MarkInMKUK

Realism from scratch - first attempt. OK, so it's time to put stuff into practice. How "realistic" can I make my game, starting in the tutorial jail cell. I'm mixing cosmetic and gameplay mods a little, as you'll see. My character is a female Bosmer, aiming to be primarily an archer/sniper/thief type. Preinstalled OBSE, OBGEv2 Initial mods added for realism: QTP3 Redimized Reduced - Because I have several other mods to add that have QTP3 options and I might as well start off with it. Animated Window Lighting System and Chimneys - Added because it looks good from outside, and I know I'll be installing it once I get outdoors anyway. Weather - All Natural - Added to get the "Real Lights" feature, so light actually comes only from "proper" light sources. SM Encumbrance and Fatigue - I want to carry more, even if I have to drag it and rest a lot. This seems to fit the bill so far. Cava Obscura - Dark caves and dungeons - now those torches are actually needed. Duke Patricks Combat Archery mod - because I've been meaning to try it, and apparently it's going to be built into Skyrim. While I was at it, I also added several more of the good Duke's mods (because they seem to cover other aspects of realism)... Duke Patricks - Actors Can Miss Now Duke Patricks - Near Miss Magic And Arrows Alert The Target Duke Patricks Fresh Kills Now Alert The NPCs OK, so I start the game going. Cell is darker, and the light comes from the torches and the corridor. plus the window. (Pet irritation - I *know* that voice, but the face is wrong. Note to self - try and make a orking replacer for the Emperor using the NPC Texture Tweak and TNR's stuff.) The usual suspects arrive, and make a hole in the cell wall. Goodness it's dark, but there's a dropped torch at the bottom. Scurry down and pick it up. Remember that I can't actually use it to hit someone, and if I drop it I'm in the dark. Thinks... Of course, now I need a droppable torch mod. Normally I'd run OOO which contains one, but this is a game based on a vanilla-ish install. So, plenty of DLT mods around, but eventually I went for Drop Lit Torches OBSE. I considered a Torch-as-a-weapon mod, but decided against as I will be sneaking mostly once I get some kind of night sight ability. OK - steal stuff off the assassin bodies (I was too far back to get near them when they killed Renault) and pick up Renault's katana & short sword. Wall crumbles, and in come the rats. Press "F" to fight, torch drops ok, and I can still see. Wallop rats, heal self, pick up torch. Creep through the hole, and start investigating. Deal with additional rat, heal, and pick up all of the goodies in the area, including picking a simple lock (which reminds me to lookm at lock-picking game alternatives). Can't aim at the well bucket - can't see it. Walk to well - drop torch. Walk back, aim at bucket, fire, miss. Repeat and hit. Now creep onwards. Because I can't see much, due to the limited light range, I'm listening for every change in ambience (it doesn't help that I'm a little deaf. Maybe I shouldn't have replaced my Bosmer's ears with the shorter mesh ones from a dark elf). Flare spell at the ready I edge forwards. More rats, another chest, and then a passage leading down ... more rats .. and something making odd noises ahead. Kill the rats as they pass, then hurl a flare down the passage. See a zombie picking off another rat, then starting my way. Apply a couple m,ore flares, then hit it with the katana. Ex-zombie. (Realism note - should then burn the body perhaps?). On and on ... find an openish area, with a couple more rats, and another chest - a harder lock. Thinks - realism and locks ... save game, look at mods to alter lockpicking. To be continued. Comments welcome.

Alternativel;y tick the option to silence script effects in the build section for the bashed Patch on Wrye Bash if you use it

Because each race in the game shares a single texture set. Not a separate one for each character. If you didn't make a new race for your character you would have to switch the texture of one of the existing races, which would mean every character and noc in the game of that race would have their textures switched to your new one as well. You missed the point of npc Tex Tweak. I quote... "It allows you to create and use a unique texture for every NPC in the game by using a simple OBSE plug-in. At the moment it only works with OBSE version 12 and Oblivion version 1.2.0.416." ... except it probably works with later versions of OBSE too

There MIGHT be a way around that limitation, possibly. Someone's working on an improved conversation mod, where you have a background program that runs and it accessed by the game engine vis scripts. What the limitations are I don't know, but if it can run extra npc's AIs in a second core, it might be a way to bypass certain game engine limitations - just use npc's as objects unless directly interacting Pure speculation of course.

