Striker879

The other thing that could be occurring is the problem that Steam introduced by changing the games BSA file dates to recent dates (they should all be dated in 2006). You can use a utility to change the BSA dates. I've used File Date Changer 1.61 in the past to change file dates, but Google will give other options if you prefer.

Is your Steam install in C:\Program Files(x86)? If so UAC (User Account Control) may be interfering. Here's a link to Bben46's wiki article Oblivion reinstall procedure. Don't miss the link near the top, at the end of the line saying "For those who need to move the steam client: How to Move your Steam to another location Without having to reinstall anything." and don't skip the part about cleaning your registry. If you are seeing the files from your installed mods in the correct locations in your Data folder and have turned on BSA Redirection for your archive invalidation (Oblivion Mod Manager is the most common way for doing that) then UAC's interference is the next most likely culprit.

Steam won't stop until they achieve their goal ... total world domination. My primary job (well since I've retired anyway) is to make 'total' domination impossible for them. They'll always be missing one person (and more if I had my way). In a way they do me a great service. As all games now seem to require Steam I don't have to spend money on new games. Since I don't have any new games my old computer runs just fine ... I don't need to spend any money on new computer hardware. Since I'm not building any new machines I don't need to buy any new operating systems ... more money saved. I win, they lose, everyone can thank Steam. The only recourse we have is to 'vote with our chequebooks' ... it's the only language they understand.

OMODs aren't for combining mods. If the armor is taking up a ring slot (hopefully not two ring slots though) it's a matter of figuring out if it's taking a right ring slot or left ring slot, and then equipping Vilja with the opposite hand ring. Way back when I was figuring out the whole ring thing I compiled a complete list of all the rings in the vanilla game, by hand used. It will tax my meager typing skills but here it is: Right Hand Rings Brass Ring, Brass Pearl Ring, Brass Topaz Ring, Copper Ring, Copper Pearl Ring, Copper Topaz Ring, Copper Ruby Ring, Jade Ring, Jade Topaz Ring, Jade Ruby Ring, Jade Sapphire Ring, Silver Ring, Silver Ruby Ring, Silver Sapphire Ring, Silver Emerald Ring, Gold Ring, Gold Sapphire Ring, Gold Emerald Ring, Gold Diamond Ring, Ebony Ring, Ebony Emerald Ring and Ebony Diamond Ring Left Hand Rings Ring of Shadows, Flame Ring, Mundane Ring, Ring of Perfection, Ring of Skimming, Ring of Stamina, Ring of the Iron Fist, Ring of Thieves, Ring of Treachery, Ring of Vitality, Ring of War, Ring of Wizardry, Black Band, Ulfgar Family Ring, Ring of Vipereye, Indary's Signet Ring, Ancotar's Ring of Protection, Circlet of Omnipotence, Jewel of Rumare and Wedding Band I suggest giving one from one list, and if that doesn't work try one from the other list. Another option is edit the Seraphim armor in the Construction Set to have a non-zero value. -Edit - On the off chance that the armor takes the right ring slot (likely as you probably have been giving her a regular ring, not an enchanted one) I've taken the liberty of getting a suggestion for you ... nothing would suit Vilja better than the Ring of Perfection. To give yourself one to give to her open the console (using the tilde (~) key on standard keyboards) and then player.additem 00098446 1 and hit enter. Close the console (tilde again) and you'll have your perfect gift in your inventory.

