Striker879

Not sure if most NPCs will take unowned food from out in the open like that. I like messing with Alval Uvani, make sure he never has any gold whatsoever. He will sneak around looking for food when he's at his stops at the various Inns (which often as not gets him caught, resulting in an ass whooping ... he's set to essential for now so just great fun). I've followed him at The Lonely Suitor Lodge in Bravil and seen an apple disappear from the counter when he swiped it, so low responsibility NPCs at least will take it where ever they find it.

The main advantage offered by the method I outlined is it gives the chance for the game world to reset itself without any interference from the player ... don't know for certain where "center" is, but I understand it is totally outside of the game world. If the mod is a personal use mod then things like not having Ernest around shouldn't be an issue. For a mod you intend to release you need to test with all of the vanilla game elements in place doing what the game would normally have them doing (chances are that is what your users will have ... along with a bunch of random mods to mess with things for you). I've never looked at that bench at Horse Whisperer Stables myself ... outside of a bit of tweaking on Maeve I haven't messed much with Anvil.

I find that Anvil courier loves taking the direct route from Anvil to her turn-around point ... which means she goes up the hill behind Maeva's house and gathers up a following posse of mountain lions/timber wolves etc. Sometimes she survives but her horse doesn't, other times the other way around (and then there are the times when both are the bug and not the windshield). I see Ernest using the bench outside the door at Horse Whisperer Stables. Are you using that bench for your NPC or have you added another? Something you could do while testing is to "clean" your testing save. Open the console and type "coc center" (without the quote marks) and hit Enter. You will be transported to an open plain with a few trees in the distance. Using the game wait menu wait 72 hours plus a bit for good measure (so three full days plus a bit). Open the console again and "coc AnvilHorseWhisperer" (again no quotes). You can return to any location that you know the correct location code for (I use the UESP Wiki Oblivion:Quests page as a starting point for getting the most common ones).

My rule of thumb for using those flags ... only use the ones that are absolutely necessary to get your NPC to do what you want, and know what side-effects come with each. If you want an NPC to ignore their next package and just continue doing what they were doing while the player is nearby, then use Continue if PC Near. I think if there is a reason that their current package failed and that package had the Continue flag set then they would move to their next package at the time set for it (but that is just an untested theory).

NPCs will take food from unowned containers, though I have run into occasions were they still won't take out food from the container (I have two NPCs shacked up with Ancotar at Fort Caractacus ... one will take food from the food sacks I've provided and the other won't ... picky eater I guess). See my reply on your other post for a workaround for that.

Nope ... NPCs will eat any time they have an eat package with duration of 1 hour or more and somewhere to sit and food in their inventory. I use the trick of giving NPCs -1 (that's negative one) of a food item like a carrot on their Inventory tab in the CS (which gives them an unlimited supply). There will also need to be a chair/stool in the cell that is marked as a persistent reference (though I haven't tested to see if they will use chairs/stools that are not marked persistent now that I think on it).

I recall reading that it needs a specific bit-rate or something, plus mono ... no telling where I read that as it was a long time ago.

After you change it are you saving in a compatible format (I think the game requires mono for instance).

Can't say what to suggest ... from looking through your load order nothing jumps out at me (but I'm no load order expert). Note that the order shown in the Installers tab from top to bottom is the "install order", with lower on the list winning any conflicts/overwrites. Looking at kuerteeCleanUp.esp and OblivionReloaded.esp in the BOSS masterlist shows kuerteeCleanUp.esp above OblivionReloaded.esp (as reflected in your posted load order). Both are in the section Load Order Independent Mods which I suppose could possibly have something to do with why they are sharing the same date and timestamp. All of my mods are same date with exactly 1 minute difference in timestamp as you go down the list, but as far as I could tell looking through that section of the masterlist, I don't use any mods that fall into that particular section.

Pay close attention to what Wrye Bash is telling you for each of your installed mods in the WB Installers tab. The colours are telling you something, as well as the details shown in the panel to the upper right. Refer to section 4 of Wrye Bash General Readme.html (found in the Oblivion\Mopy\Docs folder) for more detailed information.

Did you have anything like an automatic video driver update (you need to watch that Microsoft doesn't try to slip something like that in with their security updates)? Ya ... I'm getting to the grasping at straws stage too. Lock Load Order in WB works just fine as long as you run BOSS from the icon in WB (down on the lower left toolbar). If you run BOSS from the desktop icon then start WB it will revert to the load order you had when you last ran BOSS from within WB (or turn Lock Load Order off ... it really doesn't offer you much if you never edit ESPs with the Construction Set).

