MarkInMKUK

Firstly, if you are going to put in ANY mods, you ought to move your installation of Oblivion from the default location to something like c:\Games\Oblivion - there are instructions on the steam forum for moving your installation directory. That stops Vista or Win7 from causing problems with its User Account Control system - ANY program installed in c:\Program Files\something can suffer otherwise. Actually, there are a couple of additional mods you MAY want to add fairly early on - BUT ONLY if you get crash-to-desktop problems either while playing or when exiting. IF, and ONLY IF that applies - download and install OBSE (Oblivion Script Extender) v20, weOCPS (Winston Earle's Oblivion Crash Prevention System) and FastExit - the last two use the facilities provided by the first to fix a lot of the common crash bugs. All three should be on the Nexus someplace. However, if you don't have crash problems, then don't add them.

I suggest posting a full mod list, in load order, in spoiler tags - unless it's blindingly obvious to someone what has happened, then you'll need that anyway to spot the problem. Double check for active effects - is anything nobbling your character like a spell or a disease or a cursed inventory item?

I've seen the "fish on land" happening with just an OOO install, so it's a glitch in the OOO waterlife file someplace I think. But then, I've once seen a slaughterfish on land in vanilla Oblivion, so it may be a game bug which OOO makes more obvious by adding many more fish.

Comment / discussion opener ... feel free to chip in and add your own viewpoint. I have a problem ... I keep watching documentaries! UK Channel 4's "Time Team" have just done an episode covering the way both houses and villages (in Britain) have changed over the last few thousand years. Part of this is the evolution of houses from round to rectangular structures, and part of it is the way we "lost" the idea of breaking the house into rooms when the Romans left, and then re-discovered it when villages and towns began to be planned again in the 13-14th century. Boiling down this, and other programmes over the years, plus visits to museums and the like, here's a list of things which don't quite stack up. Things which most houses in Oblivion don't have: (1) A method of warming the house. Even in the frozen north, I've yet to see a house which is actually built around a fireplace to keep warm. (2) Cooking facilities - usually the same fireplace. (3) Smoke exits for said fireplace. (4) Proper internal lighting - most houses rely on add-on sources, not a candle sconce for light to spread from. (5) Flooring materials other than stone or wood - where are things like rushes or ferns or (for the poorest) dried mud?. (6) Houses that have "evolved" - with obvious later additions like a staircase added once upper floors became more normal - often added at the same time they moved from a central fireplace to one at the end of the house. (7) No "older" houses - everything is built in a style which apes the 15th century or so, with nothing obviously older around. Yet the year dfates say that people have been here for rather longer. (8) Doors which a cow can fit into - up until the 13-14th century, many houses had the livestock area at one end and the human area at the other, and the cattle / sheep / whatever were brought in using the same entryway. (9) Personal garden - not a pretty "chocolate-box" type as in a couple of cottages, but someplace that the people living in the house could have grown vegetables and fruit to supplement their diet. Typically, a 14th century house would have a (low) walled garden behind, with a veg patch, naybe a few healing herbs, an area to pen livestock, possibly captive birds to eat, certainly rabbits for food, and behind that maybe a shared orchard for cider production - 6 trees would produce enough cider for the family to drink all year. (10) Forks! Very late addition to the cutlery range - yet the ones in the game are "modern" four-tine types, not the simple two-pronged type which first arrived. (11) Sewers! WHERE does the water in the sewers come from? As for those "houses" in the Imperial City - how would anyone ever live in them? The shops are windowless, so no-one can see the goods inside unless you spend all your profits on lighting, and the upstairs would be dark and cold as there is no heating. There are no real individual touches to the dwellings - all generic furniture and identical bedding, etc. Argonians and Khajiit like different conditions from humans and elves, yet their furnishings and bedding, etc., are identical to human type. Where are the mementos of home - the desert silks for Khajiit, the lush greenery for Argonians? We obviously can't do much with some structures - they have quests which have events happening in them. But some others we could alter and make "different" - and the clutter could easily be less generic when different races are involved. As a thief, I ahould "know" which race inhabits a building by the clutter, not needing to see them actually asleep before I realise. We have complex glass and metal working. We have window glass, and polished metal, but no mirrors. We have beautifully made wooden bows ... and no beautifully made wooden sculptures. We have houses that are mass-produced (as they are all the same), yet aren't built by anyone. And we have European Gothic churches with all the inherent stonemasonry skills, but almost no use of the same crafts elsewhere in the world. Did they all build stuff then stop doing it and change jobs? So - discussion points. Are we being short-changed by the game because of the above, or are we being given a reasonable "world" given the essential commercial compromises the game had to be produced with? Are the things I highlighted worth improving, or are they things you can mentally gloss over in your own game? Could the in-game houses / villages / living areas be improved, and if so, how should they BE improved? And which mods exist which alter these things for the better, if any?

