Striker879

You may have already seen this one from the Construction Set Wiki.

Another consideration that will affect your choice is screen size. LCDs are best run at native resolution and your video card needs to pump to those pixels. A laptop with a larger screen will therefore require a more powerful card than one with a smaller screen. I know, doesn't make the selection process any easier does it?

What MarkinMKUK is talking about is your entire Oblivion installation. When you accept the default location when you install Oblivion for the first time it goes into either C:\Program Files\Bethesda Softworks\Obilivion (if you are running a 32bit installation of Windows Vista/7) or C:\Program Files (x86)\Bethesda Softworks\Obilivion if you are running the 64bit version of Windows Vista or Windows 7. Microsoft has a security feature called UAC (User Access Control) that protects programs that are installed in the Program Files directory (it doesn't allow them to be modified). When you first install Oblivion and don't try any mods UAC doesn't interfere. When you are trying to run mods on Oblivion you are trying to modify the program and UAC stops you cold. If instead, you install Oblivion to another directory, example C:\Games\Oblivion the Microsoft UAC doesn't try to interfere. If you already have Oblivion installed in C:\Program Files (as well as BOSS and any other mods/utilities you've been trying) your only solution is to completely uninstall Oblivion and all your mods/utilities and then re-install everything in C:\Games\Oblivion or any directory you chose outside of the Program Files directory. One of the moderators here bben46 has an uninstallation/re-installation guide you can find here to step you through the process. Good luck, let us know how it works out (or ask for more assistance if needed).

So far my modding has been pretty modest, mostly adding extra NPCs to my houses and giving them 'lives'. If you look at any NPCs in the Construction Set (double click one to bring up their properties dialog) you'll see an AI button. Click it and you get the AI Object dialog with the AI Package list near the bottom. Right click one of the listed packages (let's say an eat package) and select edit you get another dialog called AI Package. There's a section of flags that can be selected at the top and a group of tabs (Schedule, Conditions, Location & Target) for the lower section. On the Conditions tab you can edit an existing condition if one is already defined or create/add your own with the New button at the bottom left. If you're creating a new one when none existed before this will open up a drop-down selection box that has all the available conditions listed (e.g. IsRaining). In the table above that you'll see columns for Target, Function Name, Function Info, Comp, Value and an un-named column. Target in this case will be no (I've not needed to use that so far) IsRaining for Function Name, nothing in Function Info (controlled by what you assign with the Function Parameters button, bottom centre ... again something I've not yet used), == or whatever you select from the Comparison drop down to control the logic (equal to, greater than etc.), Value that you set using the box bottom right that the logic will check against (for true or false or quest stage etc.) and a check box bottom extreme right to toggle AND or OR so that you can cascade through different functions with a logical AND or OR (a bit past the depth I've required so far as well). The resources I've linked and the tinkering I've done getting my NPCs to do what I'm looking for is the extent of my limited knowledge on NPC AI, but I do know I've only scratched the surface of what you can do with just the vanilla functions provided (not getting into OBSE or writing your own scripts at all). What is possible with those tools is far beyond my limited vision as of yet. Good luck on your journey into this vast new land, and don't curse me too much when you get stuck in the occasional mucky spot. :tongue: Edit: Here's a link I remembered about for NPC creation that gets into the basics for AI from the CS Wiki.

You may already have seen this but here's a link to the Construction Set Wiki Portal for Actor Behavior. There's quite a bit of info in the wiki but sometimes it's hard to find what you're looking for. Search is good when you know what they call something but it can be a chore searching through pages manually when you don't know the right 'handle' for something. Good luck.

You could try that. I don't see how re-installing Sexlivion over the old stuff could make things worse. You could also look at just deleting all the Estrus related stuff (you have already disabled it and hopefully have a save with it disabled) and then re-install Sexlivion. Any time I've loaded a save with content from a deleted mod I get the standard Oblivion squawk about missing stuff but the game plays through the rough OK (mind you most of my 'missing stuff' is my own simple mods). Keep us updated on your progress.

