Ferryt

The fact that your computer does start working normally after a few minutes indicates to me that one possible problem is that Oblivion is slow in shutting down and is doing some internal house-cleaning. I see this with some other programs, as well, although I've never seen it with Oblivion. Firefox is especially bad about hanging around in the background "doing things" after I close it. Get a utility like Process Explorer and run it after you close Oblivion and see if it's still running. Just because you think you kill a process and it disappears from your computer screen doesn't mean it's dead. One thing you may be experiencing, here, is save game bloat, as well. Have you checked the size of your saved game files, yet? If they're really big then your saved games have a lot of garbage in them, which can be caused by a number of things, but especially overuse by "placeatme", either through the console or from mods which use that function. There's a way to use Wrye Bash to "clean" bloated game saves, although I don't know what it is right off the top of my head since I've never had this problem.

I have downloaded this, although it will be awhile before I actually get around to installing and playing it. I'm still trying to figure out an effective way to do a dual Oblivion/Nehrim install, anyway. Let me say, though, that based upon the videos and stills I've seen this is, indeed, a much more professional product than Oblivion. Visually, it is stunning, although one could say the same for many areas in Cyrodiil, as well. Where it shines, though, is in the voice acting. Sadly, for those people who don't understand spoken German, you're going to miss out on this part of the experience. I read German OK. I have a problem understanding the language when rapidly-spoken, though. However, I think I'll be using this game to brush up a bit on that. There will be no English voice-over (or any other language) version of this game released, at least not by the Nehrim team. They've already made this clear on the Nehrim site. If some talented voice actors got together, though, an English re-make would be possible. I could even live with the lip-sync being off, since I'm a fan of "Chinese Westerns" (i.e., your standard badly-acted kung-fu movies). Honestly, though, voice acting isn't that difficult, that being said by someone who is mute, IRL, maybe not being terribly believable, but I've talked to some of my close personal friends about this issue and they agree. Most of the voice acting you see in user-created mods is bad. Why? Because the voice actors don't put their hearts and souls into the acting. They aren't "acting", so much as they're just laboriously reading the scripts word-by-word. It shows and it's pretty easy to tell when they're doing it that way because of the near-monotone, stilted, rhythmic patterns and occasional pauses as they stumble over words or phrases, that you get when people are reading one word at a time, rather than taking the time to memorize their lines and then speak them as though they were real people engaged in conversation with other real people. Some of the best voice acting I've witnessed, in fact, has been extemporaneous role-playing in table-top games, and these players didn't even have scripts to go by! It can be done. You just need to find people who will actually put some effort into it, rather than coming off as sounding like they just wanted to get the reading over with and had no "feeling" for the characters they were portraying. We have voice actors on this site. Hint ... hint.

