Striker879

It can if you set a wide range between min and max. If you set the same for min and max (let's say 12 hours) it would make the world far more predictable. It's just a tool for making the game be like you'd like.

SPAWN changes how often different types of cells reset. You could have Ayleid dungeons reset every day but dungeons with roots only respawn once a week and forts only once a month. You can also have it a bit more random by setting an different time for min and max values (all settings are in game hours, so one week = 168). The default game cell reset is 72 hours (three days). If you look at SPAWN's default INI values you'll see it doesn't change them very far from vanilla game default. I don't know what the limits that can be set for duration are. I use 360 min to 720 max for Ayleid ruins for example (15 to 30 days). My roadways (exterior cells) are 72 min to 480 max so when I'm coming up to that spot that I know is a bandit ambush I'm never sure whether there will be one there or not. I'm not entirely certain how it would work along side MOO ... Maskar would be the best source for that answer.

I use SPAWN with INI values tweaked to my liking for how often the different parts of the game respawn. I have personally opted for a nine year old level of respawning on roadways. :blush:

Was a new one on me too Drake. Maybe what happened is any mods with newer dates than Steam's dates got BSA Redirection, but ones older than Steam's dates didn't. In any case it's good that you popped in as I wasn't even thinking in that direction until you jumped in. I always say "It takes a team to troubleshoot".

The wonderful people at Steam, using their infinite wisdom, decided to change the dates on all the vanilla game BSA files (e.g. Oblivion - Meshes.bsa and Oblivion - Textures - Compressed.bsa etc). That broke BSA Redirection for all of their victims ... err, I mean users. You have just righted that wrong in your own little corner of the Universe.

Yes ... all it does is reset the timestamps of the BSA files back to what they are supposed to be in the vanilla game.

The wine bottle replacer you are trying to use is from back before BSA Redirection was invented. It uses a completely outdated method of archive invalidation, one that is incompatible with BSA Redirection. As you've discovered, the reason it was superceded by BSA Redirection is you will need to hand edit your ArchiveInvalidation.txt file every time you add a mod that requires archive invalidation. If you use BSA Redirection you do it once and forget about it. If your wine bottle replacer isn't compatible with BSA Redirection use the wine bottle replacer portion of Alluring Potion Bottles. The base install of COBL also replaces wine and beer bottles (along with a lot of other improvements ... some people like it, some don't, and some mods require it).

I haven't tried it myself but there's Oblivion 4ever. I don't how much it has changed Oblivion worlds 1 and 7 but that is mentioned in the mod description. Aranmathi Ayleid Home has a portal to go to the random Oblivion worlds (works the same as going through one of the gates) but they are all just the same old vanilla Oblivion worlds. BFGs Open All the Gates offers options to tweak how and when Oblivion gates open (again still the same vanilla Oblivion worlds as far as I know). That's about all that I know of.

Yes, as far as I know you can use TES Mod Manager together with Wrye Bash (but I know absolutely nothing about TES Mod Manager, so don't consider that the last word on using them together). There wouldn't be much to a step by step guide. After you install Wrye Bash you sort your load order with BOSS (or manually move your mods in the list on Wrye Bash's Mods tab, making sure to have the bashed patch at the bottom unless you know you have a mod that needs to be after the bashed patch), right click on the bashed patch and select rebuild (I use the C Bash method myself). Give it some time to work ... unless you know otherwise accept it's recommendations for the bashed patch, give it some more time to finish and then close Wrye Bash. Every time you install or uninstall a mod it's the same ... BOSS then rebuild.

Wrye Bash is the only way to create a bashed patch. What Wrye Bash does is take all of the conflicting parts of your installed mods and creates a combined "mod" out of them (the bashed patch ... which is just an ESP). It then puts the bashed patch at the bottom of your load order so that the bashed patch changes overwrite everything higher up in the load order. One of the tools it uses when deciding what records from which mods should "win" the conflict is something called bashed tags (the Import Cells from your post), so it uses load order and bashed tags to get your mods playing nice with one another. Wrye Bash is one of the original mod managers, but it is far more than just that ... more like a swiss army knife for modding. The best place to learn more about Wrye Bash is to download the Standalone Executable to a folder and extract it with 7-Zip. In the Mopy\Docs folder you'll find two HTML files, Wrye Bash General Readme.html and Wrye Bash Advanced Readme.html ... almost everything I know about Wrye Bash comes from those two files.

