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Oblivion first time modded or vanilla

Play oblivion vanilla or modded as a first time player


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wishbonetail

Learned
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Oct 18, 2021
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671
Better cities, eh? Did they fix sewers without toilets, fireplaces without chimneys, dwellings without bathrooms or kitchens, or outhouses?
It is an imperial capital, dammit.
 

Funposter

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Toilets are an inconsequential detail unless the game has shitting mechanics for NPCs and the player.
 
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The western road to Erromon.
But Imperial city has a sewer, see. And all of the houses consist mostly of living rooms and bedrooms. Those are not liveable places.

They may have a highly sophisticated service of gong-collectors for all we know. The bigger issue is that they have no aquaducts, which means they're getting water from the same source they're shitting in.
 

wishbonetail

Learned
Joined
Oct 18, 2021
Messages
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Morrownd also has this issue but its world is alien enough for this not to become apparent.
Theres no lifestock in Cyrodiil as far as i recall, and there are no places for people to prepare said lifestock. Farms are too small to support towns and there are no bazaars for farmers to trade crops. There are no huntsmen, hunter cabins were they would trade their goods.
Gothic3, Kingdom come, god forbid Witcher series blow this shit out of the water. Oblivion world is infantile and sterile and addition of a dozen new NPCs wont make a difference.
 
Joined
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Codex Year of the Donut
Morrownd also has this issue but its world is alien enough for this not to become apparent.
Theres no lifestock in Cyrodiil as far as i recall, and there are no places for people to prepare said lifestock. Farms are too small to support towns and there are no bazaars for farmers to trade crops. There are no huntsmen, hunter cabins were they would trade their goods.
Gothic3, Kingdom come, god forbid Witcher series blow this shit out of the water. Oblivion world is infantile and sterile and addition of a dozen new NPCs wont make a difference.
There's a chest in the archmages guild that duplicates any alchemical ingredient put in it.
https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Enchanted_Chest

Put food in it, duplicate food, repeat as necessary.
its-magic-i-aint-gotta-explain-shit2.jpg
 

Funposter

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A comparison of the two latest Oblivion Reloaded forks/adaptions, Oblivion Reloaded E3 (ORE3) and the very recently released Oblivion Reloaded Combined (ORC)

To start off, it probably helps to explain what Oblivion Reloaded (OR) is and what both versions here have in common. The official website states that "Oblivion Reloaded is an OBSE plugin that mainly modifies the rendering pipeline, adding new features and providing screen effects not supported in vanilla Oblivion" which is a pretty good starting point. It grew out of the Oblivion Graphics Extender (OBGE) and in addition to graphics options, it also allows for better memory utilization and purging of RAM/VRAM, meaning that users can enjoy high-resolution texture packs without crashing every 15 minutes. Unfortunately, OR has been severely feature-crept during its development and each update seems to break something. Common complaints are basically down to everything non-graphical related, with mounted combat (that doesn't work), dual wielding (which doesn't work) and an Equipment Mode which allows you to wear shields on your back (this crashed your game until about a year ago) being example of what OR doesn't need to be doing, since they're either unnecessary additions or are better left as individual plugins. Alenet is an autistic Ukrainian, so of course he chimps out whenever people complain about this sort of thing and he threw a tantrum and left Nexus a while ago due to people asking him too many questions about his borderline-essential tool which also lacks proper documentation.

So "vanilla" OR is a bit of a mess as it continues being updated, and each update seems to break something whenever it introduces a new feature or improves an old on. This leads to the development of forks/adaptions, usually built off an older, more stable version of OR. The feature sets for each version is a little bit different, with ORE3 being pretty much entirely focused on maximum visual quality with zero superfluous features, and ORC following in the broader tradition of Oblivion Reloaded being more than just a graphics extender. Both come with improvements to stability and memory management. ORE3 has pretty much all of OR's non-graphics features disabled by default, while ORC has a few of them enabled and also comes with some new stuff that means you don't need to install extra OBSE plugins. In this way, you could consider ORE3 to be the purest extension of the original Oblivion Graphics Extender, while ORC is a continuation of GBRPluss' previous Oblivion Reloaded Lite (ORL), cutting some of the more intensive graphics features in exchange for better performance and focusing more on OR's ability to provide better stability for heavily modded setups. The big differentiating factors (i.e stuff that one version does which the other doesn't offer) are as follows:

Oblivion Reloaded E3

  • Exterior Point Light Shadows - Light sources other than the sun are now able to cast shadows in exterior cells when Shadow Mode is enabled.
  • 12 points for shadow rendering (up from 4) - This is a huge improvement on OR's basic shadows, especially in interiors where you often have more than four light sources active at once. This means that your modded Oblivion can have three times as many active light sources creating shadows as even a modded Skyrim SE in 2022. Performance heavy, but super nifty, especially when combined with something like Real Lights for flickering stencil shadows. Basically every gamer's wet dream circa 2005.
  • Moon-based directional lighting - I'll be honest, the effect of this is pretty subtle because I haven't really noticed it too much.
  • Day/Night dynamic interior & window lighting - Adds lights to and from windows depending on time of day, seems to also darken them a bit at nighttime, which is nice given how most of Oblivion's window textures are nuclear-bright cyan. Almost supersedes All Natural, unless you really want to use Immersive Interiors or hear raindrops when it's storming outside.

Oblivion Reloaded Combined

  • Interior Shadows, SMAA, Parallax Occlusion Mapping disabled - Some of the most performance-intensive but also graphically pleasing shaders. POM is required for exterior shadows to work on objects that have parallax enabled with ORE3, which it should be said is not the case with ORC.
  • Purge cleaning logic is optimized - basically better performance.
  • DXVK Patch - Linux users can now use OR. In theory should allow Windows users to also use Vulkan without experiencing crashes or graphical glitches with OR, as they used to, which should improve performance.
  • HeapMode - maybe possibly improves performance.
  • AnimationHook and PlayidleHook - you can sit down without being forced into third person and enjoy idle animations while in first person.
  • Random Difficulty - randomizes the difficulty every few seconds. What?
  • Diagonal movement and Shield on Back built in - You don't need to download WalkBlessed and the Equipment Mode here is genuinely an upgrade over similar mods which utilized vanilla meshes, so requires you to go in and edit things if you want modded shields to appear on your back.
  • Camera Mode - lets you view your body in first person, but it's tied to the player model so it bobs and follows the idle animations etc. and looks and feels disgusting.

Basically, ORC is for Linux users or people using heavily modded setups that include performance killers like Better Cities. I'd recommend ORE3 unless you're using mods that add dozens of NPC and clutter objects to cities. ORC is supposed to be "lite", but it still includes all of the superfluous shit like the Equip Mode, Camera Mode, animation additions and a dodge function which the community has had solved for nearly five years in more satisfactory ways. It also adds replacements for the main menu video for some reason, which I can only imagine are there to tell you that you're definitely playing with OR installed. Why the "lite" version keeps there, I have no idea. I think the endgame for OR is for it to basically be a one-stop shop for "fixing" Oblivion after installing the UOP, but they'll never get there because of feature creep and Alenet's autism. In addition, installing ORC (through Mod Organiser 2) and later uninstalling it to go back to ORE3 broke my main menu despite the fact that everything is installed in virtual folder. This is a great example of what makes the main fork of OR so frustrating to use, as it gets its grubby, little, piss-stained hands all over the game and it feels impossible to remove all traces of it beyond uninstalling the game itself. It borders on malware.


Edit: so OR does something funky to your oblivion_default.ini which is what causes the problem with the main menu. Deleting the default_ini and validating game data through Steam fixes the issue. A piece of advice for OR, though, make sure to set SaveSetting to =1 in the OR.ini, otherwise changes to game settings (controls, video etc.) will not carry over when you next boot up. idk why this is set to =0 by default, probably to prevent crashes from people messing around with shadows.
 
Last edited:

Valdetiosi

Scholar
Joined
Apr 18, 2016
Messages
215
Location
Finland
The shadows is only real thing I see interest on Oblivion Reloaded and even that has stand alone mod called ShadeMe.
Also, installing with MO2? If you're going to end up creating Bashed Patch in the end might as well just use Wrye Bash.
 

