3 Tips for avoiding mod issues

[HikariWS]

I'm new to Oblivion world, and I've already faced problems created by mods.

First of all, I can't remove the blame from Bethesda. We thank them for Construction Set, but still they left Oblivion full of bugs, including Vanilla.

Also, we must understand that game modding IS for amateurs. As StarCraft and WarCraft custom game creation always was. Provessional game developers won't work above others' games, they will create their own.

That being said, here are the tips.

1) First one is obvious, but many people even today igore it. just avoid NMM and OBMM, use Wrye Bash instead. The advantage of WB is that it properly handles installation order (and not load order), and when a mod is uninstalled it brings back conflicting files from other mods instead of just deleting these files. It also has BOSS to handle load order.

And WB isn't hard at all to use its basics, just drag a zip/folder into its Installers tab and right click to install. Then move to Mods tab to check the new esp and then run BOSS to update load order. The only thing WB misses is a basic UI to hide most of its features.

2) Use Multiple Oblivion Manager. This app automates the handling of multiple Oblivion setups. We can do pretty much what it does by renaming folders, but it does that for us and gives names to each setup. If you wanna install a mod and fears it may break something, or just wanna try it, instead of uninstalling later, just create a new setup for it and delete it when you're done.

It's highly advisible to, after installing MOM, to uninstall Oblivion and make a new clean intall. That clean setup will be used as basis for future setups. I even advice to reinstall all your mods. I did that and it was worth it!

3) Use Subversion to control changes. Subversion is a tool used in Software Development, and can be used for Oblivion as well. It monitors all files inside a folder and tells when a file was deleted or a new one was created and when a file was modified. If the file is in txt format it also shows which lines were changed.

It's specially useful for mods ini configs. You install a mod, verifies what was changed, test it ingame and commits. Then you change the mod's ini and tests it again. If you didn't like the config, revert it back to default. Once satisfied you commit the ini. Subversion will forever save the previous ini version and allow you to remember what was changed in it.

Subversion also has the advantage over MOM that MOM requires a full copy for each image. Oblivion with mods can reach 10GB, that's too big for having multiple copies. Subversion doesn't need multiple full copies (but supports it when needed) for each install, and when committing changes it incrementally stores only what was actually changed.

When committing a change, always add comments with the name of the affected mod and what you have done. This helps when looking on Subversion log to find the revision you need and later understand what had changed.

[QuanYin]

As far as I can tell, Wrye BASH does nothing to automagically enforce a correct installation order. Whatever I drop on it, it installs last. So to get it to follow a particular installation order, apparently you would have to determine that before you start dropping mods on the Installers tab. By hand. Which I have been unable to find anything that explains just how you do that.