To build on wetblanket's idea you could have the nefarious 'boss' living the good life in the IC in complete anonymity. Be a good end-quest goal for the Legion infiltration idea (find me the guy who's pulling all these strings). You've got me salivating.

I'm curious what you're seeing for GPU memory usage. I use Bloom myself (because I don't like the contrast and lack of shadow detail I see in-game with HDR). Without AA I'm usually around mid 400Mb on each of my SLI'd 8800GTS 640Mb. When I enable 8x AA I start out closer to 500Mb per card after a minute or two of jogging outdoors. When I start seeing over 600mb per card in my G15 keyboard display I know it's time to start saving 'cause the CTD is coming soon. I don't think the game engine is very good at freeing up old video memory so the garbage slowly accumulates.

I've always been a Creative SoundBlaster guy, but the next box I build will have an Auzentech in it. They use the X-Fi chip from Creative and massage it with some better quality peripheral trinkets. They have a range of products meeting different price points ... just keep this in mind. You get what you pay for. I don't endorse 'buy the most expensive 'cause it's the best'. I also say that the cheapest reaches that price for a reason ... cheaper components = lower price = less quality & reliability. Computer components are all an exercise in compromise between price and quality. The acceptable compromise point for me will not necessarily be yours.

That would be the root of the problem I believe. Estrus has likely overwritten animation files from Sexlivion and what's left is a mangled mess. Look at the extracted contents from each and delete the files (and folders if there's nothing else in them) that each added to your Oblivion install. Startup the game and make a clean save. Re-install Sexlivion and you should be good to go.

Did you ask in the mod's Comments section? I'm doubtful that you'd need them ... from all I've read in the UESP Wiki you don't need them for the vanilla houses (but I keep them stashed just like you, each to it's appropriate house).

A resource that I have found helpful (and sometime frustrating) is the Construction Set Wiki. It can be a little hard to find what you're looking for ... search is your friend IF you know what THEY call something (part of the frustrating mentioned above).

Or you're super focused on getting that bauble that Martin needs so desperately but the game has decided to clear out it's outstanding inventory of ogres, and figured that the roads between you and that bauble would be the perfect spot to put 'em. Grrr ... good thing I brought along my chameleon gear.

There's a couple of respawning barrels there that always yield the less common ingredients (Gingko for example). I always stop & shop on my way by.

Again ... crack open the Construction Set. I was checking up on a couple of my boys last night (CM Partners) who hang out at Dzonot Cave (it has a bedroll and cooking type fireplace and no bandits hanging about outside so it's a good place to park them until I need them). There's some respawning apples and carrots so they won't go walkabout on me looking for food, but I like to leave 'em a bit of bread as well. After I set the bread next to the fire were they wouldn't kick it into the water when they wander around I thought "Hey, maybe they'd like a little venison, and I am carting around a bunch". So I drop a piece of deer on the ground and grab it to move it next to the bread by the fire (which at this point wasn't burning). Just as I released the venison the fire lights, like it was the stove and I turned it on to make supper. Flipped me out ... I thought "How cool, they scripted the fire so it would light when you slap down some meat". I just checked in the CS and I'm sorry to disappoint but Bethesda wasn't quite that sophisticated. Turns out that that particular fire has a light resource DExteriorTorchFire256wFlame. That light resource has a script associated with it ExteriorLightScript. To my un-expert script reading eyes it looks like if the player is close to the resource it will run, and lights the fire at 6pm and will put it out again at 7am. Must have been just dumb luck that I'd just slapped down the boy's meat at exactly the right time. To all you scripters out there ... when venison.distance <= 1 light fire, get on it for me will ya!! :laugh:

And a big 'May Your Blade ...' etc.

