Any cons to the Unofficial Oblivion Patch?

[DarkImpulse]

Well, I did what I believed was logical.

I reordered my mods so that the UOP came directly after my ESMs, followed by the SI esp, USIP, KOTN esp, UOMP KOTN, bulk of my other mods, then loaded the UOMP addon-specific esps directly after the official DLC's followed by the Quest Award Leveler mods directly after each of the pertinent Unofficial patches, followed by Natural Environments.

 

At first glance, nothing has exploded and I can load my save game properly, I hope everything works well. I also hope nothing has happened to the items I had stored in the Frostcrag spire.. Lacking the money to buy a home, I moved up there instead.

 

Thanks a huge bunch, I'll continue tinkering with this and hope it all works well.

 

If there are any more additional tips or advice, I'll be glad to hear it.

[OnyxNightBlack]

Just one small thing which might get VERY important:

 

Save before installing ANY mod and make a backup of that savegame. Some mods sound harmless and small, but it's better to be safe than sorry.

Another thing I do regularily is make a backup of my whole Oblivion folder. It eats up a lot of HD space, but gives me a fallback solution if a texture replacement or modding atempt goes wrong.

 

Anyway, glad to be of help and have fun with the game. :biggrin:

[DarkImpulse]

Thanks for all the help, and yes I did take that first bit of advice and saved into a new slot after the game loaded with the new mods.

 

I haven't gone as far as to make a backup of my entire Oblivion directory yet though, hopefully I won't need to.

 

I've verified the ArchiveInvalidation thing is working by using that Crystal Armor/Clear Glass Armor mod that relies on it and it changed the textures correctly. The Quest Award leveler also appears to work as it updated a sword I was using to a more powerful one since I've gained a few levels after I got it.

 

The last thing is I need to figure out a way to test that the UOP is working.. I suppose the only way for me to know is to actively try to invoke one of the bugs that it fixed and see if the bug still happens or not. I just glanced through the list of mods I have and it's a whopping 52 lol. That's a whole lot more than I thought I'd have, considering I want to stay conservative..

 

Anyway, thanks again - I'm going to look for a nice bug to test with.

[nosisab]

The bulk of advises were already given and they are corrects, I will just add some minor rememberings.

KotN is knew as troublesome, some mods will point directly where to put then, before or after that one, on at least one case I don't remember wich now you will be prompted to try putting the esp before or a after the KotN one, swapping the order if trouble comes.

 

As the position of the unofficial ones, the rule is: put the respective patch immediately after the esp it will fix, oblivion.esm being the only one exception, as it must be the very first one and esps can't come before esm.

 

The arquive invalidation.txt use is now deprecated. The idea is than the engine would take the most recent timestamp for the file, but it fails sometimes to do it in unpredictable ways, so it would rely on the entries and order it would find in the txt. Yet the engine fails in it too in a yet more unpredictable way. OBMM and other similar utilities uses a different approach, acting directly over the BSA and data sub folders (not very sure about the last one), so is not a question over how make the arquive invalidation.txt or even in hiding it.

 

As the unofficial Patches acts directly over and only over the modules it fix, if another mod coming after alters something the patch address (says a NPC for instance) the alteration on the object that will prevail is the last loaded one, so, that of the mod (and the original bug can reappear, but not because the patch, but instead just because the fix not being active anymore for this specific issue)

[bben46]

If you use OBMM it has a better archive invalidation system. It will also try to put your mods in a reasonable load order while allowing you to change them as needed. The timestamp system for archive invalidation seems to work fine for most mods, although there will be exceptions. On my load order, OBMM wants to put bookplacing.esm ahead of Oblivion.esm and USIP right after UOP, well ahead of Shivering isles.esp.

 

Note, for a long time I had KT race fix still loading after UOP with no problems.

[madman132]

There will be some issues if you use a "non english" Version of Oblivion. The UOP will screw the Dialogues.

Well, this could be real funny =)

[DarkImpulse]

Thanks again for all the helpful tips guys.

 

I personally wish to avoid messing with the official files, which is why I used BSA-Invalidation initially, but that started getting tedious (and took a while to scan) after a while. The 'Invalidated!' mod uses BSA-Redirection IIRC, which is still fairly good, and probably my best bet since I want to avoid BSA-Alteration. It seems to be working well so far, so I can stick with it until problems crop up.

 

As for the KOTN positioning, I used a combination of OBMM and Wrye Bash to set the load order (recently using Wrye Bash more and more simply because it lets me check the status of my save games after any changes.) I've set it to come directly after SI and the USIP, but directly before the UOMP for KOTN and both sit above every other mod I have.

 

I ended up disabling the KT Race Fix just to be safe, it was a simple mod that I believe was only invoked during a new game anyway, so it's not a big deal. I do use the English version, so funny dialogues won't be an issue for me.

 

I believe everything is working now, I tested to see if the Unofficial patches worked or not.

Going into the basement of Chorrol's Oak and Crosier doesn't spark dungeon music, it retains the standard music, so I think that means UOP works.

Speaking with Mels Maryon to start the Azura Shrine quest begins the quest normally, so I believe that USIP works.

And getting Sir Caius's blessing gives +5 Agility instead of +5 Personality, so I believe that the UOMP works. I don't know how else to test this last one as the bulk of the fixes appeared to be for KOTN, and I actually managed to finish the entire KOTN questline by level 4 lol.

 

As for my original suspicions, so far I don't believe it has changed the gameplay in any way, I don't see any new crazy armor and the game doesn't feel any easier or harder, so it all worked out it seems.

 

Thanks again everyone!

[IndorilTheGreat]

Does the UOP count as something like the "1.02" Patch? Becasue there are several mods that need this, and I have had problems with the 1.02 Patch.

 

(Sorry for Spamming! Please Forgive me!) :thanks:

[OnyxNightBlack]

Glad to hear everything worked out for you. The Unofficial patches shouldn't mess with gameplay in any shape or form, besides making it actually work in many cases. :biggrin:

[bben46]

gman: If you need the 1.2 patch, nothing else will replace it. Many newer mods require the patch to work.