vometia

I've heard of a few, perhaps because I know some of those strange creatures known as "young people". I've even watched a few perform on Jools Holland's music programme, which is usually safe territory for us oldies!

Speaking as someone not averse to the pastime of "misadventure", I must say I found that to be quite an entertaining story.

I'll have to check that out! Even though part of me is drooling at the idea of how big those steaks must be.

We recently discovered the curious thing that is swordfish: I haven't previously been very adventurous at all when it comes to fish things, preferring safe options like cod, trout, salmon and so on. Though I'm sure it's old news to many here, I rather like the way that it has the consistency of tuna and the taste of cod. And no pesky bones! So far, anyway. No recipe here, cooking a swordfish steak from frozen just involves heating the oven to 220 degrees centigrade, loosely wrapping the steak(s) in some foil and placing in a baking tray, lightly seasoning them and putting a small knob of butter on top and leaving them to cook for half an hour. Accompaniments are at present things like baby sweetcorn and green beans. Because I'm on a diet. I would like to take a moment to say how much I hate dieting: I really hate dieting. Especially because I don't get on with carbs, and carbs taste really wonderful, and I can't have them because they're bad for me. On the other hand, I've lost over three stone since the start of the year, which is cool. I look better, and my blood tests indicate I'm actually healthier. Who'd have thought? But I want pizza, and chips, and potatoes, and cake, and loads of other stuff I can't have!

Did you ever resolve this? Is it loading the bsa file correctly? That's the only thing I can think of offhand. I have known the bsa files to occasionally become corrupted (which is odd since nothing should be writing to them) so it might be worth seeing if the voices1 and voices2 archives can be viewed with a bsa browser.

A bit late in the day, but I found out the hard way why some people won't use OBMM: mine couldn't open its database for various sundry reasons and proceeded to delete a huge slew of stuff it no longer recognised. This included a lot of painstakingly-installed stuff as well as bits and pieces I'd been working on. Though I'd backed them up, I was officially Not Happy. Once its database was available again, it wouldn't load it, unhelpfully. I gave up and moved on to BAIN. Though Bash's documentation can be, er, hairy, it's proven itself to be much more reliable and straightforward.

Oh God, yeah, I remember that from my first modelling attempts in Oblivion: I didn't know that there was a script to copy the weights from another mesh and tried to do all my weight-painting by hand. Of course my painting would subtly stray into territory where it wasn't welcome and the effects were far less subtle in game. Discovering the "bone weight copy" script has made life immensely more straightforward.

I decided ED-E needed a respray. I'm not entirely sure what she thinks about it.

I think the idea is to speed up other people's downloads by making your PC part of a network of download servers. They just "forget" to mention that bit.

Thanks for the suggestions! I think the problem was caused by things pulling each other this way and that, and Streamline occasionally trying to be too clever (don't get me wrong, I love Streamline, but it sometimes gets a bit tangled up.) The uGridDistantCount fix worked well enough to make me happy so I'm leaving that particular problem alone for now! Now, if only I could find out why it's more unstable than I'd like... it's always hard to say if it's a bad mod (which is a little unfair in some cases, some things that can cause a CTD really shouldn't) or just Oblivion being Oblivion. As for the chapel steps, can you click on them, get their reference ID, use it to look up the base ID, dig out the NIF and use that to find the texture path? Or is it stuff like ground textures, which I really have no idea about trying to track down...

It is evil! And also horrid! I've only seen it included with LotRO where its evil purpose was somewhat obfuscated, hopefully it's not too likely to be found elsewhere.

Oh yes, Pando Media Booster, item number 937,128 in "How To Alienate Your Users". I'd actually forgotten about that, but I was certainly not very impressed at the time when I discovered it chewing its way through my monthly usage allowance: in an age of usage caps where people can be facing either steep penalty fees for over-use or simply become cut off for the rest of the month, it's not a good way for a company to ingratiate itself...

I always find myself wondering about this: as CPU speeds and IO throughput diverge, at some point the overhead for decompression will be less than the overhead of dragging the full-size file in from mass storage. But at what point does that happen? Has it happened already? Does the system's overhead for maintaining multiple file handles have an adverse impact? Lots of theoretical questions from me but no useful answers at this point!

Thanks for passing that on.

May I ask how they snuck in? Just wondering if there's anything I should keep an eye out for elsewhere... Thanks for keeping on top of it.

The situation is a bit muddier in the EU where the EULA clauses don't overrule what the law says; and I don't fully understand the situation, but to Valve's assertion that Steam only conveys a right to use rather than ownership, the EU's response seems to be "lol no", just because Valve says it's something doesn't make it so. That's probably good news for their customers (I hate the word "consumer" and the way it depersonalises people) but it would seem that the actual legal status needs to be tested in court. Of course all of this shouldn't matter, and wouldn't matter, if the companies actually viewed their paying customers with a bit more respect. It seems to be a bit of a folly that they don't: it can't end well.

Oh dear, sounds a lot more serious than I'd assumed (NoScript just warned me about "organiccrap.com", I guess you're already aware of it). How very annoying, shame some people can't just create their own stuff instead of ruining other people's...