I haven't done any testing around large address aware as my current gaming machine is only 2 GB RAM, but I have seen comments on here claiming both it did and didn't make a difference. I think because there are so many interrelated factors (mods, background processes, CPU/GPU differences etc.) that it will be difficult to use another persons settings and get the same results (unless you duplicate their exact setup, from hardware on up). I had a read through your linked Performance Project page. To me it seems mainly focused on getting the game to run on marginal machines (a huge issue back when the game was released). I'm not sure how many of it's suggestions transfer over to today's situation ... graphic and CPU intensive mods, pushing modern hardware, using a gaming engine that wasn't designed to take advantage of any of the benefits of that hardware. One thing from that article did jump out though, that relates back to your original post concerning settings for uInterior Cell Buffer and uExterior Cell Buffer. In the next to last section where they talk about 'Worst Case - Best Case Scenarios' they make a good case for not setting uInterior Cell Buffer too large, especially in light of what they mention on how non-city interiors (caves dungeons forts etc.) aren't purged from memory when you exit to the wilderness cells. Before my current SLI had problems (one dead card) and had to be downgraded to a single card I usually never saw anywhere close to max GPU memory usage (then I had 2 x 640 MB). Now with the same Oblivion.ini settings (uGridstoLoad=5, uInterior Cell Buffer=16 & uExterior Cell Buffer=102) I regularly see over 600 MB GPU memory usage, even without any dungeon crawling. I'm going to trim that uInterior Cell Buffer back and test tonight. Maybe I'll see some improvement. One habit I have had in the past is I regularly save (never a quicksave ... either from the Esc menu or console named save) and, at least when I remember, I exit the game and reload pretty regularly (every 2 or 3 hours of play). That may have been saving me from getting too much grief from that high uInterior Cell Buffer setting.

Not sure if it's the one you're looking for, but I recalled seeing Jedo Gladius recently ... no idea on the sabre.

Here's a link to a Construction Set Wiki article on Making New Armor Using NifSkope. Note the part in Step 5 of that tutorial and Part 4: Exporting in Saaya's around skeleton issues. I've also seen a lot of talk about having an 'extra' scene root (have a look through DrakeTheDragon's posts on various threads). Sorry I can't offer more specific help, but you're in an area I have theoretic knowledge on, but no hands on experience (i.e. I've read about but have never got my hands dirty on).

While you aren't asking about any of the BBB aspects, Saaya's BBB Armor Weighting Tutorial may help you out.

Perhaps someone else can confirm this for me, but I think I've seen mention that for whatever reason some people's CS won't handle certain things (pathgriding I know I've seen mention of, but I think I may have seen dialogue too, but I could be mistaken). TES Alliance is another great source of modding knowledge (and is probably where I've seen those comments I mentioned).

If you are trying to work with voice files, I believe that Bethesda broke that when they came out with the latest version of the Construction Set (version 1.2.404). There is a work around using the old version of the CS I believe, but I'm not sure of all the details to get that to work. Here's a quote from the Construction Set Wiki tutorial Dialogue Tutorial A quote from the CS Wiki page The Elder Scrolls Construction Set Here's a link for Construction Set Extender from here on TESNexus.

If you have a long running character like my old guy, (who I go back to from time to time now that I'm playing my 'new guy', who has barely scraped up enough gold to buy the waterfront shack) you will have way more gold than you can find things to buy. I find that 99% of the things I can buy just get stashed in some chest in one of my many houses and forgotten. At least when I'm using one of my horses I can see what I got for my money.

The different rings in the vanilla game are designed for either left hand or right hand. Wearing two lefts or two rights isn't an issue for the player character (put on two lefts and you will still be wearing two rings and your character will display a ring on the left and a ring on the right). NPCs will only wear two rings if one is a left and the other is a right. If the ring is a vanilla ring and she's not wearing anything that is taking up a ring slot I'm not sure what the problem could be (a ton of mods including 'armor' mods use the ring, amulet and/or tail slots). I created left and right for the rings I want companions and NPCs to wear so that they'd wear two rings with the enchantment combination I wanted. - Edit - Just had a thought about your character and the amulet you think you're wearing. If the armor you're using also has a piece that uses the amulet spot (not at all uncommon), then it will automatically unequip your amulet and put it's piece in it's place. If that armor has zero value you are once again nude. You need to edit the armor's value in the Construction Set.