No problem ... you gave a good description of the shield, I just had to try to remember which of the armor mods I've downloaded it was.

Here you go ... Iron Maiden Set - Jos Rest Add-on Pack.

Yes, if you downloaded using the second link down from the top (where it says Chocolate Elves v14 OMOD) but then when you look at the downloaded file it's named Chocolate Elves v14 OMOD-18247.zip you are are a victim of Microsoft's delusional plan (if in fact it is them doing this). Simply change Chocolate Elves v14 OMOD-18247.zip to Chocolate Elves v14 OMOD-18247.omod, double click on the renamed file and OBMM will open.

There has been a lot of what I call "file extension hi-jacking" going on lately ... likely some new "feature" dreamed up by Microsoft. You can easily fix it yourself by simply renaming the file extension from .zip to .omod (right click and then select Rename from the right click menu). Just be sure to leave the first part of the file name the same.

I often have some sort of premonition of imminent crash ... the thought will unbidden pop into my head that I haven't saved for a while. I have learned that I must have some weird ability to see into my computer's memory and recognize that things are getting fouled up because never seems to fail if I don't hop off my horse and save I get a crash rounding the next bend\crossing the next cell boundary. That said, often enough to keep the water murky I don't get the anticipated crash after saving, so I can never be sure if I'm voodoo or not. I wouldn't sweat it so much trying to get the game completely crash free. Once you get a feel for how often crashes are likely to appear just save at half that frequency or less. The closest you'll get to crash free is using all of the tools and tricks outlined in those Oblivion Reloaded mod comments (including using OR ... it's more than making the game pretty). It is however, the type of thing that requires careful study beforehand.

What ... wait a minute!! We're supposed to PLAY the game?? Just kidding. Here's a link to a Nexus Wiki article on the subject. There is a link down that page to 4gb Ram Patcher but I have seen quite a bit of discussion concerning the need for patching DLLs (there is a long discussion on that in the OR mod comments). It's for the most part above my paygrade (plus I'm not in a position to utilize any of it) so I can't say who may be right on the subject. I also have a link to 4GB Patch, which may be the same patcher (the author is the same as the NexusMods Oblivion link). - Edit - Not much experience around stuff like Improved <whatever> as I already tax my hardware enough. I would think that providing all of the resources for the removed mod are also removed (all meshes, textures etc) your game should be using the resources from the vanilla BSA files (Oblivion - Meshes.bsa, Oblivion - Textures - Compressed.bsa etc). You aren't using BSA Alteration as an archive invalidation method are you??

TES4LODGen is a separate utility (not a mod) that is required for RAEVWD (read the RAEVWD install instructions). I have no experience with TesModManager so I can't say whether it understands BAIN or OMOD install structures.

I use Enhanced Weather myself, but that's because it had fixes for weather problems at Kvatch when using an older now unavailable version of Kvatch Rebuilt that was required for MOE (an older alternate start mod). Weather All Natural is the more modern descendant of EW. Could be if that turns out to be your sticking point for fast travel that it will have some tweaks that can be made to get it stable. As I've said, I don't fast travel at all so I can't say how EW reacts to fast travelling. I've been around all the main areas of Cyrodiil so much that I know where all the choke points are ... every spawn point for every type of critter/badguy close to all the main roads. Often I attribute a crash to the game loading up a spawn point (loading the NPC/critter and intializing it's AI package). I find that it's more likely to happen after playing a while (the game does a poor job of memory management, and I have only 2 GB on a 32 bit OS so the 4 GB patches would do nothing for me). Are you using any patches to enable the game to use more of your RAM?

What about fast travel to Harlun's Watch and then go to the Cheydinhal stables the slow way? Just looking to narrow down if the problem is fast travel related or more rooted in where you are trying to fast travel to.