I'm certainly no expert at this, but I believe this is how you'd add an icon to your pie. Open the mod's esp in the Construction Set and find the item in the Ingredients list in the Object window (you'll probably need to click the plus sign (+) and scroll down the list. There will be two buttons to the left of a rectangular box (that would display the icon if one was assigned). The top one will be the world model nif that displays the item if you drop it on the ground during the game, the lower one will probably be blank unless an icon is already assigned but not displaying. If it does have an icon assigned note the path displayed on the button (e.g. the icon for Shepherds Pie I mentioned earlier is found in Clutter\IconServantPie.dds). Now go that directory in your Oblivion install directory using Windows Explorer and see if you can find the dds file that your pie is looking for (menu icons added by mods are usually found in Oblivion\Data\Textures\menus\icons and then the subdirectory named by the mod). If you can't find the directory, go to the folder you downloaded the mod to (hopefully you extract the contents of the downloaded archive into a separate directory and check out it's contents before you install a mod ... good practice) and look at the directory structure of the extracted mod. When I downloaded and extracted Bisquits Elven Princess for example, it created folder structure inside my temporary directory for it's menu icon giving me subdirectories Textures\menus\icons\ElvenPrincess and three dds files for displaying it's menu icons. This is the directory structure and contents that I copied into my Oblivion install directory when I installed the Elven Princess mod. If the downloaded and extracted directory structure and contents for your mod that added the pies isn't the same as your Oblivion install you'll need to correct any differences. If for example I didn't have the icons\ElvenPrincess subdirectories in my Oblivion install directory (using my example above) I would go to my downloaded and extracted directory, right click on the icons subdirectory there and select copy from the right click menu. Then I would right click on the menus subdirectory in my Oblivion install directory and select paste from the right click menu, which would give my Oblivion install directory a copy of the contents of the icons\ElvenPrincess subdirectory in the correct location. Checking my Oblivion install directory would now show Oblivion\Data\Textures\menus\icons\ElvenPrincess and the three dds files needed by the mod. If however, when you check the downloaded and extracted directories you don't find a menus\icons subdirectory that means the mods authors may have never created any menu icons for that resource. Please note that when you're looking for the icon resources for one particular item in a big mod that adds lots of items there may be a menus\icons subdirectory with icon resources for other items added by the mod, just not that one item you're looking for. Another possibility, that leads onto the next steps anyway, is that the resources for the mod may be contained in a bsa archive, the same kind of location that the vanilla game uses for it's resources. They're just a form of compressed archive, similar to zip/rar/7z formats. You can look inside the bsa archives the same as you can other formats, and extract resources you need. I use the BSA Browser utility that's part of Oblivion Mod Manager myself but there are also other tools. If your mod does come with a bsa file for it's resources but it's not displaying the menu icons you can look inside the bsa files for the dds file that you found way back near the beginning (my example was the icon for Shepherds Pie which is found in the Clutter\IconServantPie.dds file located in Oblivion's 'Oblivion - Textures - Compressed.bsa' file located in the Oblivion install Data directory). If you can find the right file name but it's directory structure isn't the same as the one that was listed in the Construction Set (way way back near the start of this explanation) you can extract the file from the bsa into your download directory. You would then create the required subdirectories in your Oblivion install and copy the file into the correct subdirectory (one caveat here, and perhaps more knowledgeable members could correct me, but for this to work you may need to use archive invalidation). If the required file doesn't exist in the mod's bsa you can extract a suitable one from the Oblivion bsa resources and use it. Again using Oblivion Mod Manager's utility BSA Browser, I'd open the Oblivion - Textures - Compressed.bsa in the BSA Browser and click the drop down box in the lower right and change it to File name then click the Sort button. Scroll way down to the files with names beginning with 'icon' until you find the file iconservantpie.dds (there will be three of them, one in a menus50 subdirectory, one in a menus80 sub and one in a plain menus subdirectory ... I'd use the menus one, not sure what the other two subs are for). Highlight the file and click the Extract button. Select where you want the file extracted to from the resulting menu (if you do this a lot you may want to create an ExtractedResources directory somewhere on your hard drive) and click Save. Create a subdirectory in your Oblivion install that's consistent with established standards (my suggestion is Oblivion\Data\Textures\menus\icons\<name_of_the_mod>) and then copy your extracted iconservantpie.dds there. Back in the Construction Set double click your pie that's missing a menu icon and click on the lower of the two buttons to the left (the one that says Add Icon Image). Navigate in the Select DDS File menu that comes up to find the iconservantpie.dds that we copied to the Oblivion install directory and click Open to assign the extracted file to your item. Again you may need to use archive invalidation, not sure on that. OK, after all that I know what your thinking ... way too much bother. I don't disagree, a blank spot on the menu isn't that big a deal to me either.

