subtledoctor

For the longest time I had the mentality the Streamline 3.1 is great, as long as it's configured right. That meant, at the least, disabling StreamSaves because they introduce higher, not lower, chances of corrupted saves (and my games pauses for a second when I save, so frequent StreamSaves means tons of gameplay interruptions). Then I disabled StreamPurge because PCB is simple and works fine. Then I started disabling StreamSmooth because OSR can do it better. Then I disabled StreamSight because All Natural can do it just as well. (Choose a "make the world smaller" fog setting - it's not claustrophobic at all, the world still feels plenty big.) All of which means, Streamline has disappeared from my load order. I set OSR's heap setting to 5, and I've read that iHeapSize should be no greater than 768 for best results. Then I added the MoreHeap mod on top. Finally, I use ENBoost v0.259. ENBoost means you can't use and big graphical stuff like OBGE/OR/ENB. Which is a shame. But it also means I almost never crash. Like, 0-1 crashes per 3-hour session. My game is amazingly stable. That's with All Natural, Enhanced Vegetation, QTP3 Redimized, RAEVWD pretty much maxed out, all Unique Landscapes, Better Cities, and some monster-sized world expansions like Elsweyr Anequina and TWMP Hammerfell/Stirk/Topal Isle/Valenwood Improved. With a mid-range graphics card from 2012 and 1GB VRAM. Pretty visuals from OBGE or an ENB preset would be great, but for me the stability provided by ENBoost is worth the trade-off.

I have to disagree about OOO. It makes massive and often arbitrary changes to the game. While it is certainly a good collection of work, I wouldn't recommend it for a first time install. Basically OOO is polarizing - half of the people love it and won't play the game without it, while the other half think it goes too far and won't include it in their install. Who knows which camp the OP will fall into? As a first-time player he should play with out OOO so that he has a basis for evaluating whether he likes it. Most of the other stuff - DarN, SM, UL, BC, AFLevel/RL/ObXP etc. - just improve or add things to the game without changing the basic experience too much. IMHO.

For leveling and stat issues, try AFLevel - I personally use the "level every nine ability score increases" option. Then just choose the seven skills you want to focus on and... just play the game. It makes it really that simple - you do things, you get better at those skills, and your skills/abilities/level just sort themselves out. It's fantastic. For magic: Supreme Magicka, which is fairly mild - one of those things that make things better but you barely notice it in-game. And definitely Hotkey Casting OBSE 3.5. Assign your most-used spells to hotkeys within easy reach, and retain the general "cast" button for using random other spells from menus. For me this made magic use go from a chore to fun and easy. Landscape: Unique Landscapes. All of them. They're hugely popular for a reason. For in-town, Better Cities. Graphics: this gets dicey because you can make your computer explode (well not really, but it might CTD) but some combination of Qarl's Texture Pack, Detailed Terrain, RAEVWD, and either Oblivion Reloaded or an ENB preset (I really like "Cinematic ENB"). Fatigue: Realistic Fatigue, and configure it how you like. You have to play around with the .ini settings a bit but it ends up working nicely. UI: DarnUI, or the DarkN version. Dual-wielding, perks, more fine-grained sneaking: there are mods that sort of address these things, but not to my satisfaction. I say, forget these three.

I just download a bunch (~150) of mods from Nexus, drop them into Wrye's "Oblivion Mods/Bash Installers" folder. I 'package' bare .esps into simple folders, and separate out the few OMODs into OBMM's "mods" folder. Then I just install from Wrye, switching over to OBMM at appropriate times to install the OMODs. At the end I sort with BOSS, make the Merged Patch and enable all the mods, run TES4LL and TES4LodGen, and play. I can't fathom why I would ever use NMM, and I've never even heard of MO...