The first one is an OMOD install script used to install the second one using Oblivion Mod Manager (OBMM). The second one is the original, which is set up to be installed either manually or preferably with Wrye Bash's BAIN installer. Read the mod description and install instructions for the first one for details.

I'm retired, so I live a different Bill Murray movie ... Groundhog Day. So are you saying that even without any of the horse related mods installed the stables are your crash hotspot (so what I'm saying is complete uninstallation for testing ... no meshes or textures or sounds left behind)? Also to help you get an idea of what "somewhat normal" is, without the use of anything to reduce crashes outside of gameplay habits I generally can get somewhere in the neighborhood of an hour to maybe hour and a half without a crash. This will vary depending on what quests I'm currently running and to an extent on how many bandits etc. I've left alive either through NPCs Yield or console necromancy. My pattern is to save whenever I'm remounting my horse or when dismounting to go into a city or one of the places I've acquired (the chance of crash on major cell change goes up the longer the play session). Every hour or so I save and exit the game, usually check this site or the weather etc. before restarting the game if I'm going to continue playing (I never leave anything like a browser up in the background while playing). I'm on a machine that has only 2 GB RAM for a Core 2 Duo 3.0 GHz and an old GeForce GTX275 with 896 MB VRAM. My gameplay style has my save game size up to around 3700 to 4000 KB with an OBSE save file size floating around 63 to 64 KB. Like I've said, I've made some choices that work against stability, but I've never had the expectation that I should be able to start the game and play non-stop for half a dozen hours or more without a hicup. For one thing I'm too old for that ... I'd need therapy on my hands after that long on mouse and keyboard. That Oblivion Reloaded page I linked has a ton of tips discussed on getting the game more stable (game stability is one of the features of OR, augmented by some other tools). That is, if your horses aren't at the root of your problem. - Edit - Your NPC face problem will likely be related to OCO v2 not playing nice with anything that touches race records (i.e. race mods/beautification mods). Also NPCs added by other mods can have some pretty ugly faces as a result of the OCO v2 changes to heads. Best advice is get a base modded game working correctly (just OCO v2) and then add one possibly conflicting thing at a time and test.

Having those saves turned off is a good thing, though in my case I can only recall once or twice that I felt that the saving was what caused the crash (which is the point of turning them off). I'm a tinkering, under-the-hood, grease up to the elbows type myself, so I guess the game wouldn't have the same allure for me if I couldn't/didn't have the chance to try things/see what I can break. But I'm also 5 years into this journey ... that's not where I started either. Until I became comfortable installing and modifying mods I was on the same part of the learning curve as anybody else starting out. You've cut your teeth on a perhaps more refined version of the game engine with Skyrim (I've never even laid a finger to a keyboard with that game, and likely never will). I also have no experience with Morrowind, so I can't give any opinions on how Oblivion's implementation of the Gamebryo engine compares to it's predecessor. I found that turning off Windows wanting to phone home and report every crash of a program helped avoid the locked up situation, but I'm an old Win XP dinosaur, from a time when operating systems let you use your machine (as opposed to today's operating systems that act like your only part in the game is to provide a machine for them to use as they see fit ... /rant).