Funposter

Arcane
Joined
Oct 19, 2018
Messages
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Australia
The shadows is only real thing I see interest on Oblivion Reloaded and even that has stand alone mod called ShadeMe.
Which the mod author openly admits is made redundant by the Shadows in OR. ORE3 is the best option atm, imo, especially with the upgrade to the amount of light points. OR is pretty much all about the shadows and water shaders, and then the extra stuff like DoF and Colouring is optional but nice to have.

Also, installing with MO2? If you're going to end up creating Bashed Patch in the end might as well just use Wrye Bash.
It's literally just because I find MO2 more comfortable to use. When I last did a properly modded Oblivion playthrough in 2020, I used Wrye Bash.
 

Valdetiosi

Scholar
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Which the mod author openly admits is made redundant by the Shadows in OR.
I can't bother to install OR for all the other stuff it does when I just exclusively want shadows. Considering its still up though, I would use it unless it would be outright performance eating.

It's literally just because I find MO2 more comfortable to use.

I agree, but I only find MO2 comfortable with New Vegas.
 

Funposter

Arcane
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Which the mod author openly admits is made redundant by the Shadows in OR.
I can't bother to install OR for all the other stuff it does when I just exclusively want shadows. Considering its still up though, I would use it unless it would be outright performance eating.

Download Oblivion Reloaded E3, go in-game (don't even need to mess with the ini!), access the in-game menu by pressing the O key, set all of the options that aren't Shadows, POM, AO and SSAA to be disabled. Would take five minutes if that.
 
Joined
Feb 3, 2022
Messages
944
Morrownd also has this issue but its world is alien enough for this not to become apparent.

I was under the impression that those Kwama egg caves/mines were the farms of Morrowind? Those queens pump out lots and lots of eggs, which the mine workers harvest and sell at market, and people eat them? So Morrowind's population is supported, it's just not overtly visible on the surface unlike traditional agricultural farms and coastal fishing industries are.
 

wishbonetail

Learned
Joined
Oct 18, 2021
Messages
671
Morrownd also has this issue but its world is alien enough for this not to become apparent.

I was under the impression that those Kwama egg caves/mines were the farms of Morrowind? Those queens pump out lots and lots of eggs, which the mine workers harvest and sell at market, and people eat them? So Morrowind's population is supported, it's just not overtly visible on the surface unlike traditional agricultural farms and coastal fishing industries are.
I meant dwellings. But yes, there are domesticated guars too, a whole plantations region and fishing villages.Worldbuilding of Morrowind is top notch.It was fun clickin savant NPCs to learn everything in detail. People at bethesda werent braindead back then.
 
Joined
May 7, 2021
Messages
206
Before playing any game that's got a modding scene, what you wanna do is mod the absolute living fucking out of the game until you can't tell what's vanilla and what isn't and crack open a tequila trying to figure that out for yourself.
 

Valdetiosi

Scholar
Joined
Apr 18, 2016
Messages
215
Location
Finland
Might as well say what mods I use and what I recommend to use, be it new or old.