Telyn, Thanks for the viewpoint. Personally I prefer the game without guns and the attendant stuff, but I thought I'd open it up for discussion as it is a 2real2 item that could have been added without too much anachronism. No guns for me, anyway. Siege engines are quite another thing though ... Catapults and Trebuchets anyone?

(Almost) no modding with D2D. Ditto with Impulse. Steam or hard copy only.

You are playing an old game, designed for older cards and a single processor. The newer games can make far better use of multiple cores than Oblivion. With Oblivion, one fast core beats two or more slower cores every time. 20-30 fps is fine for TV or cinema - why worry about it for gaming?

Check it's not reporting a conflict with the preinstalled MMM nifs - after all, you'd espect a replacer to conflict with the items it's replacing

Realism discussion point - Guns / Cannons / Gunpowder / Rockets I've just been watching a TV programme (Time Team Special: Wars of the Roses) which reminded me that field artillery was actually in use in Britain by the 1460's, albeit in a primitive way. Furthermore, and competent blacksmith could actually turn out a 2" / 50mm bore cannon in well under a day, just using a forge, hammer and anvil. Meanwhile, the Chinese had been using rockets for ceremonial purposes for thousands of years, although not usually as a warfare device. The Western world adopted rockets and almost instantly turned them to weapon use. So... What level of development of guns / rockets is likely / acceptable within the confines of Oblivion? Are Alchemists likely to be developing gunpowder? Who, if any, within the game are likely to be working on guns or rockets? Would Dwemer ruins turn up some form of gunpowder-based weapon (remembering the use of explosives in mining) and if so, who would be using them.

If you want to be able to add mods to Oblivion, with SI, you WILL need a disk release or the Steam version of Oblivion. The Steam Deluxe version comes with all (I think) of the DLC modules, the Disk "Game of the Year" comes with just Knights of the Nine, and you would need to either buy and download the others, or hunt down a copy of the Knights of the Nine CD which had all apart from Battle horn Castle DLC included. We don't support "downloaded from somewhere" disk images and will give no help to people who use them. As for the .7z files, a recent version of Winzip or Winrar would extract them, or download 7zip (free) which creates them)

Generally, the most nearly "correct" load order can be achieved by downloading BOSS (Better Oblivion Sorting Software), updating its masterlist.txt, and running it. It'll organise the files into an almost certain-to-run-ok order. When you get more into modding, you'll probably also need a tool called Wrye Bash to handle two mods which both alter the same item or aspect of the gamne play.

The hi-res textures minimiae the colour difference, but the change in colour is due to the way Oblivion renders the face and body differently. Nothing will completely remove it. There is a neck seam minimiser which adds necklaces to hide the join line - that can help a little

Talking of the Braveheart moment - a much earlier version occurred to me - a scene right near the end of one of the British "Carry On" comedies - "Carry On Up The Khyber". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8atKXFZefA the scene in question is at about 5m40. Regarding encumbrance - the "Nailed to the floor" approach is another immersion breaker. Once you hit a ceretain level, a sliding scale of apeed drop would be far more realistic - heck, I can actually lift and stagger with 200+kg (440+ pounds) of steel pipe, but probably can't manage normal walking speed much over 80 pounds load for any period of time, and a flat-out run requires no encumbrance. Coupled with the "Inventory as a backpack" mod, that set of effects would make things much more immersive. I haven't YET dug into the depths of the "Real fatigue"-type mods to see what they do in that way - it's possible it is already scripted. If so, adding your slowing down effect when wet would be relatively easy I would think. Speaking of clothing,there is a mod out there someplace which begins to affect npc reactions to you based on what you are, or are not, wearing. Again, I haven't yet tried it, but it would seem a sensible one to add. Being arrested for public exposure, or propositioned on street corners if you are in "skimpy" clothing, would seem very much in keeping with immersion.

I've seen a mod that makes them have a sort of silver layer over them ... but nothing that looks realistically damp for clothing - it might look semi-ok on bare skin.

Now THAT would be one of the best realism improvers out there. I know there's one mod that tried to do it, but failed. Workable umbrellas maybe?

Hi Telyn, Good set of mods - I foresee a happy hour or two downloading and installing tonight. Hopefully with some work we can overcome the game's inherent bias towards making AI stand for "Absolute Idiocy".

