Two Questions About Mods

[chaospearl]

Hello lovely folks. I've received some great advice and assistance here in the past and I'm back for more! I have a question about Wrye Bash and one about the Better Music System mod.

 

First things first; WB. I currently use OBSE (the beta 18 version) and OBMM, but I haven't conquered Wrye Bash yet. From my understanding, it is a utility that allows you to combine mods together so that you don't have as many active esp files. I'm rapidly approaching the 255 limit but not there yet so I haven't thought WB necessary for me. (Translation: I'm lazy and don't want to spend a few hours learning the complexities of a new program until I'm forced to). That being said, as I add more and more mods, I'm noticing that my game crashes more often. I'm around 230, 240 mods right now and I'm experiencing CTDs every hour or two. Now, I'm willing to put up with this for the sake of my mods; it may sound intolerable to some of you, but two hours is actually a pretty long time, long enough that I don't really feel like I'm *constantly* crashing. It just forces me to save my game every fifteen minutes or so. There's also the fact that I'm running Oblivion heavily modded on a laptop (using a 42" flatscreen TV as my monitor and a Sixaxis controller, so sometimes it's easy to forget the game is actually running on the laptop hidden in back of the TV cabinet, heh) -- so I can't expect superfabulistic FPS to begin with. Anyway, I was wondering if using Wrye Bash would help prevent the frequent CTDs. I realize I'm crashing a lot becaus of how many mods I run, but I'm not sure if it's technically due to the number of active esp files, or if it's more the sheer amount of new content and modifications I'm asking the game to handle. If I bite the bullet and teach myself to Bash some of those esp's together, will my CTD rate go down? Or will it not make a difference because I'll still have all that new content and changes running even if I can cut down on the actual number of esp files?

 

Second question: Better Music System. This is a simpler question. It's annoying the hell out of me that BMS is taking it upon itself to mess with my audio settings. I normally play with Voices and Effects set pretty high, and Music Volume set toward the middle. I'm noticing that ever since I installed BMS, whenever I change playlists (that is, enter a dungeon or a battle and have the music change from Explore playlist to Combat or Dungeon playlist) the Music Volume slider automatically slides itself fully over to the right and the music comes blasting out at me. It not only drives me nuts personally, it causes issues at home because I often play late at night when the household is asleep, and I need to keep the volume at a reasonable level to avoid waking anyone. I used to have the laptop's audio routed through our home theater system but I've had to disable that and just use the television's normal audio because otherwise whenever I entered a monster-full dungeon it sounded like World War III breaking out in the living room. Even with just the TV audio it's still far louder than it needs to be, but I can't put the overall volume down any farther or I won't be able to hear the voices or effects at all. That's why Oblivion has separate voice \ effect \ music sliders to begin with! I've pored over BMS's documentation multiple times and combed the ini file and there's nothing anywhere that mentions its automatic moving of the music slider up to Nuclear War decibels, and no way I can see to disable it.

 

I'd be incredibly grateful to anyone who can solve this for me. I'm no modder, but I have used the Construction Set to tweak existing mods to my own preferences so I have a basic grasp of how it works. If someone could even give me a hint as to what I'd need to change within the BMS esp, I could probably figure it out... I'm just not sure where to look.

 

Thanks in advance to everyone who's taken the time to read this far.