The only points I'd like to comment on about the video on are I personally like to have Lock Load Order turned on in Wrye Bash, as it makes life easier for me as I also create/edit mods using the Construction Set, which will change my load order when I save my edits to mods using the CS. Oblivion uses a simple system of file date and time to control load order. When the game starts it uses the date and time on all the ESMs and loads them from oldest to newest, and then loads all the ESPs the same way, from oldest to newest. BOSS just assigns file dates and times according to the order it has in it's master list, and WB displays your load order the same way when you select to have it display by load order. Without Lock Load Order set in WB if I edit a mod then it will automatically move to the very bottom of my load order because it will now have today's date and time from when I saved my edits. That means I'll need to run BOSS before I can rebuild my bashed patch. With Lock Load Order turned on in WB after I edit a mod and start WB it will reset the edited mod's date and time to what was assigned by BOSS the last time I ran BOSS, so I can immediately move on to rebuilding my bashed patch (so it saves me one step in each edit mod/test mod cycle). The other point is in changing the options for rebuilding your bashed patch. The video author mentions it, but I'd like to reinforce the message ... use the defaults for the bashed patch settings except for specific things you need to change for your own particular situation. Before you customize the bashed patch options make sure you understand what and why you are changing. Also a good idea to keep notes so you know exactly what to change back when/if you muck things up. Don't use Oblivion Reloaded myself because my machine won't handle it (in my opinion ... quite possible that certain pieces of OR would work fine but I have no burning need to devote the time and energy required to find out what can and can't work). I have a 3.0 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU (should be more than adequate) but I'm hobbled with a video card that only has 896 MB video RAM and a meager 2 GB RAM (which was all fine and great when I built the machine a decade ago, but is lacking for today's Oblivion modding). What I would do is turn off everything in OR, see what my performance was like then, and then turn things back on in OR one at a time and test thoroughly in between. You will gain a good understanding of how each piece of OR affects your own performance. It will take time, but nothing comes for free.

Make sure you are running BOSS from within Wrye Bash (icon is in the lower left corner of the Wrye Bash window). Also, where is your bashed patch? What is WB reporting for your percent towards A-Bomb for your latest save? How many saves do you have currently in your saves folder?

A couple of links that may help ... Oblivion:Movement Formulas Movement Game Settings I'm no expert but your character's run speed is a derived value, not something you can adjust separately from walk speed. What you could try adjusting is fMoveRunMult to make your run speed faster for any given walk speed (can't say if console would work for that). Something to keep in mind ... as your character's speed attribute increases so would your new run speed, so you might need to adjust fMoveRunMult back to default to avoid being too much of a Speedy Gonzalos later in the game. I just use a horse to control how quickly I level up speed early in the game.

Mainly because most of what I "know" about it comes from my notes, which are compiled from you answering these types of questions in the past (the often mentioned DrakesTips.txt) ... aka without you I would know diddly.

That particular piece (quilted shirt) is found in the BAIN\005 Core Files - Musc with Pants 0 and Musc Outfits\meshes\clothes\middleclass\02\m folder. Look in the level 015 folders for other supported body sizes, but keep in mind these are replacers, so you can only have a single body size even with the clothing/armor without creating an ESP and unique folder structures. I haven't ever run across a resource that correlates the folder numbers to which clothing item (e.g. that folder middleclass\02 is for the quilted shirt, tan linens and doeskin shoes) so I went all old school with pen and paper and went through all the clothing in the Construction Set and created my own list.

If the body you are using is Roberts Male use meshes from the Roberts Male extracted download, not meshes extracted from Oblivion - Meshes.bsa (unless you are shooting for a target audience that doesn't use Roberts Male, in which case your mod will be unsuitable for your own use while you continue to use Roberts Male). What is the texture path shown in NifSkope for your mesh (open up the little flower icon in the panel to the upper left)? Texture paths must be relative, meaning the path attached to the NIF starts at Textures NOT Data. In your game folder the texture path you have shown is correct IF you want all male quilted doublets in the game to get your new texture (i.e. you are creating a replacer type mod). If you want only your altered mesh to receive the new texture you will need to give both the mesh and the texture unique folder paths (e.g. Data\Meshes\clothing\middleclass\MyQuiltedDoublet\shirt.nif and Data\Textures\clothing\middleclass\MyQuiltedDoublet\shirt.dds). I also think you will need to put a copy of the vanilla normal map for the quilted doublet in your unique folder (so Data\Textures\clothing\middlesclass\MyQuiltedDoublet\shirt_n.dds) ... Drake will be able to give more authoritative advice on that.