I just graduated from Mod Hell -- or, perhaps, escaped it, depending upon your perspective. I think I've downloaded about 500 or so mods, which I think is more than the game can handle, and I'm studying them diligently. My last play through was so glitchy and buggy from all the mods I was using that I finally just decided to wipe everything clean and do a new install of Oblivion. Now I'm in the position of evaluating all the various mods that are getting my attention (and there are new ones on almost a daily basis). Too many to choose from, too little space in the mod order, and too few frames per second on this machine, already ... Before, my approach was "if some is good then more is better". I don't think I've ever been so wrong. Now, it a matter of fine-tuning the game to my playing style with as few mods as possible, and that's turning out to be pretty difficult. There's no question that all the official patches and unofficial patches are absolutely necessary, of course. Beyond that, I approach this game as a role-player and someone who loves immersion. I'm not interested in the hack&slash style of gaming that Oblivion was clearly designed to best support. I prefer the freedom to explore, the freedom to make moral/ethical choices that actually affect the world, and, most of all, the freedom to totally ignore a linear, rushed, and totally disappointing main quest. With that in mind, I want to see mods that offer new opportunities to actually role-play, new quests, new factions to join, and that sort of thing. I'm still sorting it all out. That said, there are still just a few mods that I consider essential. OBSE and COBL: I honestly can't imagine playing the game without these because so many of the best mods either require them or are at their best with them a body replacer: After experimenting with HGEC I've dumped it in favor of Robert's mods for both male and female bodies. I just detest the Vanilla meshes and textures. Female characters with a dude's body? Whatever was Bethesda thinking? Exnem's bodies, upon which HGEC is based, give the option to play an average female with average breasts, which is what I prefer, but the arms and legs are like matchsticks and there are issues with both the meshes and textures. Robert's female body has no such issues. At this point it becomes a matter of guesswork, so I won't even try. I've tried several different overhauls for stealth-based characters, for instance, and I'm still not sure which one I prefer. I'm avoiding mods that overhaul large parts of the game, like OOO, because most of them contain features that are deal-breakers for me, so I don't expect to get all my fixes in just one or two big mods. I'm less interested in eye candy than I am in fixing problems (like the abysmally-designed leveling system) in this game. I'm still evaluating several hotkey mods, seeing that eight hotkeys aren't sufficient, especially for a mage character. A month ago I'd have a list of about twenty "essential" mods. Having experienced them, and dealt with incompatibilities, I've trimmed that way down, as you can see.

I just spilled my espresso in my lap because of a giggle fit that triggered. That is absolutely classic! I have a real one -- when things you've seen or know about in the game make their way into your dreams, and it's game-like and not realistic ... i.e. like last night in a dream I saw a mispositioned tile artifact and thought to myself "That would be fairly easy to fix in the CS", or in another dream awhile back I was exploring a certain ruin for the first time (in the dream -- I've been there lots in-game) and paused right before reaching a tripwire that I know IRL is there, but couldn't have known that as my dream-self, and looked around for it so I could step over it in the darkness, rather than walk through it.

I hate level-based games, whether they're table-top or computer games. Unfortunately, the vast majority of role-playing and FPS games are level-based -- a legacy from the very first such game, Dungeons and Dragons. The industry has actually learned that there are better ways of doing this (enter the most played non-leveled table-top game system, GURPS), but it's a meme that's ingrained into gaming because, I think, of the bragability factor. "Hey, look at my gazillionth-level <fill in character class>! He can kick all your butts and has an awesome Sword of the Gods and he's 100% invisible all the time and ..." You probably get my drift. I play these games from the perspective of a role-player (as opposed to a hack&slash player) who likes immersion. Oblivion is a game that has enormous potential for both, although the game designers, in apparently targeting an audience in the pre-teen to young teen age groups, dropped the ball as soon as it was passed onto the court in both respects. The fact that it may well have the worst-designed leveling system ever doesn't help, since any kind of level-awareness breaks immersion for me. In spite of this I've tried efficient leveling, rapid leveling, slow leveling, no leveling ... and have, after a number of long conversations on the shortcomings of Oblivion with one of my friends, who I introduced to the game, decided that I'm just not going to concern myself with it at all, once character generation is complete. I make a list, for each character, of attributes and skills that are 1) vital (just a few), 2) very important (no more than a handful), and 3) secondary. Those which I deem vital are going to be specialties. Those which I think are very important, though, only become primary if they're relatively difficult to train, and then I make a conscious effort to train them whenever I can. I replace those as my primary emphasis with some from the third list that I consider useful, but not essential to my character concept. During play I'll train anything if I get a chance, and I'm not talking about just seeking out trainers for them -- that system is even more flawed than the leveling system, itself. Almost every skill can be trained when you aren't actively exploring or fighting, and some of them can be easily trained even when you are. After character generation is over I really don't even pay much attention to character level, although I'll monitor my skill levels just to make sure I'm not short-changing myself down the road. I just have fun at the game and that means, among other things, not being overly cognizant of the "numbers game" part of playing Oblivion. Yes, this can result in some difficulties because the game shoves level at you on a number of occasions. The Daedric shrine quests all have level requirements (one of the reasons that if anyone tells you they finished the game at first level, they're either lying or they've modded the game -- even Azura's quest, which is the lowest level one require you to be level 2). There are mods which eliminate the level requirements from these quests, though. The other major place the game screws you over big time is the main quest. Do it at low level and the NPCs who are helping you have a good chance of survival. Wait until higher level, like I did on my first full play through, and the NPCs will drop like flies, leaving you with no help because the game levels up your opposition but not your allies. While Bethesda might have done this on purpose, I consider it a serious game design flaw. Since the only thing that will get me to engage the main quest ever again is a mod that has to interact with it some way, this is no longer an issue to me. I simply don't like the main quest. It's not very interesting and the reward at the end is a set of armor that's not as good as armor you can make yourself, and the guards still treat you like dirt.