Do you have more than 4 GB RAM in your machine (the way I read between the lines in the utility description is it will make the patched executable use 4GB, which means you will need at least 6 GB to leave 2 GB left over for the OS). As for your Steam issue ... well there are reasons I won't use Steam. Patch and run off-line.

Koroush doesn't specifically say so, but if you look at the end of the iPreloadSizeLimit paragraph he mentions that raising that and your cell buffers should be coordinated, and adds a caveat that going too far may cause crashes. My own investigations around the subject lead me to believe that the largest impact you can make for smooth game play revolves around your hard drive system. His comments in the uGridsToLoad section of his guide supports this. Look at it this way. No matter what tweaks you make, at some time the information that starts out on your hard drive, either in a compressed BSA or regular uncompressed file, needs to be loaded into RAM. The absolute slowest part of your machine (after your DVD drive that is) is your hard drive system. Even with SATA and RAID 0 your system practically starves while it's waiting for the data from the hard drive. Running the game off a fast SSD RAID 0 would probably help greatly, but I haven't the resources to test those waters (I'm an old Windows XP dinosaur anyway ... no SSD support). Before I retired I'd purchased the major parts for my next machine (just a CPU speed bump to the fastest version of my current Core 2 Duo). I've never got around to picking up the rest of the parts (we'll see if there's money left after this Christmas). I have 4 GB of RAM for that box, but I still have 3 uninstalled OEM copies of WinXP 32 bit, so it will be hard to justify the money for Win 7 64 bit. I thought about reviving an old DOS trick and set up a RAM drive to run the game from, but I really don't know how practical that would be (may not be too bad though as the game already is set up to store saves to your log-in profile's documents folder). Bottom line ... I'd start out from Koroush's 2 GB recommendations and then make small changes from there, testing thoroughly between changes. I'd also suggest those small steps be made across uExterior Cell Buffer, iPreloadSizeLimit and uGridsToLoad (if you don't use an LOD replacer) in concert, so that you don't run into the one or two you didn't raise being the bottleneck. A lot of this will be subjective as well, as the game doesn't really require the FPS of a shooter or online click-fest game, and there aren't any good utilities for measuring the change in loading pauses. And my best advice ... defrag, defrag, defrag. Everything you can do to help speed up your hard drive system is gold. - Edit - Just saw Harvald's reply on this thread. The utility he linked to is kind of interesting, but will only help out if you have more than 4 GB RAM (by the way I read between the lines in the utility description anyway).

Here's a quote from the UESP Wiki walkthrough Bugs section for Leya wiin Recommendation:

I like the horse armor. It makes it easy for me to tell my white horse from Vilja's at a glance, or if I left one of my horses in a public stable that has other horses, same thing ... mine's the one with armor. The only horse that the horse armor DLC screws up is Shadowmere, who won't return to Fort Farragut if you lose her (which is not an issue with the unarmored Shadowmere).

Have you read the Memory, Loading & Multithreading Variables section of Koroush Ghazi's Oblivion Tweak Guide (particularly the iPreloadSizeLimit settings referenced right below the uInterior Cell Buffer and uExterior Cell Buffer section)?

If you look through the file Vilja_Manual.html that was included with your download you'll find the answer to that and may other questions. You could also look through the Vilja comments thread, as that question is answered by Emma on about every fourth or fifth page of comments (I have no idea where she gets her patience from ... look at post # 4524 for the latest time she has answered what is clearly explained in the manual).

I did a search on the Construction Set Wiki that turned up a couple of links you may or may not have seen: Fixing the AddTopic Bug I Do Not Have A Greeting Text The search for 'I have no greeting' also turned up a number of tutorials I haven't listed here, that may give you an idea of where you've gone astray.

One quirk about feather as well is that it won't give you full 'bang for the buck' if you apply it before becoming over-encumbered. Pick up enough to trigger the 'You are over-encumbered' message and then apply feather (via spell or potion). Have a look in the 'Bug' section of the UESP Wiki article on Feather for complete details.

