Striker879 Posted February 24, 2016 Share Posted February 24, 2016 Better Cities has a reputation of lowering stability. I think to run it you need to really know how your machine reacts to heavy loads and understand the tools used to mitigate that lessened stability. I see you mention OBGE in your OP. Are you aware of Oblivion Reloaded - OBGE v4? It goes beyond graphics and includes some stability enhancing tweaks. It isn't for those afraid of reading documentation, has more things you can tweak than Carters has Little Liver Pills, but if you have the hardware for it (and I don't yet) it's the way to go. Not surprising you ran across me Googling as the "support staff" here for Oblivion have mostly moved on to other games/other pursuits. I probably have a text file somewhere with boilerplate for building a bashed patch, but usually I forget to go looking for my prepared texts and just wind up re-inventing the wheel time and again. It's perhaps a bit out of date vs the latest versions of WB, but there is Wrye Bash Pictotial Guide. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Esteris Posted February 25, 2016 Author Share Posted February 25, 2016 (edited) Quote OK, so, we will assume that you have a correct Python install, and have installed Wrye Bash, and BOSS as well. There SHOULD be a shortcut labelled "Wrye Bash Launcher" on your desktop if all went well. Double-click it as you would any other desktop shortcut, and Wrye Bash will pop up a small window while starting, then its main window. At the top of the Wrye Bash window is a series of tabs labelled "Installers", "Mods", "Saves", etc. Make sure the one labelled "Mods" is selected - the others can be ignored for the moment. Next, look right at the bottom of the window. You should see a series of icons, including a pale green and pale pink aquare, and the familiar Oblivion icon. Depending which other Oblivion-related programs you also have installed, you may see icons for paint.NET, Blender, Bink Video utilities, and plenty of programs which I also don't have installed. The one to look for is the word "Boss" in black lettering. If you have both of those, you are well on your way to building a "Bashed Patch". Next - a little bit of setting up... Firstly the second column on the screen currently shows something like "Lo...". In the same way you would if using a spreadsheet, hover your mouse next to that label until you find the vertical bar separating it from the next column (labelled "R"). Click and drag that to the right, until the header says "Load order". Once you can see that, release the mouse click, and then click ON the words "Load Order". The column below, and the associated mods, should organise themselves into numerical order, starting with "00" at the top, and increasing as you go down the column. With me so far? Secondly, right-click anywhere on the bar with the "File" and "Load Order" labels in. A pop-up menu should appear. Remoce the tick from "Lock Times" if there is one, and make sure there are ticks in front of "BOSS disable lock times" and "Always update BOSS masterlist prior to running BOSS". Now, click the BOSS icon at the bottom of the screen. There will be a small popup while the Masterlist updates, and BOSS runs, and then a window will open with the "Better Oblivion Sorting Software Log" in it. Read down it, and you should see familiar mod names, along with some arcane comments about "Bash tag suggestions". Check through the whole list for anything labelled "Error" or "Warning" - these need to be dealt with (or at the very least, understood) before trying to go further. If you close the BOSS log and go back to the Wrye Bash window, you may well find that mods have changed order in the window. BOSS has used its Masterlist to determine what it thinks is the best load order, and adjusted the date and time stamps of the files so that they load in that order. Now, left-click on ANY one of the mods, and press Ctrl+A to select all of the mods. They should all be highlighted. Right-click the highlight, and select "Mark Mergeable" from the Pop-up. After a few seconds, a window will pop up giving a list of the files that Wrye Bash believes can be merged, either partially or fully, into its Bashed Patch file. If they weren't alredy, you may now notice that the text has changed colour for some of the mod names, and the boxes to the left of the names may also have changed colour. Scroll down towards the bottom of your mod list. Ideally right at the bottom, you should find a file marked "Bashed Patch, 0.esp". If this is not present, follow the instructions in the Wrye Bash readme to locate it and copy it (NOT move it) to the correct place, then re-run BOSS. Once you have a Bashed Patch" file, the next stage is to USE it. Right-click the file, and select "Rebuild patch". Another popup will appear (unless you, for some reason, have no mergeable mods)... "The following mods are mergeable. While it is not important to Wrye Bash functionality or the end contents of the bashed patch, it is suggest that they be deactivated and merged into the patch; this (helps) avoid the Oblivion maximum esp/m limit." There will then be a list of mod files, followed by "Automatically deactivate those mods now?" Click "Yes". The next popup has DOZENS of options in the left-hand window. The one we are interested in this first time through is the second item on the list, "Merge Patches". Put a tick in the box next to it, and then tick all of the files which appear in