For me I think it's a toss-up between Vicente Valtieri and M'aiq -- Vincente because he's just so suave and M'aiq because he's so funny. There are a bunch of NPCs which run close seconds to those two, though.

OK, I had some time on my hands, so here's Lesson #1. First a top view in CS to show general layout and lighting. For lighting I used "CommonLightOrange256Flicker". It's my sense of realism showing, I suppose -- farm houses are drafty (I spent most of my childhood on an old farm) so the candles would flicker unless the air outside the house is almost dead-still. It's not brightly lit. We're using candles! I'm not even sure a 256 radius is actually realistic, in fact. I put a candle in the middle of the table, too -- "CommonLightOrange128", which is probably more realistic. The flickering at that light level is almost seizure-inducing (and the slower flicker looks funky to me), since the dining area is fairly dark (more romantic, don't you think?), so I didn't use a flickering light source for that. I think it's ameliorated throughout the rest of the house by the slight overlap in illumination radii. I got the effect that I wanted, though -- relatively bright lighting in the entrance area, and more subdued near the bed. Yes, I added a NorthMarker, since I peeked ahead to see how the external structure would be oriented, and noticed that DarkRider's rotation on his house was 57.6547°. I made mine 57°, even. I doubt that the extra half a degree will make any difference once I place the external structure. By the way, for those of you taking screenshots of the CS, if you hold down the "alt" key while pressing PrntScrn it will only create a screenshot of the active window, rather than including your desktop, too. Next is the view toward the dining area from the door, showing the table and four chairs, and the two cupboards that are part of the Extra Credit assignment. It turned out brighter than I expected. I have the ambient light set to 80/80/56, with Fog at 5/5/5 (there's a bug in the game that sometimes crashes it if you leave Fog set to 0/0/0, so I understand). I'll leave it for now, though. I looked at some of the lighting schemes done by the Bethesda game developers and noticed that they "cheat" a lot. They seldom put the actual light sources right on top of the objects that are ostensibly emitting the light in-game. If there are two torches on opposite sides of a tunnel, they'd frequently put a single light in the middle of the tunnel, right between them, and candles next to the wall would frequently be represented by a light source placed a bit away from the candle, which resulted in what, to me, looked even in-game like the light sources were displaced. Is this S.O.P. or was it just sloppy design work? Also, they would frequently put dim lights along tunnels or hallways to supply ambient lighting (I had been wondering what those odd "hot spots" in the lighting were). It looks like light placement isn't quite as straightforward as I thought it was going to be. Next is a view toward the fireplace from the bed showing the bookcase and one of the four tapestries. Finally, we have the view toward the bed from the fireplace, showing two of the other three tapestries (the final one is just to the right of the window by the oval rug, visible in the top-down picture), the two paintings, bedside table, and the rest of the Extra Credit objects (two dressers). This was fun, if a little basic. I used to build and script in Second Life, and I'll admit that this is a lot easier, since we get to use pre-built objects, rather than have to construct them from scratch "in-game". The interface is a bit clunky for me, though. I like to zoom in really close when I'm positioning some things, and it's tough to do with the CS, unless there's a trick I haven't figured out.