Finally Achieved Stability I figure I should note for posterity the advancements I've made in getting my heavily modded Oblivion installation to work well. THE MODS: I use over 200 mods and patches to make my game as large, deep, and detailed as possible. I'm not going to list them all, but I'll mention ones that tend to adversely affect game stability. - World Mods: Morroblivion, Silgrad Tower, Elsweyr Anequina, TWMP Hammerfell, TWMP Valenwood Improved. My game world is humongous, and soon I'll hopefully add TWMP Skyrim Improved. - Mods Within Tamriel: Better Cities, all of the Unique Landscapes, a dozen or so villages, a bunch of Dwemer ruins & Ayleid ruins & dungeons, plus big quests like Lost Spires, and Crowded Roads and Tamriel Travellers. BC is the big performance hog here, but it all adds up when you tack on... - Visual Mods: Qarl's Textures, Detailed Terrain, All Natural, and RAEVWD. I hate stuff popping into existence, so trees/grass/items/etc. are set to max distance, water reflections are on, plus Vsync and 8xAA. Resolution is a reasonable 900p. Put that all together and it can cripple a decent computer. Mine is a 2012 laptop with a Core i7, 8 GB of RAM, and an nVidia GT 650m with 1 GB of VRAM. Running Win7 Home Premium 64-bit. In early 2015, it strikes me as solidly middle-of-the-road, spec-wise and playing lid-closed with a monitor it is fairly thermally constrained. Here's what I've done: 1) Strip out as many running Windows process as you can. Turn off AV, automatic notifications, stuff like that. It's just annoying anyway. 2) Followed Tomlong's installation advice over Tescosi/Tesposi. Turns out that install order matters almost as much as load order for Oblivion mods. 3) As long as you're 64-bit, hit everything with the 4GB patcher. Specifically Oblivion.exe, TES4LodGen, and TES4LL. (Okay really just those three.) 4) Forget NMM. Take 20 minutes to familiarize yourself with OBMM and Wrye Bash. DO NOT choose a favorite - use both. I mostly install via Wrye, but some mods work better as OMODs (DarnUI, Realistic Fatigue, Dynamic Map, a few others). At the proper points in the install process, just close out Weye, hop over to OBMM, install the OMOD. Then go back to Wrye. At the very end, fix your load order with BOSS, build your Bashed Patch in Wrye, run all three TES4LL scripts, and run TES4LodGen. 5) Mods I've found to be useless: forget WEOCPS, it didn't do anything for me. Also Streamline. Even properly configured, even using *only* the Streamsight feature, it didn't really help. 6) Mods that ARE helpful: - Oblivion Stutter Remover. Conservatively configured. - Purge Cell Buffers. I set it to every cell change, because aggressive purging helps my poor overworked video card. - ENBoost. I dunno how it does what it does (seems to help my video card when new cells with gobs of meshes and textures pop into existence) but it seems to do it well. - MoreHeap. Ditto. The final change was dropping WEOCPS and Streamline and adding ENBoost and MoreHeap. I'm not sure which of those last two is more effective. But with both of them added, I went from random crashes in the countryside every 90 seconds (the west coast around Anvil and to the north of it, is just vicious with all these mods) to a single solitary crash in the last 20 hours of play. Unfortunately, the presence of ENBoost means o can't use Oblivion Reloaded, OBGE, or the various ENB presets. But for this kind of rock-solid stability, it's totally worth it.

Not sure what exactly you're asking - are you talking about the leveling system, or specifically about the rate of skill advancement? For the former, I use the excellent AFLevel mod. Equip the ring of choice after leaving the sewers, let it determine your major skills (should match what you've already chosen) and select "level-up every 9 ability point increases." The end result will mimic the vanilla system if you could put 3 points in selected skills every time. Functionally though, it's miles better. You just go out and adventure, and as you use certain skills they increase; and as the skills attached to certain ability scores improve, those ability scores increase; and after that happens 9 times, you level-up. You don't even have to sleep. You just *play* however you want to, and your skills/abilities/level just sort themselves out. As for the *speed* of skill advancement, I tend to advance way too quickly (but I use mods that quadruple the size of the game). So I use a "3x slower skills" mod to slow my advancement down. In the early game, I tend to uncheck the slower skills mod and quickly train up various skills until I'm as well-rounded as I want to be. Then, around 3rd level at this point, I enable the slower skills mod and start adventuring for real.

But... rather than changing skills, wouldn't it be possible to change each weapon to be affected by a different skill? Of course it would be very confusing if you couldn't also change the *names* of the skills to reflect the new values. And it wouldn't play nice with weapon mods, unless they checked for the presence of this one. And it still leaves the problem of the missing Big Guns skill... Ah, too bad, a man can dream.

Hmm, upon review this seems like it might be the same problem as that described here: http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/864514-twmp-hammerfell-improved-wip/page-25&do=findComment&comment=19697954 So *someone* seems to have had a similar issue! GrandVizier says "run tes4ll." I did that, to no avail. Is there some particular method necessary? I ran the 'midres' batch file. There's also others, one to do with 'qlod' and one to do with 'normal maps' ... are those necessary as well? (I tried the qlod one, it took 1-2 hours to run and didn't help this problem.) Haldar says "just follow the instructions" and "download pre-generated lod files." I've followed all of the instructions... is there some specific set of lod files I can find somewhere, apart from what is provided with his mods? This seems to be a conflict between two sets of meshes existing in the same place, the bad mesh rising above the good landscape. Will copying over such pre-made files eliminate the bad ones, or will they still pre-exist? This is really frustrating.