Nice spec of PC, but I'd add an off-board soundcard - that way you shift some of the processing burdern off the main board AND (if you pick the right one) can find one that emulates EAX properly under Win7 for older games

Try Damsels In Distress and its two sequels

Thanks Wetblanket - that's a very useful mod. With the torch mod that'll really improve realism

Your best bet might be the mod that makes them carry torches ... not sure how that affects their night sight though

I'd like to see things like areas of the building that don't QUITE meet correctly, which leaves a gap you can squeeze through IF you are a smaller character, not wearing armour over a certain class, into a "secret passage" - or a similar area which only taller characters can reach (unless you implement draggable barrels to stand on), that kind of thing. Being able to stand on the bed and climb through a window above a door, or onto a barrel, chect of drawers and wardrobe to get out of a skylight would be fun, and only work if you are a compulsive "what can I interact with" player. Graphical "glitches" - you COULD have a heap of really rubbish swords, but have one which looks identical but every few seconds has a tiny sparkle animation running for a few frames - as if it's a nearly exhausted magic weapon. Take that sword and add a varla stone to your inventory, and it sucks the power and becomes something rather powerful, changing the texture as if the rust had fallen off, and changing the in-inventory name too. Armour - have a book that gives you a fairy tale about an armour enchantment - "makes leather into ebony" or something - where the character has to speak the words. If you type that into the console as if speaking, your armour changes stats.

If you are intending to make the owl fly, you may need to research it a lot - flying is something the game engine doesn't handle well. Good luck - owls are beautiful birds and I'd love to see them (and other birds) in the game.

If you are upgrading to Win7, the transfer of files from XP is not perfectly easy - for some reason they prefer you to start with a blank hard drive. Having said that, the File and settings Transfer Wizard does a reasonable job, but for Oblivion you might be better reading Bben46's Uninstall and Reinstall guide (somewhere on the nexus). Remember to install it to either c:\Games\Oblivion (if you have to put it on c drive) or another drive, as the User Account Control (UAC) on Windows 7 will stop a lot of mods installing correctly if it is installed under c:\Program Files (the default). I believe that's the case for many other moddable games too. Also having a specific games directory allows you to set up antivirus exclusions much more easily. Once on Win7, if you have a nenory card reader slot, stuff a good sized memory card in it and use "readyboost" - effectively this gives you a fast virtual drive as your first stage swap file, rather than swapping to physical hard disk. Make sure your main system RAM is the fastest your processor/motherboard can handle - any timing improvements you can get that way will help.

Desert region mod mentioned would be Elsewyr Anequinae I believe. For massive quest mods, try The Lost Spires and Integration: the Stranded Light. FCOM does a lot of stuff for you, there IS a pre-setup "Superpack" if you google for it but it adds several optional mods some people might prefer to be without. The Bashed Patch instructions are really useful though.

The Khajiit with "proper" legs would actually look VERY odd (I've watched my cat walking on his hind legs and it's really not a good look for even vaguely humanoid animations), hence why we're doing the best we can with the digitgrade foot (Razorpony's work at the moment) and working on a full replacement set of stock clothing/armour meshes/textures for that foot (Razorpony again) - the whole substitution then being handled by some of Drake's clever scripting. Once done, adding a tweaked/adjusted skeleton could well allow a body/leg proportion change to make the Khajiit look even more "correct" with just a minor angle/length change. The scripting method could also easily handle altered meshes/textures for clothing mods to suit the centaur, thus allowing it to complete quests where wearing ALL parts of the armour are required, and LOOKING as if that is being done ... ... which means that, along with Drake's work on the Argonian Beautification and Scripted Argonian Feet mods, and a FEW more tweaks to the meshes/textures for THOSE feet, both "canon" beast races in the original game are working correctly. The modified footwear meshes may not need much tweaking to suit the "hoofed" leg mods too, so if you used that as the basis for the centaur's front legs you could import any adjusted meshes very easily, thus just leaving you with lower body mods to fight with.

I'd suggest "Attack whoever is hurting them the most", as the best method is to kill off the most dangerous attacker, then the next, and so down. You could also build in a bias towards taking out the ranged attackers first unless the melee attack is overwhelmingly powerful, as often an archer or mage is hitting pretty darn hard.

It's actually a good touch for realism - limitless gold is unlikely in real life. Why would you expect a "normal" trader to be able to buy, instantly, a super-duper-ultra-power-magic-sword-with-bells-on, when normally they only buy rusty iron bows and the like. If you max your Mercantile skill, you get a bonus amount of gold to each merchant, so it's a bit of an incentive to do that too. However, I agree that at least one or two merchants SHOULD be able to buy high value items, even if only one a day or one per restock of gold. There are assorted mods which revamp the whole way trading works - I personally use Enhanced Economy which lets you fiddle all sorts of values to make merchants have more or less gold at different times, etc.