My reason for asking about the sound card in relation to the horses is that often for people using weak sound solutions (aka on-board sound solutions like Realtek that are just a couple of chips on the motherboard that rely on the CPU for most of their processing) the footstep sounds of most four legged beasts seems to be the source of some of their crashes. One way to troubleshoot if this could be affecting you is to disable sound effects in Oblivion.ini, or as an alternative try one of the footstep quieting mods (e.g. Quiet Feet). I don't personally have any experience at using the foot quieting type mods, so I can't say how effective they are. The INI change is simply modifying bSoundEnabled=1 to bSoundEnabled=0 while testing. Note that this will disble all sound except the game music so it's nothing more than a tool to help zero in on the problem. Yes custom races could be a cause, but so could a number of other things. Funny you should mention that it's Skingrad that is one of your problem spots ... I always dismount and save at the top of the hill past Grayrock Cave (where you can just see the towers of the city but haven't rounded the bend that leads you down past Derelict Mine) as it's a common crash spot for me. I have made a number of choices in mod INI settings that don't always work towards less crashes, NPCs Yield Refined being at the top of that list (but the choices I've made are against the advice of the original mod author kuertee, so I know exactly who to blame). I think even vanilla Skingrad may be a bit taxing with so many NPCs out working the fields and vineyards (and in my case add in Children of Cyrodiil and RealSwords Breton which add to the "load" you encounter as you make your way to Grateful Pass Stables). Like I said, my installing/testing regime makes me very intimate with what is going on with my game behind the scenes. Another thing I can tell you ... the UOP is just a mod, actually a rather large mod, with plenty of AI changes and scripts running. I'm not suggesting trashing the UOP, but all that doesn't work towards making the game more stable. Like I said at the outset, crashing is a feature of the modded game. Heck even unmodded the game will crash. Even if I could play for an hour or more without crashing I still save every time I'm going to remount after a fight/doing something (the before mounting thing came about as a result of a shortcoming with an earlier version of Blockhead when saving while mounted, since corrected in the latest version). When my saves folder starts filling up I move a bunch to my big Data drive for archiving (I am a packrat).

Most of the reason I'm a non-fast traveler has to do with my past transgressions ... I was a quick save junkie at one time. That got my game knotted up enough I couldn't fast travel, and eventually enough I couldn't go from one cell to the next without a crash/reload cycle. I got good saving habits (which you already have) and through perseverance I managed to save that character's saveline. By the time he could fast travel I was beyond wanting/needing to do so. I now use SPAWN to get around the one thing that bugs me the most about good old fashioned get from A to B ... the need to stop every ten feet to fight some other critter/badguy when I was just down that road a few days ago. Some probably play for the fighting ... obviously I play to do stuff. For me testing sessions are tailored to the mod I'm testing. Mods that may impact performance take as long to test as it takes me to visit all the different places that mod may affect. Mods that impact gameplay can take much longer, especially if they are adjustable through INI edits. Probably took me two weeks to get Basic Physical Activities, Realistic Fatigue and Basic Primary Needs adjusted to my taste because of how their gameplay effects overlap/compliment one another. Mods that just add items/places only generally take a cursory visit. Vanilla game quests, mod added quests and mod added items can all cause problems (I've never had it myself but I've heard that missing textures can crash you). Generally the "coc center + wait" trick will get you through any quest bunchup problems though. A lot of your mods are about horses, and horses have hooves and in-game have sounds attached to traveling and idles. What sort of sound card are you using?

Unfortunately, that is one of the "features" of modded Oblivion ... at least to a certain extent. You have obviously done some research on troubleshooting and have already tried anything I could suggest as a quick fix. Something I do see in your load order is that you are using both MaleBodyReplacerV5.esp and Oblivion_Character_Overhaul.esp ... the recommendation is to not use MaleBodyReplacerV5.esp if you use OCO v2. That said I don't think it has anything at all to do with your crashing problem. Your load order is definitely different than a BOSS sorted load order. I don't have very many mods in common with your load order but in my opinion a BOSS sorted load order is better suited to Oblivion modding. Not sure how you installed your mods, but my tried an true one mod at a time and then test thoroughly method has one advantage. If I add one mod to a working load order and then start having problems I know where to start troubleshooting. Granted you have some mods that must be installed together due to dependencies, but even then you'd have a shorter list to deal with when looking for culprits. My method takes much longer before you are "playing" the game. Some of my testing sessions would look a lot like gaming sessions to some folks, but I have a very good grasp of how each mod in my load order affects gameplay and performance/stability. The UOP fixes much that you wouldn't necessarily see at first glance. Read through Unofficial Oblivion Patch Version History.html found in the Docs folder of the extracted download to get an idea of the scope of the UOP's fixes. It goes far beyond grounding a few floating rocks and trees. The crash on exit can be mitigated ... read through the comments on the Oblivion Reloaded - OBGE v4 page to get some tips.