If you have Oblivion Mod Manager already it has a BSA utility included (click 'Utilities' then select 'BSA Browser'). You would need to put the extracted sound files in your game install Data folder (treat this the same as a replacer mod, which in a way it is ... you are replacing the compressed sounds in the BSA with their uncompressed counterpart).

Not sure if you've seen this Mod Cleaning Tutorial on the CS Wiki.

There are a few things that can't been seen unless you do the associated quest but for the most part the game world is your's to explore (you can even visit the Oblivion world at Kvatch without starting the main quest by delivering the amulet ... don't talk to anyone and go into the gate ... a cool place to pick up some of the hard to find Oblivion ingredients for alchemy, level dependent however for availability even in Oblivion ... don't close the gate and return whenever you feel the need). As I started off saying in my previous post, I concur with ponyboy10. Get a feel for the vanilla game and then go pick up Vilja. If nothing else, you'll have a proper frame of reference to measure her gameplay additions against. One more caveat to add ... if you managed to snag a Game of the Year disk version make sure to install the Shivering Isles right off the bat. For one, it patches the game up to the current for you, but more importantly it will make your game compatible with any mods out there. If you don't install the SI and patch your game up to the latest then you won't be able to install SI later without a complete reinstall and any mods that have SI as a requirement won't be playable for you. If you install SI right at the get go all that will happen is you'll get a message just after exiting the tutorial sewers about a 'strange door'. Nothing more is required on your part, and you can never visit the Shivering Isle and no one will ever notice.

If you intend to do the main quest on this play through, no I don't recommend loading Vilja at the start (although you can load the mod and then just not go and meet her, which is what I'm doing with my new guy on my current install ... I like to go back to my old guy, who is traveling with Vilja, from time to time). The main issue with any companion when doing the main quest revolves around closing Oblivion gates ... if you have them with you when you grab the Sigil stone they'll often lose their inventory (one of the main attractions of having a companion along then, other than an extra sword arm is using them as a pack mule to carry loot). It's certainly possible to use a companion while closing gates, just make sure to either send them home before grabbing the stone (if they offer that option, as Vilja does), or have them follow to outside the gate and tell them to wait while you go back in and close the gate. The downside here is if you don't kill everything in that plane of Oblivion before you lead them outside you'll have a little solo work left to do before getting to the Sigil stone again and/or some planes of Oblivion are quite large and have complicated paths to get to the location of the Sigil stone (the Sigillum Sanguis found in the main tower). It's perfectly possible to hook up with Vilja at or near the start of the game, do a bunch of adventuring with her along and then when you decide to do the main quest either leave her behind when going to close a gate or leave her behind while doing the whole main quest. That's one of the cool aspects of the game in general ... you can start a quest on day one in the game world and then leave finishing it until you feel like and, for the most part, it will have no impact on your game (there are a few quests that change an NPC's status from essential, i.e. unkillable, to non-essential, reducing their usability and value in some later parts of some quests). Companion Vilja is a game changer without a doubt, and compared to other companion mods out there has very few of the gameplay flaws that they introduce (i.e she can be set to stay out of the fight unless you're about to die if you want to level up your fighting skills ... with most other companions you need to lead them well away from the scene of the upcoming battle and tell them to wait to keep them out of the fight). The only downside to starting out with Vilja in tow (or leading you ... a novel and exclusive Vilja option) is that if you then decide to leave Vilja behind and go adventuring on your own you'll find Cyrodiil a rather lonely place (hence my switching back to 'the old guy' for a little play time). - Edit - An addendum about your WoW/LotR comment a few posts back ... while you do have less of a 'grind' as you put it, keep in mind that this is a highly addictive game ... expect some late nights.

If you are looking for a relaxing experience that can still have unexpected moments try Companion Vilja. Take a look through the mod comments and you'll get a sense of the quality of the mod and support it receives (both from the mod author and her team and from it's users).