Making a plugin without Oblivion.esm

[BottomFeeder]

Hello, I'm new to the oblivion modding scene though I have been toying around with TESCS since morrowind was young.

I have been trying unsuccesfully on several various occasions to make a mod for oblivion, without the chunky oblivion.esm file, and have had little success.

I have tried making my own startup and character gen scripts, and gone carefully through the oblivion.esm to see what I have missed.

I have re-read the world-building tutorials on the TESCS wiki, and considered what those scripts are doing in case there might be some clue as to why my mod won't work.

Everything works fine - it gets to the menu - I click New and it asks if I want to start a new game, so I click ok, and then the title screen just carries on like nothing had happened.

If anyone could just give me a few points in the right direction, I would be appreciative to say the least, I am really looking forward to having a mod setup without the front movie, and all the crap in memory that I don't need or want.

I have almost given up on it, but thought I would just stick this somewhere to hear if anyone else has tried pursuing this, and to find out what others have found....

[mezlo]

Unless you are planning on recreating the entire world of Oblivion (aka Total Conversion) you must have oblivion.esm loaded. Practically everything in the game is defined in that file. If your main concern is just getting rid of the opening movie, then modify the following lines in your oblivion.ini file (located in My Documents\My Games\Oblivion) so they are blank like this:

 

SMainMenuMovie=
SMainMenuMovieIntro=
SIntroSequence=

[BottomFeeder]

Thanks for the tip about the opening movie, that will come in handy. I had planned something along the lines of a TC, but with a bit of borrowed content from the original game, anyhow, as I mentioned I have almost given up on the idea, though I still am curious about the way in which the mod actually hooks itself to the new game button of the main menu.

I'll keep sluging along with what I am doing, take care Mezlo

[Vagrant0]

  BottomFeeder said:

Thanks for the tip about the opening movie, that will come in handy. I had planned something along the lines of a TC, but with a bit of borrowed content from the original game, anyhow, as I mentioned I have almost given up on the idea, though I still am curious about the way in which the mod actually hooks itself to the new game button of the main menu.

I'll keep sluging along with what I am doing, take care Mezlo

You should really try not to do a TC unless you personally have significant modding talents. You should really start out with a house or dungeon mod which has some scripting and pathing elements in them before even thinking of doing a TC. You should really have completed some fairly large mods with significant scripting, quests, packaging, area additions, and dialogues before actually trying to do a TC. TCs are hard and require alot of people to just get a basic chargen working (ask team Serpent). If you just want an area with a non-TES theme, you can usually just have a portal or something linking between the main world and your world... That way you can focus on your own elements, and not have to deal with everything from scratch or near scratch. Even creating your own little world can be a complicated process, I'm learning this first hand, and I'm not exactly new to modding.