20 gb. Point is, if the mod is just for your own fun then the slowdown does not really matter . If you plan to release it and it's too slow then the only thing I could suggest is making the textures a smaller resolution. or maybe make really low res textures for the distance graphics.(.far) Anyway I do like your screen shots - if it works it'll be played by lots of players I'm sure. To 'test' the popularity of such a mod... why not make a small interior world 'Tron like' with a few quests etc as an addon mod to Oblivion.

Has anyone made or can make pond life? Frogs, Toads, Turtles, Lizards... alligators and snakes? I want to have more assorted life like the Morrowind mods with extra birds, butterflies and assorted land and water life - are there animation restrictions in Oblivion or is it just not that important to do? I would like to see frogs hopping about and turtles in the swamps.