The same or similar problem will happen if you try to patch either (a) Oblivion only with the SI patch, (b) Oblivion + SI with the Oblivion Only patch, or © the Oblivion Only US version with the UK patch or vice versa. If you are running JUST Oblivion, work out whether it is the UK or US edition, and download the CORRECT patch (they ARE different). If you are running SI, install Oblivion, THEN SI, THEN the "Oblivion WITH SI" patch, NOT the "Oblivion" patch. The SI patch works with both UK and US versions. If you run a no-CD crack, or even a CD emulator, you may have problems. Simples, no? http://greengayle.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/simples.jpg

The generic dialogue should still work - it'll just pick up (for instance) male nord not female nord

The best option remaining may be a second PC, with a high-speed single core processor, and your existing graphics card. The faster core speed WILL improve the fps for any object the main CPU has to handle. Other things to try: Antivirus: Temporarily disable it, and see if that helps. If so, look at disabling any "on access" scanning for the Oblivion and OBSE processes - they open dozens of files and if each one has to be virus scanned every time it can really hit performance. Swap File: Move your windows swap file to a different PHYSICAL drive from the game. Having to move the drive head from game to swap to game continually can slow disk access badly and again hit fps rates. That would tend to show up more after you have been playing for a while.

If I am understanding what you ate trying to do correctly, altering the gender of npc's would cause a lot of problems, mostly with their dialogue. Any npc associated with a quest and with custom dialogue will ONLY have that dialogue recorded in the "correct" voice, there will not be alternative dialogue recorded in a male voice for a female character, or vice versa. Of course, if this doesn't concern you, then you can manually change the gender of each character in the Construction Set and also adjust their appearance or even import character faces from other people's uploaded mods.

That was certainly interesting, and I'm sure the people who actually do the 3D modding have taken careful note of the results. Because of the larger feet, he seemed to be running a bit knock-kneed, so maybe an animation tweak might also be needed ... but at least we know from Drake's work you CAN use a custom skeleton on a per-race basis,

Omega drivers are available at http://www.omegadrivers.net/

Suggestion - Try installing DirectX 9.0c if you are running Vista or 7 - look for the Administrative Download or Offline Installer. The DirectSound EAX support on Win7 doesnn't exist, and some other sound options may be affected too. Also try different settings in the sound setup for Oblivion. Finally, try an updated install of FFDShow which may fix something.

Fundamentally, you've added every mod from the "how to reduce your frame rate" list, and now have the reduced rate one might expect. You're very lucky that you get more than one or two frames per second with that load! You don't mention it, but do you have QTP3 installed as well , and texture replacers for the bodies and suchlike? Those will also slow things down a bit, and it is all a cumulative load. There are a couple of things you CAN try though. For the crashing, add FastExit and Winston Earle's Oblivion Crash Prevention system. Certainly add all the FPS patches you can find for Better Cities. Also try turning off the wine barrels and shutters in the Better cities options if you have them enabled. Anvil waterfront is a good place to see the effect they are having. Get the 3GB patch for Oblivion - it's an old program and doesn't use more than 2GB as installed, but some clever person wrote an improver which helps. No 32 bit OS will see more than 3and a bit GB of your 4GB - it's an addressing limitation - switch to 64 bit to use more (that's a whole new can of worms) Track down and try the Omega gaming drivers for your video card - when I was running XP they gave me quite a fps boost compared with the current manufacturer's drivers. Oblivion is a single-core program at the fundamental level - to run it at its fastest, one fast core will easily beat two or more slower ones. Overclocking is not advised.

Thread hijacking's something that just happens - and while not quite what the thread was started to cover, your project is well within the scope of the things people here are tinkering with. Certainly your input on other parts of the project will be appreciated. As a side note, maybe try modelling your horse part on the Caspian breed. It's a very old breed originally used by the Persians for chariot-pulling, and it likely to be similar to those breeds used in ancient Greece. The original size of the breed is thought to be about 9 hands (36 inches / 91.4cm) which would scale better onto a human body - which probably also ought to be adjusted to a typical ancient Greek height to get the ratio more correct.

Not strictly true. A reboot cleans the memory out, a ctrl-alt-del leaves a lot of junk floating in memory and allocated as far as the computer is concerned, so you have less RAM you can use when restarting. Eventually it SHOULD get cleaned up, but Windows isn't always great at the cleanup. Many regulars here use a couple of add-on mods which reduce or eliminate some of the known crash reasons - Winston Earle's Oblivion Crash Prevention System is a good one, plus FastExit to handle the crash-on-exit problem which is known to happen. You need to install OBSE (Oblivion Script Extender)to get them to run. They massively incresed stability on my system. Also, if playing Oblivion. kill EVERY un-needed process, and don't try to run chat programs and the like as well. GameBooster can be worth trying - it's amazing how much extra RAM you get with everything else turned off. There is also a 3GB memory patch for Oblivion - helps it actually use some of the memory you have. BTW - There's no point in having more than 4GB on a Windows 32 bit system anyway - you need 64 bit to address the extra couple of GB you currently have installed. It's worth reducing the system to 4GB and seeing if that helps the problem - you may get some odd effect where two memory chips are addressed at the same time and causing a crash.