dharh

Backstory, new dialog, maybe even questlines for each of the Housecarls to explore them, their personality, and maybe provide closure to something in their past or not, can be simple or complex. We know next to nothing about our Housecarls. Why is Lydia so dejected and suicidal? Why does that suddenly change when you marry her and even more when you adopt? How did Rayya, and Redguard from Hammerfel, become a housecarl? Valdimar is the only Housecarl to use magic. I focus on some of the oddities of the housecarls, but I think each deserves their own story that we can explore to learn what makes each tick. If along the way that strengthens the bond between the Dragonborn and them, for the better. Additional ideas, thoughts, welcome.

Are you using Vortex or another mod manger? Make sure you can run the launcher through steam and then the game from the launcher. Sometimes background things like 'redistributables' need to be installed. Then use your normal method to launch the game.

You should definitely uninstall/remove all those lslibs. Did you install the .net sdk? Once the sdk is installed and you have a lslib looking correct, try Re-Installing each mod one by one through the Vortex interface.

.NET programmer here. Of course this would be the problem. Somewhere, someone, forgot to make sure the new version of .NET was dependent on deployment of the new version of LsLib\Divine. Edit: Just to add as a second voice, this does work. I have not verified that just installing the runtime compiler for .NET 8 instead of the whole SDK works. Second Edit: Not sure about other mod managers, but you may need to re-install all mods in Vortex if you are still having problems in game with mods being missing after fixing the LsLib\Divine issue. I think the load order does not properly refresh itself after the fact. Re-installing each mod one by one seems to fix this.

Thanks for the comment. That is exactly what I intend to do. Act like the unofficial patches are official and patch them into the BSA files. Sounds like I have a long ways to go before I get anywhere near your mod collection, but you're proof that using BSAs helps quite a bit. And yeah pyffing stuff seems to have been making a huge difference for me already and I haven't even done the official BSAs yet. I'm curious how far you go with pyffing meshes as from the stuff i've read certain meshes can be optimized quite a bit (Architecture, Clutter, Dungeons, Furniture, Landscape, Plants, Rocks, Sky), others not so much, and even some (hair, helmet, some creatures, some clothes) can get bugged out.

Id also suggest if you don't want to make it esp modular, then make it setting modular. Ability to turn off the energy system in game. etc.

I guess im converted. Any idea if they support 10X sub-sub packages? Guess I could figure that out for myself later. Anyway, thanks for schoolin me.

An IF DailogYesNo prompt is too simple an example. A Switch "Option 1","Option 2","Option 3",..."Option 7", is what id be going for. Also having nested options. Where a sub-package depends on a previous sub-package. If I choose option 2, I might have certain things I can choose from in the next dialog box, if I choose 7, I get a different set of options. I would kill for a script command to for one package to check the validity of another package. Such that if I try to install x117 it has a script that can check and verify whether MBP has been installed, if it the right version, and can even CRC check all the needed files. A month ago I was using OBMM and kept running into multiple packages overwriting other packages textures/meshes. With just a few dozen OMODs I could not bloody figure out which one had precedence. Thats when I started looking into wrye bash. So I still have a bit to learn about wrye. Reading more stuff about wrye as we speak. But like the author of the link you gave me, I am iffy on BCFs. Other than that I agree it's a great way to repackage without actually distributing the files all over again and to not trample on the rights of mod creators, I still have to do manual work on files installed after using a BCF. The user if a downloaded BCF still have to go all over the net to get the required packages. With many of the cross language packages these days, or worse dead links all over the place, it can get quite tough. I'm glad to see there are people out there who are as enthusiastic about package management and installation as I am.

Eh, what I meant is that it doesn't have scripting, so there's no popups to make a choice on what modules to install and what not to install. It's still essentially extracting an archive right into the data directory, with the caveat that you do indeed have BAIN redirections. I like that a complex BAIN package lets you explicitly define the order of install and sub-packages inside a single package. But its still only doing what I was doing before with multiple archives named such that I knew what order to install and uninstall. It just needs to go that one extra step, which you've already said they are working on.

That'd be awesome. Main complaint ive heard is that OMODs don't have good conflict resolution but great scripting for modular by choice installs. Whereas BAIN has great conflict detection but no way for modular by choice. Then I could really go to town on x117 and MBP.