  • Weapon Expansion Pack for Oblivion Nthusiasts - a weapon fix/tweak mod that adds orcish/mithril weapons and also adds missing out Madness/Amber weapons.
  • Extended UI - some nice QoL tweaks when navigating menus, info, spell favorite list separate from hotkeys ect.
  • Alchemy Advanced - Allows more control over what kind of potions you create.
  • Morrowind Style Alcohol - Gives attribute and skill boosts to some brewery instead of simply restoring fatigue.
  • Av Latta Magicka - I'm not sold on Supreme Magicka and LAME, so this one works as middle ground. Gives different perks for schools of magic, adds new magic effects (my favorite being to imbue weapon with shock/ice/fire damage) ect.
  • Balanced Creature Stats - Stops some creatures level scaling with you, giving them fixed max and min levels.
  • Better Recoil and Stagger - So you don't get stunlocked for 4 seconds, instead for 1.
  • Soulgem Magic - Allows to store multiple souls on one gem that gets converted to higher one, in case I just happened to soul trap petty soul on my grand soul gem.
  • Ultimate Leveling - Leveling mod that lets me put attribute points where I want them to, instead of keeping check list what skills I've raised. Alternatively has Oblivion XP styled leveling.
  • Enhanced Weather - Adds bunch of new weathers that fit into aesthetics and reduces HDR so that not everything is glowing up in your face.
  • Enhanced Water v20 HDMI - Allows me to see more than 1 meter beyond underwater. Especially useful with Maskar's Overhaul which adds underwater treasures so they are easier to locate.
  • Bashing Reworked - Allows me to manually bash my shield, duh.
  • Real Time Lockpicking - Picking up locks like in Morrowind, though handled more like Deus Ex lockpicking.
  • Supreme Overhaul - Bunch of nice features, like no omnipresent guards, regional bounties and persuasion overhaul to bring it back to same as how it is in Morrowind.
  • J3 Atlassed VWD 2 - not performance eating VWD mod that allows me to see forts/ayleid ruins/rocks from a distance.
  • Maskar's Oblivion Overhaul - I think this one is quite obvious and I would shill this as only reason to play game.
 

Funposter

Arcane
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Messages
1,773
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Australia
Extended Cyrodiil - Lite

A collection of village expansions which affects all villages in the game barring Weye, making it quite compatible. Also features some inn extensions. Visually it's quite nice but it features a few weird things as well as a couple of my cardinal sins for modding, in addition to being a translation of a German mod so there's a couple of grammatical oddities which weren't fixed. Some of the expansions are nice and logical, like Pell's Gate which just features a few extra houses, communal vegetable gardens (the term "farm" would be a bit grandiose) as well a little dock to accommodate fishing. Cool. Others aren't so great, like Hackdirt which is now a Disney forest village instead of a half-burned down shithole, or Brindle Home which now features a priory as well as a chapel, in addition to the minor landscape edits and extra homes, which is all you needed! Gottlesfont Priory now has a couple of extra homes and some food production to justify its existence, but adds male NPCs to an area which in the vanilla game existed as a curiosity as it was effectively a convent, featuring two female NPCs with the 'Sister' title. Some incorrect naming conventions, such as 'Home of [x]' instead of '[x]'s House' as well as a Khajiit named in an Arabic fashion for some reason. This really demonstrates that it's a collection of different mods, since the issue isn't consistent. Visual clutter of the statue variety, with every village of 8 people now warranting at least one statue of Mara, if not two or three of Morihaus. A couple of doors which act as decoration instead of actually leading anywhere, one of my most hated things that modders do. There was also a new NPC in Hackdirt named 'Bernd' which made me cackle because it really lets you know it's a German mod.

It's actually well made but feels "moddy" as a consequence of those few issues, and I hate to think what it was like before monkeyangie went through and cleaned it up to get rid of non-vanilla assets and improve some of the scripting. The landscape edits to the affected villages are nice too, since it helps to alleviate the monotony of Oblivion's overworld and makes things feel more like a person actually designed them. Give it a try, because the issues might not annoy you as much as they do me.
 
Joined
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Messages
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Codex Year of the Donut
DXVK Patch - Linux users can now use OR. In theory should allow Windows users to also use Vulkan without experiencing crashes or graphical glitches with OR, as they used to, which should improve performance.
If there's an issue with OR they should submit a bug report.

I'll look into it, I guess.
 

visions

Arcane
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Jun 10, 2007
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Better cities, eh? Did they fix sewers without toilets, fireplaces without chimneys, dwellings without bathrooms or kitchens, or outhouses?
It is an imperial capital, dammit.

But Imperial city has a sewer, see. And all of the houses consist mostly of living rooms and bedrooms. Those are not liveable places.

Fireplaces without chimneys were common in rural Estonia even in the 19th century (the smoke was supposed to exit through the windows or the door). Also many rural dwellings didn't have separate kitchens. Also outhouses weren't ubiquitous, many people shat in the woods.

Checked the homepage of Oslo's folk museum (open air musuem of old Norwegian buildings that have been brought there; https://norskfolkemuseum.no/en/farmhouse-from-nes).


