Dead looking horses and alive looking corpses! HELP!!!

[Kataura]

Recently I messed my Oblivion data up with mods. For example; the eyes were backwards, skin looked as if it wasn't put on properly, eyes were missing with some characters, there were strange duplicated races with muddled race names that looked of another language and even some of the vocal and written script had gone missing.

 

But anyway, that was only some of it! I uninstalled and reinstalled the whole damn thing, fixing most of it.

Now, to my limited knowledge on the matter, the only thing that I have found that is wrong is that the horses, all of them, appear motionless on the ground, stuck as if they were still ment upright. They're not dead, because they soon pop back to their normal position when I mount them, but if I save near a stable and try to load that save file my game crashes before it even gets a chance to fully load.

 

Also, when a creature or NPC is killed, they seem normal, slumped lifeless on the ground, but as soon as I go through a door and come back to the area with the dead thing in, it's standing upright, like its alive, in it's original "alive" stance, static.

 

I really would appreciate any help on how to solve this, as I have no clue what I have done and I have so many mods I don't know what it could be. I have installed Slof's Extra horses and base, CM partners & beasts and so on. I hope someone can help, I really don't want to have to go through uninstalling and reinstalling it all again, it gets tiresome.

 

Thank you.

[maYuYang]

Sounds like a strange problem I never encountered, but let's see if I can help you:

1st of all, did Oblivion work before you installed any mods? If you didn't mod yourself, then another mod might cause that problem. Deactivate all mods you installed recently and see if oblivion works properly. If you can't remember when Oblivion worked, I suggest deactivating all mods. Activate all mods one by one untill you find which one is causing the problem(I suggest activating them in their load order; you can, if you have more than 200 mods like me, activate them in 10-mod-steps, too, but once you found the bug, tracking it is a bit annoying since you have to deactivate every single pluggy and start the game). I would uninstall the buggy mod once I find it, but you could also try to reinstall it(redownload it, then install).

The load Order might be wrong, I recommend using BOSS for this, install it into your Data Folder and run the bat file. It will sort your mods(usefull for cm partners and Slof's Horses).

 

If the vanilla version has the same bug(deactivate ALL mods to check this), you have to reinstall the game.

[Kataura]

As far as I know the game worked fine before the mods.

 

Thank you very much, I will try that and hope it works. :)

[dezdimona]

General Load-Order Guidelines

Here are the guidelines that I adhere to, personally.

 

~ Unofficial Oblivon Patch should always be first on the list. The fixes are great, but most aren't essential, so if a mod overwrites them its not a big deal, and the fixes have the potential for screwing up other mods if loaded later.

 

~ Offical Content (DLC's) should be loaded last, until you complete all quests associated with them (that includes buying all furniture for the houses and whatnot). Once they're complete, they can be safely moved up in the list. This is especially important for Knights of the Nine, which will have some fairly major problems unless loaded last (unless you get the UOP for KotN)

 

~ Major overhaul mods (OOO, Frans, MMM) should be loaded near the end. That gives you the most complete experience with any of those particular mods. It also lets you carefully choose which other mods to load afterwards... only move mods that you know will conflict and that you want the changes from. For example, I have Improved Soul Gems below OOO because I know that OOO changes the icons of some of the SG's, and ISG needs to be below to show through.

 

Some people will recommend putting larger mods first, but personally I disagree. There are a number of mods out there that make minor tweaks, and loading after a large mod will end up completely overwriting a chunk from one of the bigger mods because of the way conflicts work in Oblivion (even one minor change will take precedence over the entire record... for example, simply tweaking the speed of a weapon can cause every stat of that weapon to be retained to vanilla levels if loaded later).

 

So basically, it stacks up like this...

 

Oblivion.esm

Unofficial Oblivion Patch

<Minor Mods / DLC's (Post-Completion)>

<Major Overhaul Mod/Mods>

<Mods that specifically conflict with overhauls and need to take precedence>

<DLC's (Pre-Completion)>

 

 

 

Expanded Load-Order Guidelines

by dev_akm

 

I would extend this to include:

 

Oblivion.esm

Unofficial Oblivion Patch

<Weather/Environment/Sound Mods>

<Minor Mods/New Items/Houses/DLC's (Post-Completion)>

<Major Overhaul Mods>

<Mods that specifically conflict with overhauls and need to take precedence>

<DLC's (Pre-Completion)>

<Quests>

<Compatibility Patches/UOMP/Merged Leveled Lists>

 

And a special-case warning for Knights.esp (Knights of the Nine) -- you may not be able to move it earlier than some other mods (some people have had problems after moving it before OOO, for example).

 

That's basically the structure I use and I have 140+ mods working well together.

 

Another way of describing this (posted by DMan77):

....

Oblivion

unoffical patch

Deeper realism mods that add sights and sounds

added content like weapons/items

gameplay changes, like 'must eat and sleep'

The OOO type

the 'new begining' type mod..

................................................................................

................

[Kataura]

Thank you, that's helped a lot. :)

[nosisab]

The only thing I couldn't ever understand with the dezdimona's load order is Why the advice to put the minor mods before the overhauls... since they or are meant to actually replace something on them (and so must come after) or should not be installed at all (since they will fade off and just increase chances of things going bad) or, finally, don't conflict and thus the order doesn't matter.

 

In that case my own advice is more simple: Simple ready carefully the description of that minor mod, and if it says it does something an overhaul does to... decide if you put it 'after' or bypass it's install for good. Since nothing is just black and white, such minor mod may have something you don't want to change in the overhaul, yet have another feature that not conflict and so putting it before in the load order is reasonable.

 

Another thing people seems to be not aware is uninstalling a previously active mod may summon chaos and havoc on certain saved games, sometimes just changing the load order may do it too. Most of times the engine can cope with the fault and just 'ignore' the now lacking features, sometimes it seems it is doing fine just to dumb crash after a time for apparent 'no reason' when some missing or changed feature is eventually called.

 

So, uninstalling mods is worth so much thinking as installing is, more maybe, since some mods may plain overwrite things an active mod placed there too, and uninstalling will remove it for both (in this case the order they are INSTALLED is meaningful too, being the overriding modules of the last one the one that will actually be there. And yet, this is the very reason the load order change may go bad, since the now active feature will refer to object's features that may lack in that module).

 

To complicate things yet more, some mods may place same objects (objects are far more that mere items in the actual context, and would need a whole article to explain) in game and never physically overrides among themselves and that is the most common case, yet the same reasoning above applies and explain why the uninstalling or order change may compromise saved games (where the problem is clearly visible in the overwriting it becomes much more insidious on overriding cases).

 

Most of the complaints about the stalling/crashing at exit, or start game falls on one of above categories too by means of an mechanism known as deadlock that I think most will not bother to try understand, lets just say is like the gentlemen fighting for the right to pay the lunch bill.

 

Bah, better was tell since the beginning just this: Common sense, reading documentation and purpose/usefulness must be the guide.