They didn't quite do it for me. I can't quite pin down a specific reason, I think it's just that Jackson's vision and mine didn't really coincide at all: not that they were bad films, they just weren't LotR to me. I think there was a lack of the book's "Englishness" and too much "epic! Epiiiiiic!" for my taste. The swords he had commissioned were really pretty good, though.

I guess the title makes it quite obvious this is a rather specific query! I was curious why a particular combination of the above can cause really bad performance problems, and if anyone has any ideas. I've been faffing about with the road record in order to correctly add two new provinces to my game, Elsweyr Anequina and Valenwood Improved; prior to that, NPCs of a more wandery bent weren't able to travel, and now they are, so all is well there (for the record--which was an unintentional pun, honest!--I've started off with Arthmoor's excellent NRB road-generation grid and manually mapped the new provinces myself; which seems to have succeeded in spite of me forgetting how to delete the existing pathgrids en masse.) All has been well, for the most part... unless I'm somewhere in the south, pretty much anywhere below Bravil but especially Leyawiin, or Haven in Valenwood, if I look towards Corinthe (near the south of Elsweyr) I get appalling framerate drops, typically under 10 fps with awful lag. Normally I'd expect at least 40 in outdoor areas, usually much higher. (It's possible Corinthe itself could be the culprit since open cities aren't things Oblivion does well, but in this case it's so distant from the areas affected that it seems unlikely.) The weird thing is, I only get it when I have Streamline active: it's fine otherwise, but no amount of faffing with its settings seemed to rectify the problem. Of course I don't want to disable Streamline as it's pretty much essential when using Better Cities unless I want my graphics permanently on minimum. Also for the record, I additionally have the Oblivion Stutter Remover installed, but I've told it not to monitor the min/max fps. I have found a kind-of solution which is to reduce uGridDistantCount from its default of 25 to 15: this has little visual impact for me as I have the weather set up to always fog at a maximum of 40,000 units: that was influenced by Morrowind and intended to make the world look bigger (something I found wasn't the case in Morrowind if I used MGE and turned off fog!) Because of that, having 102,400 units worth of landscape being rendered is a bit of a waste as all I see are silhouettes of distant trees and objects: I don't want to nuke them all but it's rather inefficient as it is, so 15 seems like a good compromise. It has mostly done the trick, that <10 fps and lots of lag is now about 20 fps and some lag in the worst-affected areas, but I'm still curious as to exactly why it's happening: even with a solution, knowing the reason would still be nice! The other benefit is that it's consuming less memory so I can now go for a startling 30 minutes or so between crashes, usually, whereas it was down to under 10 which was becoming almost unplayable. I guess I just have too much stuff loaded up, which isn't a good idea with Oblivion's extremely fragile memory management, but it'd be nice if this could also be mitigated somehow; sadly, Oblivion seems to be immune to the 4GB patch and won't use more than 2GB. But I guess this is getting off the point a bit...

I specifically don't recommend my method, which was to use a text editor, which then required another utility to remove the trailing newline it added to the file. It worked (as long as the paths were the same length) but it's officially a really bad idea!

I've just bought us the box set of The Sopranos: "instant violence, just add DVD player". My gf got me into it many years ago, but I've never seen the first series nor most of the second. Nor the final episode, which has a bit of a reputation of being akin to the ending of Lost or ME3, but given that the whole series was pretty much "a day in the life of some mobsters" it'd always be very hard to have a proper The End I figure.

Does anybody know of a mod that allows the use of properly conformulated beards that doesn't require the creation of a new race for each race/beard-type/colour combination? I'm not even sure it's possible, to be honest, but I figured I'd ask. I've tried thinking of a way of creating my own, e.g. integrating beards into new hairdos which is what I did to give female characters earrings, but it all goes wrong as soon as they equip a helmet: nobody notices earrings disappearing there because the ears are usually covered, but a chap who suddenly becomes clean-shaven is another matter entirely. Unless I attempt to integrate moustaches etc into helmets, but that's starting to sound like it'll just create even more potential problems.

I'm not sure I follow... does the size of the country make a difference? Bigger invaders with huge militaries have also come unstuck (e.g. the Soviet Union) which I think is as much down to internal politics as size or anything else; it just tends to be the fate of empires sooner or later. I'd always just assumed that the Thalmor's dreams of a Tamriel united under their jackboot (or rather one of those chicken-feet boots we saw in Oblivion) would come to a messy end one way or the other anyway... it's just a matter of how it comes about rather than "if". (Hmm, I think that sounded rather more argumentative than I'd intended. That's what I get for posting before lunch!)

I'd actually quite like to see a return to Cyrodiil. Not necessarily all of it, but maybe a reworked Imperial Isle; a political intrigue type expansion along the lines of Tribunal would be quite interesting, I think.

I've also experienced that sort of corruption; I thought it was just me. I'm a bit nervous of using CS on anything other than temporary files because of its tendency to do other Bad Things to plugins, though. I'm another one who likes using Wrye Bash to do stuff like that.