Description of a 17th century building:

This farmhouse originally had only one large room with an open gallery in front of an entrance door in the gable wall. A log chamber with a framework gallery was added later. The hearth is a smoke stove with no chimney so that smoke flowed into the room and out through the vent in the ceiling. Until a leaded window was installed in the 1700s, the smoke vent was the only source of daylight.


Can't be arsed to check other countries but seems like such living standards were common in at least parts of rural Europe centuries after the medieval era. Whether any of that is adequate for a fantasy imperial capital is another matter but people in Europe used to live in similar "unliveable" conditions not that long ago.

Also sewers can be for rainwater only. Many cities have separate sewer systems for rainwater and domestic/industrial sewage. So maybe the sewers in Cyrodiil are for rainwater, but the citizens have no indoor plumbing.

Dunno how that was in the medieval and older periods irl though, maybe someone who is more knowledgeable on sewers can chime in.
 
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Naraya

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Reading this thread makes me all warm and fuzzy inside. It's lovely that people make new mods after all these years. :incline:
 

wishbonetail

Learned
Joined
Oct 18, 2021
Messages
671
Dunno how that was in the medieval and older periods irl though, maybe someone who is more knowledgeable on sewers can chime in.
If we dig far enough, we'll find out that people used to live in caves some time ago. Thats not the point.
The dwellings and cities in this game doesnt look like someone lives there. Where are public bathrooms or shitholes in Imperial city, where potters, butchers, farmers, hunters, where goats, cows, chickens or whatever the fuck their fantasy equivalents?
Okay, lets just assume that emperor levitated to shit in the woods. Oh wait, they cut it out.
Maybe, if he could levitate he would still be alive.
The same game design then traveled to Fallout3 and Skyrim. They just do not hold out the comparison with Gothics, Witchers, FaloutNV, KCD, which clearly were done by far more competent people.
 

BruceVC

Magister
Joined
Jul 25, 2011
Messages
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Location
South Africa, Cape Town
I have finally got Oblivion stable where it only CTD every 4-5 hours so Im happy

In summary what I ended up doing was

  • Reinstalled Oblivion but kept my save games so I didnt have start the game again
  • Used OBMM and Wyre Bash as my Mod managers but loaded most mods using Wyre. I then created a Bashed Patch ( I still use LOOT for load order )
  • I also used the 4GB and CTD memory mods to stabilize the game and I think these made a difference

Funposter and others

I am very confident with how my mods work now but I want to add Martigens Monster Mod. I know you mentioned this can be problematic but I found this interesting video below on how to install it correctly but I have a different question. If I install it how long would you wait before you happy its stable? For example if I have 5 hours of no CTD or problems after installing MMM should that be enough? I want to avoid playing the game for many hours only to find MMM causes CTD later on but now I have restore saves from before I installed it. So I guess what I am asking is can a large mod like MMM cause major instability much later on in the game?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63bJNbjhGhk
 

Valdetiosi

Scholar
Joined
Apr 18, 2016
Messages
215
Location
Finland
Bruce, I wouldn't recommend Martigens Monster Mod at all.

And the reasoning behind it? Nearly all features it has are also in Maskar's Overhaul. Martigen's mod isn't gonna be updated anytime soon, if at all.
 

BruceVC

Magister
Joined
Jul 25, 2011
Messages
7,701
Location
South Africa, Cape Town
Bruce, I wouldn't recommend Martigens Monster Mod at all.

And the reasoning behind it? Nearly all features it has are also in Maskar's Overhaul. Martigen's mod isn't gonna be updated anytime soon, if at all.

Maskars is great by the way, very useful mod and I also installed Alchemy Advanced from your Mod list and it really enhances Alchemy and makes it much more interesting :salute:
 

Valdetiosi

Scholar
Joined
Apr 18, 2016
Messages
215
Location
Finland
So I decided to give in and install Oblivion Reloaded E3, and I have to say, it stutters like hell. Moonbased directional lighting causes heavy performance strike even at daytime, and even setting down lightpoints to 4, any forest is going to make my FPS crawl.
But on other hands, it's really neat shadows. Now if only it could run better :negative:
 

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