There is already a Dwemer skyship. That might be a good starting point for what you are describing. Expand that a bit - have a trading network using the skyship or ships. Then add in pirates with the same technology, and you have your combat situations.

This mod adds a gauntlet weapon. For the styling of the glove, you'll need to look around - I think I may have seen a Wolverine-type claw set someplace, but it may need the modder's permission to convert from Fallout to Oblivion format.

The noise problem would be pretty much a whale-only issue - they are the only creatures I'm aware of that use subsonics to communicate. I just prefer geothermal on the grounds that it's relatively unobtrusive - surface buildings and power pylons and that's more-or-less it. ... and that's despite the fact I work for a company more likely to benefit indirectly if they go the wind farm route.

Wind farms tend to raise a lot of opposition. For starters, the noise generated by the turbines is propagated down the support and resonates in the water. Given Japan's history of wanting to continue whaling, anything that adds low frequency noise to the area will tend to frighten off whales and as such may cause protests. That's in addition to the usual complaints about ruined views and danger to shipping / wildlife / whatever. Then there's cable to bring power to shore. And how consistent is the wind? It's an intermittent supply at the mercy of weather conditions ... and also very unlikely to be tsunami-proof, which may also be a design consideration.

A few thoughts on "Difficulty" I've been tinkering around with assorted mods which alter the balance of the game. The problem seems to be that they apply a global change, which doesn't really make sense. So most of this applies just to vanilla Oblivion. For example - the tutorial dungeon (which everyone has done). Enemies - several rats, 1 Zombie, 8 goblins, possibly Mythic Dawn assassins if you are fast and aggressive enough. On easy, rats are a simple kill, and the zombie falls to three or four arrows or a couple of fireballs. On medium, rats suddenly take at least TWO arrows to kill them? Now come on, an arrow is designed to kill an unarmoured man, ideally with a single shot. Is it REALLY reasonable to take TWO to kill EVERY rat you meet? Maybe the occasional rat you'd miss hitting it cleanly, but it should at LEAST slow the damn thing down because it's pretty badly injured. But no - they comme galloping up to you at full speed trailing an iron arrow that should weigh in at half as much as they do. As for the zombie - that's getting tough by this stage. I try very hard to let the rats take it down for me first. So - is there a better way of scaling? Maybe give rats high agility so they can dodge stuff, but still be killed easily with a direct hit. The zombie should be tough to beat, I agree, but it should STILL slow down if half-cooked and turned into a pincushion. What does the game engine allow us to do to make these more reasonably balanced enemies. Then there's the goblins. The first two are pretty easy no matter what settings you use. However things become a little ... odd ... in the main cavern. With no mods, I can sneak and snipe any or all of them on easy or medium, and generally take only two, or maybe three, arrows on hard. But ... why the heck don't they ALL respond when the first one sees you and screeches a warning? If the legion guards can know you have committed a crime in another city, surely a goblin should at least wonder why another one is either screaming "Look, there's a human/elf/orc/whatever", or dropping on top of him full of holes and leaking blood. Open for discussion and ideas.

This image has a dragon crossguard - is this even remotely close to what you are after? The problem with a hand-and-a-half/bastard sword having this style of hilt is the need to swap from one to two-hand use - and the dragon tail getting in the way during the changeover, also limiting the ways you can turn the sword once you HAVE got both hands in place. Try wrapping some wire around a stick to approximate the hilt, and then try to swap between single and dual hand, and you'll soon see the problem.

That's usually caused by a download manager trying to grab the linked .php file which runs the download process. Turn off any download manager for this site and see if it fixes the problem.

Judging by your use of English, although very clear and precise, you're not a native speaker, but if you are buying the Game of the Year edition I would strongly suggest the English language version for maximum compatibility with mods. Other localised language versions sometimes throw up some very odd errors with mods, and English language mods are most likely to work reliably as they are the most extensively downloaded and complained about if something is wrong. Also I don't know whether the Downloadable Content official expansions (referred to as DLC mods) are all available in other language versions, and some mods use those as pre-requisites.

Firstly you don't appear to have the unofficial patches installed - they do a lot of bug fixing and are highly recommended/essential. AA/A-cup stock clothing replacers exist for the HGEC body - just take a little finding. Download and use BOSS for the load order, making sure you update the masterlist.txt to the latest version first. It will give you a nearly perfectly optimised load order, unless you specifically want to override it. Big quest mods - try The Lost Spires or Integration: The Stranded Light