I am actually already using the installers tab in wrye bash. So far I haven't had to use BAIN yet to alter mods, I just couple mods together so they don't conflict resource wise. One thing I wish wrye had was a scripting system for install, that to me is the only strength OBMM has. Well that and the BSA creator/viewer/extractor. So far i've not run into problems with MBP++, x117, argonoid, and neko.

That makes sense. Actually, what id probably like to do is modularize stuff like Ren's hair mod and the x117 mod so you can much more easily pick the exact race or hair sets you want before actually going into the game. With my current setup, which still only uses about 10 mods i've got about ~30 races, like 50 eyes, and 50 hairs. As neato as that is, there are only a few races and extras I care about. Clicking to next race, or eye, or hair is quite slow which can make getting the race/eye/hair combo you want cumbersome.

Thanks for the heads up on Item Interchange. Looks good, ill have to play around with it. Not quite sure what single mod compilations are if not just a single mod? I think packing 2+ mods together when they essentially cover the same thing. Especially if you have a race mod and its high res replacer (the textures are the high res versions not the default that comes with the mod) into a single archive. Thanks for the feedback btw. I'm learning quite a bit even with most of this failed experimentation.

Er. Do you mean multiple version of a file packed in a single BSA? Or the same file (and I assume path) strewn over multiple BSAs? In case of compilations I like them only when they make sense. The one I made has esps that all need the same resources or build up on one another. Grouping them together into the package lets me know (and keep a readme) that this is the case. I also don't have to second guess whether i've got one version of a resource or another version of a resource, I can just look at the readme to know what build order I used to make it. I also use wrye bash so I can also see conflicts very easily if im about to add a new mod. I agree though that just putting a bunch of stuff together to make a compilation, just for compilations sake, is pretty much a waste. The only other kind of compilation id like to see are storefronts and auto loot tables. I get tired of finding a cool armor or weapon and not being able to just drop it in and have it appear in a shop or as a possible loot.

I was mainly thinking about the most used packages. So I wouldn't be doing a bunch of 100MB BSAs. The original hope was to simplify the resources that get strewn all over the data directory, but alas I don't think its doable. Recently I put together a 500MB compilation package (HGEC, High Res HGEC, Natural Faces, Modular Beautiful People++, Working Eyelashes, lop-ear+mini, x117races). It's quite massive and when unpacked nears 2gig range. It'd be lovely if I could put the resources into a compressed BSA, but I can't since most of the resources are replacements rather than new files and i'm not sure its worth the time to change all those esp files to point to a new resources path, especially when some of those esps are still active projects by their respective authors. In the end the best I can do is probably to maintain compilation packages that strive for no conflicts and ease of use. Right now with that package, and the UOP, USIP, UOMPs packages I made, it's very trivial to start from a scratch vanilla install and have a robust set of races for starts. Main problem is I can't really post that compilation package I just mentioned because some of the authors explicitly do not want their stuff on tesnexus.

Well this phase of the BSA project is over. It truly looks like there can be no replacers in BSA format without requiring esp redirects (IE, the esp points the reference to said object to the new BSA). Unless some other crazy person wants to do that, I see no other way to make the unofficial patches use BSA. So, onto the next phase. Working on mods that are not replacers. heh. As an aside. I learned quite a bit. And I also have custom versions of all the all the unofficial patches with optimized meshes, so not all bad.

Did a bunch more testing, the first test I did was dumb as I kept the pants that you start with in the data structure of the oblivion directory (I made the jail pants icon orange). Upon removing said icon and placing it inside the BSA. The icon revered back to the vanilla icon. It seems once a BSA claims a file path no other bsa, regardless of load order, can use the path. You can of course override this, in the same way that all replacers do, by putting the replacers in the normal file structure. UPDATE: I can't seem to let this rest. I came across another article about BSAs that suggest once again that a replacer mod using BSA is possible: http://elderscrolls.filefront.com/info/Oblivion_Mod_FAQs It states though that archiveInvalidated problem, which I knew about and attempted to correct. I am wonder if _that_ is the issue I ran into which prevented me from loading the correct replacer icon. It seems to me that I am not getting very many replies. Is it that no one is interested or that nobody knows? UPDATE 2: Fort those interested in the results of my researching the above mentioned stuff. It seems that archiveInvalidated is only used for when replacing textures/meshes using the normal directory structure. Something I previously thought worked all on its own. Looks like, unbeknown to me, that I OBMM set it up for me. This does not work for BSAs, only for replacements in real directories. As a programmer this seems like poor design. It should have been trivial to allow the internal game database to recognize when a BSA is attempting to override a previous resource entry. But then again, they didn't fix the bug which makes archiveInvalidated necessary even for directory replacements.