the right-hand window by selecting the "Select all" button. Now click the button marked "Build Patch". A popup will tell you that the program is working, and give you a progress bar. Once completed, another popup will tell you what it did, so just hit "OK". It will probably prompt you to "Activate the Bashed patch" - do so by clicking the box next to it, and a tick will appear. The ticks in some of the other boxes will have disappeared now, or been replaced with + or dot marks. This tells you what their new status is. You may now close Wrye Bash, and run Oblivion, and the whole things SHOULD work just as before, but with less files active, so a smaller load list. Here's the thing I found if you want to store it somewhere :tongue: It worked for me, the pictorial guide, on the other hand, not so much. Don't know why, but something went wrong there. I don't know, my machine should be able to handle it, but I'm way too clueless to properly configure the performance of Oblivion. I'm afraid to mess up with the plugins and their inis. I'm actually using Oblivion Reloaded since the previous version linked there (I suppose that one was called OBGE then). I considered using Streamline, but it requires some tweaking to work with OBGE and the description doesn't tell me jack, I've no clue how Streamline truly works. I looked at that mentioned ini but honestly, I decided to pass, because I didn't know what and where to change to 'turn off the framerate monitoring' or similar. I fear I'd just break it. Same goes for Heap and OSR, there's something mentioned in the comments about changing "to heap 6 at 1024" (or close number). I got some heap. I got OSR. What I haven't got is a clue what heap #6 is and someone in the comments was going like "OSR has heap #6?! I thought they just had 5!!" ...wat? :tongue: I don't think ENBoost can be ran with OBGE simply either, because they both do some purging and all and I'm not sure if they're not doing the same thing/conflicting with one another. Operation Optimization is said to be outdated/included in UOP. I patched Oblivion.exe with 4GB Patch and I guess that's all I know I can do. I haven't found a simple step-by-step guide how to optimize Oblivion in 2016 that takes all the available tools into account. I remember seeing guides like that in the past, but that was before new stuff (like Oblivion Reloaded) were available. It's a shame, but I don't think someone as clueless as me can really achieve much in this regard. Edited February 25, 2016 by Esteris Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Striker879 Posted February 25, 2016 Share Posted February 25, 2016 Looks like one of my "step by step as I click through actually doing it" guides (must be an oldie as I talk about having Python installed ... all taken care of when you install the latest versions of WB). Remember, Rome wasn't built in a day. The more you learn about modding the game the more you can learn. My first weeks here I was in past my eyebrows, catching a breath when a wave passed. For a while it wasn't clear if I was winning or losing the battle. I stuck to it and eventually things started making sense. Get your base install working acceptably and as you need to/feel like start exploring some of the options in OR and OSR. I'm hobbling along on my old WinXP/Core2 Duo box with 2GB RAM and a 768MB video card so all I've done is read about OR and OSR. From what gather about OSR is some of the heap algorithms work better on certain hardware than others, so it's a matter of testing to find out which works best for you. I recall some lengthy discussions regarding it in the OR mod comments, but it was quite a while back. My understanding of heap is that it's an area of your computer's memory used by programs to do stuff. I think OSR's different "heaps" are just different ways of getting from point A to point B (some like walking on the sidewalk, some prefer the grass, while others still will walk along the road, but we all leave A and arrive at B). Don't be too fast at selling yourself short. It's outdated now, but back in the day Noob up and running was what I linked to for all things graphical (and Nitefox98 started out just the same as the rest of us ... first learn to crawl, then stand ... ). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Esteris Posted February 25, 2016 Author Share Posted February 25, 2016 Well, "step by step as I click through actually doing it" is the best kind of guide! It's 100% idiot proof :D Maybe one day you'll feel like organizing your OR/OSR knowledge in forms of guides like that too, who knows ;> Because, honestly, to me it's black magic. I can draw pictures and make up stories, I can't tech. It's been... <counts>, um around 6 years since I did any math-related anything other than counting change at the store/thinking what I'd spend my imaginary billions $$$ on. My brain is in full of fuzz :p And those documentations talk about system specifications, some sort of hardware adjustments, numbers, words, I don't understand aaany of it. I'd barely recognize the name of my graphic card :D I just won a battle with moving the needs HUD bar to some logical place, I'll take that victory. It really didn't want to accept any somethingRight somethingLeft commands. Pff. But ye, moving bars on the screen is more my speed I'm afraid. Best of luck to you with your discoveries about OR and OSR! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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