Seems kinda stupid to be skilled in "guns" (every kind of gun?) or "energy weapons" (and remind me again which category the gauss rifle is in, being an energy-based weapon that fires a physical projectile... which, when it comes down to it, is precisely what firearms do.) Seems to me a more sensible distribution would be: 1) Pistols, including energy pistols and SMGs 2) Rifles, including energy rifles, shotguns, and light machine guns 3) Big Guns, including minigun, SMMG, K9000, flamer, incinerator, tesla cannon, gatling laser, and plasma caster. Missile launchers and grenade launchers should probably go under explosives. Of course without a Big Guns skill there's one missing... I suppose you could combine unarmed and melee (you really trying to tell me all those fists and gauntlets don't count at melee weapons?) and free up a skill that way. I don't have the skills to do this... would it be difficult?

If it helps, this is only happening in the Cyrodiil worldspace, outside the lands of Cyrodiil. It happened last year when I had plain Valenwood Improved and Elsweyr Anequina installed, but it only happened in Valenwood, not Elsweyr. It doesn't happen in any areas of the vanilla game, or in any part of Morrobliv... you know, that Vvardenfell mod. I thought it might be vanilla heightmap textures conflicting with the VI heightmap, so this year I installed all of the TWMP mods, and TWMP Valenwood Improved. But it's still happening, at exactly the same place (I remember the spots on the road where the... blob/sheet intrudes). It's also happening in TWMP Hammerfell, so it's not just a VI problem. Here's a thought: could it be caused by RAEVWD? Could that be generating phantom land textures in the outlying countries, so that there is something visible when viewing from the edge of Cyrodiil? Is that a reasonable possibility? I don't want to do a whole reinstallation only to have it make no difference, if someone around here with more expertise could tell me up front whether it might make any difference...

Well, given how large and eaasily recognizable this is, I was hoping it would be easy to diagnose. Is there a way to get a .txt file with my modlist? I don't see any such option in Wrye. I tried exporting the list from OBMM and it spat out an .olod file, which I'll attach in case it helps. [edit] Okay, I found out how to see the load order in plain text. Here it is (warning, there's a bunch):

Yeah no disrespect to Nexus but NMM just seems kind of half-assed. My recent install has over 200 .esps, and my solution for installation was something like this: 1) Install utilities like OBMM, Wrye Bash, OBSE, tes4ll, tes4lodgen. 2) Start Wrye, initialize the 'Installers' tab. Quit. 3) Move mods into the 'Bash Installers' directory. 4) Open Wrye, install stuff, but also note mods that are better off NOT being installed by Wrye. (This is an art, not a science, but things like the UOP .exe files, etc.) Move them from the 'Bash Installers' directory to a 'non-Bash' directory. Also note mods that, even if you can find them BAIN-ified, just do better as OMODs. (This includes DarnUI, Realistic Fatigue, a few others.) Move them into OBMM's 'mods' directory. 5) Open OBMM, install those OMODs. 6) Close OBMM and then install the last few things in that 'non-bash' directory manually. Yes manually. Even in this age of NMM/OBMM/Wrye, some stuff is better off just being dumped into the data folder. 7) Run BOSS. 8) Open OBMM next to your BOSS log and move any stragglers that BOSS didn't recognize to where you think they should go. Now, in OBMM, put a check next to all the plugins you want activated. 9) Open Wrye again a build your bashed patch. 10) Make sure everything looks good in Wrye, then play the game. If you're using OBSE, make sure the loader is installed correctly. I had one OMODS that wouldn't activate without the non-Steam OBSE loader, do I moved it into my game directory to install the mod. But then my (Steam) game wouldn't run until I remembered to remove the unnecessary loader.

So when I go outside the central Cyrodiil region, like to Valenwood south of Anvil or to Hammerfell north of it, I see this big sheet of green in places. I can walk through it, and it's only visible from one side. Here's a video, because it's a bit hard to explain. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hzc1cbGdnkc This happened in my old install last year, with Valenwood Improved. I figured it might be some kind of weird height map texture, so this year I learned Wrye Bash, installed all the TWMP resources and TWMP Valenwood Improved (and TWMP Hammerfell), and it's still there. I ran TES4ll and TES4lodgen and it's still there. It's blocking the views of Haldar's wonderful work in those mods. (It's not so bad in the video, it gets really annoying in towns where buildings and streets are cut off.) I'm at that point where I have 203 .esps, the tweaks are all installed and the game looks beautiful and the framerate is holding up and it's not crashing much and I can travel to Vardenfell and Solstheim and Silgrad Tower and Hammerfell and Valenwood and Elsweyr... you know what I'm talking about, when your installation is just about perfect... this is the only major issue marring it. Anyone have any idea what's causing it, and how to fix it??