I'm sharpening up a couple of blades and mixing up some nice toasty fire-effect poisons ... bring 'em on!! I like the idea of giving them a little nap time too. Always seemed dumb to me that the bandit camps, with nice cozy tents and all, never get slept in until I clean them out for my companions. It'll be fun to stumble upon one of your boys while he's snoozin' ... ya snooze ya lose!!

The only pies I'm aware of in the vanilla game are Shepherds Pie and that has a menu icon. You probably have a mod that adds extra items to the game, but the mod developer didn't assign a menu icon to the resource. Happens with some armors etc as well.

Ahh ... so this must be a shop added by a mod. In any case, as pointed out by others, in Oblivion sometimes bad things happen to good people. Falling from bridges, getting ambushed by bandits while travelling or running into a guy like me can ruin their day. Next thing you know they're laying in the street, stinking the place up. Some will disappear when the cell resets, others will stick around until you reformat your hard drive (kidding ... don't do that to get rid of them). If you have one who just lays there forever (e.g. the above mentioned Toutius Sextius) you can open the console (using the tilde key ~) and then click on them with the mouse. This will bring their refID into the top of the screen (for our friend Toutius that would be 000293F8). Once the refID is displayed type 'disable' and hit enter. Close the console and they're gone. If instead you'd rather enjoy their sparkling company again you can use the 'resurrect 1' command instead (after clicking them as above to get their refID displayed). This will bring them back to life (as an aside, using the '1' after resurrect allows them to stand up from where they're laying, with the benefit of keeping all their stuff). As I said, Oblivion is a dangerous place for the poor NPCs. When I see one laying by the roadside I'll usually give them a little console lovin'. If I run across one hiking down the road while I'm going walk-about I'll usually provide escort (after all, I'm the one who makes the bad guys spawn near the roads when I walk by ... it's the least I can do). Then there's those other times, when my bad side shows through and I just can't help myself. Hey, I wasn't the one who asked them to make it possible to reverse pick-pocket ... I'm just usin' all the tools. :tongue:

Wouldn't the greaves now be in your savegame, which to my understanding isn't editable. That would mean that you'd need to edit the original, but I'm no expert (just follow a lot of threads trying to learn).

What ... your going to make it hard for me find 'em?? As it is now that's one of the problems with all the bad guys, I know where they spawn so I'm ready for them. Some randomly roving bandits swooping down with a "Your money or your life" would spark things up. That's why I asked which ones weren't lining up, I was going to wander over that way and see who (if anyone) I could rustle up. The only one off hand that doesn't ring a bell with me is the one near Lord Drad's. I've encountered regular bandits there before but I don't recall any highwaymen. The highwaymen do have a rather boring existence, just standing there waiting for the player (have you ever noticed that an Imperial patrol will go right past one unless you are close enough to trigger the highwayman). At least the bandits, marauders and conjurers have wander packages so you might not find them in exactly the same spot each time. Good luck. You can always get back into the frying pan if it gets too warm in the fire.

Have you tried asking for help in the particular mods Comments section. Without more specific information (i.e. the name of the mod, your operating system, location of your Oblivion install etc.) it's difficult to divine the root of your troubles.

I take it that the five that you can find are also at five of the points you list in the OP. Where exactly does the wiki say the missing one should be?

In the CS you can set the NPC's AI to check if it's raining. My extra 'house guests' are scheduled to read outside if it's not raining, if it is they just wander inside on their default AI package. There is also an option for if the weather is pleasant, but they wouldn't go outside unless it was a gorgeous sunny day. Here's a complete list of the Condition Functions available in the CS AI editor found in the Construction Set Wiki.