Mod Issue - From Steam?

[Lanceor]

well thats just f-ed up.... i hate having to make my own omods, not that it is difficult but that after downloading a ton of mods its a pain to have to go back and try and make an omod after setting stuff up the normal way.

 

its times like this that i really hate steam, bastards dont even care about their customers anymore.

The same would have happened if you went from the Steam to the retail version. The only practical difference between the Steam and Retail versions when it comes to mods is a different install location.

[DrakeTheDragon]

The troublesome difference, or at least that's what I've heard of so far (quite often that is), would be the far-too-recent file dates on the BSA archives when coming from Steam.

They're dated far more recently than any mod-added replacement files, thus replacer-type mods in general don't work.

 

I've read of people using file redater tools to set them back to somewhere close to the retail version's file dates, myself have instructed lot's of people to use OBMM's "Reset BSA timestamps" to do this (and from what I've heard it worked for them) and by all means make sure you're using "BSA Redirection" for Archive Invalidation, as it appears nothing else will work with Steam. Especially don't use any "ArchiveInvalidation.txt"-file-based approaches, whether adding entries into this file manually or automatically through OBMM or Wrye Bash, as it's not the way they're added but the game using this file itself which was never working reliably, and get rid of any left-over instances of "ArchiveInvalidation.txt" in your folders, as they will basically tell the game to use external resources over internal ones which aren't inside the BSA file that needs invalidation anymore to begin with (BSA Redirection sets an empty dummy in its place) and this will cause multiple random issues.

 

BSA Redirection is selectable in OBMM's Utilities for Archive Invalidation, Wrye Bash and is the same approach used by the famous mod "ArchiveInvalidationInvalidated!". It's a one-time-only fire-and-forget solution, as it gets rid of the "need" for Archive Invalidation entirely. It's the only approach I can sanely advertise and in the case of Steam Oblivion it seems to be the only one working.

 

But I'm only telling what I've read from my users and in multiple forum posts here, as I'm not using Steam myself and don't know the details.

Additionally there seem to be Steam users "not" encountering those issues. Counting numbers of the ones which do though I'm wondering why it works for those few.

Edited October 11, 2011 by DrakeTheDragon