About MODs

[Darkbritt265]

Hello all,

 

I've JUST started taking an interest in mods for Oblivion (I've seen some pretty cool screen-shots), but i thought to read how-to's and look at the files to see how to work things. I stared with Ren's Beauty pack (or whatever it is called, I'm sure you all recognize it) and-doing what I read I SHOULD do- I started up the game to see if it works. Here is the issue; Once I started up the game, I started a new character. I looked through the races and the moonshadow elves...or whatever they are, the new race' picture was not showing up. Thinking that that just may be a bug, I went to a different race to attempt to test the eyes and the hair. The names popped up in the selection-just like the Elves- but the actual mesh/item/texture thing wouldn't show up. The same goes for the eyes. As another test, I went to the moonshadow elf race and a new hairstyle and started the story. I went to the menu and looked at the character. She had no head, but had like gums and teeth, as well as weird black ears and nothing else. Her arms were purple (like florescent purple), but she still walked around and stuff.

 

I looked in the Oblivion folder (the official one) and noticed that there is a .bsa and a .esp of each file. I Already had Oblivion Mod Manager, and attempted to make the .esp file into a .bsa file as well. You see, I have the free version, and I'm not sure if that matters, but I made the .bsa file and i checked it in the Mod manager and it has a lock icon on it. I started up the game again and the same thing happened.

thinking that this may just be the mod itself, I unchecked it and put on a different mod. This time a player abode. It was there and i could enter it and walk around, but the outside was that florescent purple and so was the inside, except that the items, like the table and chairs and display cases and such were fine. i tried the oblivion mod manager thing again and nothing happened again.

 

I would REALLY like to enjoy the mods I downloaded, but i understand that I can't solve this with luck, so would one of you amazing people please help me? Thanks for taking the time to read through this really long message btw.

 

-Darkbritt

 

PS

Sorry if this isn't supposed to be here XP

[yeldarb]

A BSA is just how Bethesda Softworks packaged the meshes,textures,sounds, and most of the data for Oblivion. An esm or an esp makes the information stored inside a BSA file playable in the game. Many mods,especially a cosmetic or race mod require another mod to run properly. The reame for OBMM is inside the "help" button. The "utilities" button will bring up some choices like archive invalidation. I use bsa redirection as my form of archive invalidation. OBMM is also very useful for changing the load order of your active mods! A mod conflict might be the reason the eyes,faces,hairs of Moonshadow Elves are not showing up in your game.The esp that contains the race you want to play should always be the last cosmetic/race mod in your load order. Download and get use to using BOSS to sort your load order. This utility is the best tool available for sorting out load order conflicts, but it is not perfect. There are @ 20,000 mods on TESNexus, and BOSS only keeps track of @ 8,000 total mods. Newer and unrecognised mods need to be sorted by hand using OBMM and common sense/experience.