Install the regular plain old vanilla Construction Set v1.2 from here. You will now have a desktop shortcut to the vanilla Construction Set. Right mouse click on that shortcut and select Properties from the right click menu. In the Properties dialogue box that opens you will see a field named Target (it will probably already have the entire path to the CS executable highlighted ... at least that's how it works in WinXP). Single left click in the Target field to remove the highlight and then use the arrow keys to move the cursor insert point to just before the .exe part of the CS executable file name (been so long since I installed the CS I can't say for certain if the file name is ConstructionSet.exe or not ... the part we will be changing is just the file name part, not the file extension part). Once you have the cursor immediately to the left of the dot in .exe backspace over the entire file name but NOT any of the path that precedes the file name (so just the ConstructionSet part of ConstructionSet.exe if that is the correct file name). Next type in obse_loader (so what we have done is replaced the ConstructionSet part of the file name with obse_loader). You will now have a Target field that has the original folder path with obse_loader.exe and then a quote mark (") at the end. Using the arrow keys move the cursor to the very end past the closing quote mark, hit Space for a single space and then type -editor. Your Target field should now have obse_loader.exe" -editor at the last part. Click on Apply and then click on OK ... done.

Wish I could say 100% for certain that you are OK but I can't. I have looked at my game backups from my two previous characters who did not use Wrye Bash and thus used OBMM for archive invalidation and neither of them has any significant difference to what you have posted (differences are all related to which DLCs are installed ... other than that BSAs and Oblivion.ini are the same as what you posted). Until I looked at those backups I was under the impression that OBMM's BSA Redirection worked the same as Wrye Bash's BSA Redirection ... it seems that is not the case. I do know that BSA Redirection was working for both those characters. If you have a pure replacer type mod (a mod that changes something without using an ESP file) and it works then archive invalidation is working (a body replacer such as HGEC is a good example). You could install a pure replacer just as a test, as once you uninstall the assets it includes your game will automatically revert back to the vanilla assets found in the vanilla game BSA files.

OBMM isn't the one creating Oblivion.ini that is Oblivion.exe doing that. It uses Oblivion_default.ini as a base to create Oblivion.ini after it detects your hardware when the game first starts after you install it or any time that Oblivion.exe can't find Oblivion.ini in it's proper location. NEVER touch/move/edit Oblivion_default.ini ... ever. As far as I know the game requires Oblivion.ini to be located in the Users\[username]\ Documents\My Games\Oblivion folder. You could store a backup in any folder you like. OBMM's archive invalidation should be set to BSA Redirection, if you use the Steam version of the game click on Reset BSA Timestamps and then click on Update Now. The BSA Redirection method of archive invalidation creates an empty BSA file and then puts that BSA file in the first spot of the sArchiveList line in the [Archive] section of Oblivion.ini (there are slight differences in the file name used for that empty file depending on which utility you use to create it ... Wrye Bash names it ArchiveInvalidationInvalidated!.bsa and I believe OBMM uses either the same file name or similar).

Not so much "in addition to the CS Wiki" as "to complete the CS Wiki in it's current form" ... Official CS Wiki Backup. Pretty well all the images included with CS Wiki tutorials are mis-linked in the current version of the wiki, but can be found in the backup. Be warned, there is a lot of stuff not related to the wiki that got bundled up in the archive, so some assembly is required (batteries not included and all that).

Just speaking on a high level, what I look for in game changes is primarily adding variety. To me not everyone has the same skills, and as their ability to use different tools varies so will what they are willing to cart around. For example if you aren't skilled in using a shield why would you tote one around. If every time I run into a bandit I can predict their skills, fighting style and equipment (as is generally the case with the vanilla game) I'm forced into inventing new ways to handle the encounters, just to keep things a slight bit interesting. In my own tweaks and simple mods I'm always on the lookout for unconventional ways to create the unexpected. I haven't really ever thought of what unconventional things might be used to add diversity to enemy encounters, but now you have me thinking on it (which may or may not be a good thing ... I do have a reputation for moonshot expectations).

LOL ... I can understand both the gratifying part and the hilarious! Now I've given us both our morning chuckle. Good way to start the day. I haven't tried your mod but did give it a real close study on the day it was released. I'm pretty tied up until after mid week but when I have the chance I'll revisit it and give it some more thought along those lines.

Pay close attention to what WB reports in the windows to the right when you add a new mod to the Installers tab list. The order from top to bottom in that list is "install order" and can be adjusted to get the desired result (where manual install relies on doing each step correctly, in the correct sequence).

I'm Mr. Old School ... install one mod, test thoroughly, then move on to the next mod. Rinse and repeat.