Did as you suggested. Seemed to work fine. Tested the files I made, everything seemed to work for that as well. I've uploaded the files.

It'd be nice to find a mod that associated the level of difficulty with the contents of the chest. I'm playing a Shinobi character currently and it's pretty annoying getting to the end of a dungeon after slaying from the shadows mundane and inhuman foes only to receive a paint brush and 8 gold from a very hard chest. Also, after sneaking into one guys house and successfully assassinating him via stabbing him to death (Deadly Reflex), I found out how valuable a bowl and flawed jewel can be to someone so wealthy (again, a very hard jewelry box). I'd like to see a cross between a chest releveler and custom chests. Although I am actually pretty sure there is at least one mod out there that already fixes chests from having lame stuff like paint brushes and bowls. I think one of the mods that changes how the lock pick mini game thing works or one that changes the picks themselves. I'm too lazy to look now. Chests at the end of a dungeon should be completely custom, specifically dropping some type or piece of armor, possibly such that you can only get that armor or type of armor from that chest. All the other chests can be random generated from a cleaner (no bowls and crap) loot table.

After some further researching it looks like BSA files must be referenced in some way. The UOP files would need to go into the oblivion.ini file for them to get loaded. To avoid that i've decided that the Unofficial Oblivion Patch.bsa file will have ALL data files, even ones not specifically referenced by Unofficial Oblivion Patch.esp. Since that esp loads directly after oblivion.esm I am hoping that the data files in the bsa will override vanilla data files. Will this work?

Maybe we can hope for an MMO _and_ a single player TES? I've only just gotten back into moding and I'd hate to be blocked out of a new TES game to mod. As good as oblivion is technology wise, it is getting outdated and i'd like to see an updated engine to work with.

In case people are wondering, here is the load order for data files I hope to eventually accomplish. Oblivion.esm -> Oblivion/ShiveringIsles/DLC*.bsa -> UOP/SIOP/UOMP.bsa (this is what ill create)-> <insert mod here>.bsa -> File found in the data directory.

UPDATE 1 - Instead of 5 files I am doing 2. UPDATE 2 - Tested, Approved, Uploaded UPDATE 3 - removed, researching UPDATE 4 - And i'm spent. Project: Convert the many mods that I use heavily to use BSAs instead of copying hundreds of files into the data directory. Reason: So that files don't get constantly overwritten by the many many texture/mesh mods out there and thus make it far easier to remove a mod that replaces data files. Phase One: Convert Unofficial Patches to use BSAs! Files: Unofficial Oblivion Patch.esp (normal, directly taken from the manual install .7z) Unofficial Oblivion Patch.bsa (this contains ONLY those files used specifically by the esp all data files found within UOP archive) UOP - Meshes.bsa (contains distantlod, meshes, trees; modeled after the oblivion meshes.bsa) UOP - Sounds.bsa (contains sound/voice) UOP - Textures.bsa (contains textures) Results: Failure [see update 4].

It also has shell integration (which I prefer) so you can right click and have options for extracting faster.

I usually play male characters too, because I want the immersion of role playing and im gonna go out on a limb and suggest that I don't know crap about how a girl is going to act. But I understand why some people play female characters. Stare at your man ass for a while and you start to want to look at something a bit more appealing. Which is also why I have never had anything but a female companion. There is a diverse universe of people out there, which means we see a huge range of tastes. Also, if you are gonna play dress up, which lot of mods are about, specifically the ones you are talking about, then it kinda goes without saying that most of them would be about dressing up a female character. Honestly the vanilla armors have been good enough for me, ive pretty much never thought about getting any of the armor mods for my chars.