New Oblivion Modder Probs

[starryciel]

So I've always had Oblivion for Xbox, but yesterday I was reminiscing so I bought the GoTY Deluxe Edition on Steam for my PC.

And after spending an entire day failing at understanding how mods work, resulting in me deleting everything relating to Oblivion, uninstalling and redownloading it, I've decided to try my luck here.

 

I could use some help understanding how to use the new NMM or if I should just take the old route and use the OBMM and Wrye Bash to use the mods that I want and have them work in unison with all the other mods I will get.

 

So yeah.

[DrakeTheDragon]

Well, which of the mod managers to use, if any, or not depends on a lot of things, mainly your own personal taste or intentions also.

 

But I can give you some pointers to things you should definitely keep in mind when attempting to use Oblivion mods with this particular setup of your's.

 

The GotY edition should come with the necessary patch for an up-to-date game version included already, and coming from Steam it's likely already properly patched as well. So this shouldn't be causing any issues along the route. Your game version should be 1.2.0416, the latest, already, as shown at the bottom of your title screen, and as such all "plugins" or "masterfiles" out there should work for you.

 

The "loose files" though could be an issue with a Steam install of Oblivion. The BSA files coming from Steam are dated far too recently for any "replacer"-type mods to have a chance to work.

 

In Oblivion all Vanilla resource files, like models (NIF) and textures (DDS), are stored away in those big BSA files (Bethesda Softworks Archive, or what it stands for) and with the disc version for replacement "textures" to work you have to call the game there are some and you want them to be used in place of the ones inside the BSAs.

- An old traditional, never reliably working, approach to it was to add the filenames and pathes into an "ArchiveInvalidation.txt" file somewhere in your folders, which the game reads to figure these out. Later this file was written automatically by mod manager tools and their utilities for Archive Invalidation. But the key fact this never worked reliably to begin with always remained.

- Different solutions came up, like BSA Alteration, directly replacing the files in question inside your BSA files and potentially risking the loss of the originals and requiring a complete reinstall to restore your game later.

- The current up-to-date and advised approach is called BSA Redirection, which places an empty dummy BSA into your data folder and registers it in your Oblivion.ini at the place of the only BSA ever requiring invalidation to being with, thus eliminating the need for Archive Invalidation entirely once and for all. Nowadays this done via OBMM's Utilities for Archive Invalidation by choosing BSA Redirection and leaving everything else at default, via Wrye Bash with a similar means dialog, or by installing the famous mod "ArchiveInvalidationInvalidated!", and they all do the same and are "run once and forget" solutions due to the nature of the change they apply.

- However, if you ever used any "ArchiveInvalidation.txt"-file-based approach before, you must now get rid of any such left-over files, or they will keep telling the game to use an external file over an internal file which doesn't even exist in the now-empty dummy BSA to begin with, and this is known to cause multiple random issues.

 

Coming back to the Steam Oblivion issues, said Archive Invalidation seems now to be required for just about "every" file, not only textures anymore. And the far too new file dates of the BSA files make any attempt at Archive Invalidation totally useless to begin with. So you must first fix these, either by clicking "Reset BSA timestamps" once in OBMM's Archive Invalidation Utilities, before applying BSA Redirection, or via use of a 3rd party file redate tool as discussed in many Steam Oblivion modding-related forums as well.

 

Another important point is the location where you installed your game to, if you're on an OS with UAC (User Account Control) like Vista or Win7, as this is far too over-protective of the system folders, like "program files" and makes most 3rd party files installed into there go somewhere else entirely but will lie to you they would still be where you put them. Of course the game can't find them, if they're not in their respective folders but somewhere else locked away in compatibility folders by the OS. You just won't see it until it breaks something. That's why it's advised not to install the game to its default location, somewhere inside program files, but rather to somewhere outside of this overly-protective security software's grasp. This is also the case with Steam Oblivion, as steamapps also resides inside program files and you will encounter just the same issues along the way of using mods due to this.

 

There's a complete reinstall guide around somewhere telling step-by-step how to move the game to a safe place cleanly and sanely without loosing any savegames, mods or settings in the process, for the disc version as well as for the Steam version. Ah, yes, that should do: http://wiki.tesnexus.com/index.php/Oblivion_reinstall_procedure

 

That should get you started and help avoiding the most prominent pitfalls with your chosen setup.