A couple of basic questions

[Khettienna]

In other news, my alternative version of the ChorrolHouseMiddle07Interior without the annoying central pillar is much less... annoying. Except that I forgot to delete the nails near the top, but my disinclination to go back and edit buildings in Blender outweighs any perfectionism I might otherwise be inclined to employ, and they're hard to see anyway...

Fix it, or it will ALWAYS BUG YOU.

[vometia]

Fix it, or it will ALWAYS BUG YOU.

No.

I really am pedantic enough at the best of times, I don't need any encouragement! If I use it in one of my own mods I probably will bite the bullet and fix it, but at present it's just to fix a couple of annoyances in Bananasplit's Better Cities: which is probably bad enough in itself since I'm unlikely to explore the house and pub in question again, but these things get to me!

Still in the testing phase of the new installation and I only have a couple of packages managed by BAIN so far; don't really have enough confidence with what I'm doing to transfer more stuff away from OBMM yet. I would actually play the damn thing but I have this niggling feeling there's something I've forgotten; which is probably unimportant, most things can be installed later anyway, and I have the major stuff like FCOM, Better Cities and so on. Oh yeah, perfectionism again, I want to get Modem's City Life working with the open version of Better Cities (they seem to have dropped the compatibility patch for the closed version so I had to do that myself anyway) which reminds me of a similar remark I made about three years ago prior to my imminent play-through: the one I still haven't done yet! Sigh...

I figure that actually playing it is also a good way to get myself to do some modding, which has been my experience prior to now anyway: I don't really mind chopping and changing, and I find one inspires the other. Perhaps one reason my mod stalled in a big way was because I wasn't actually playing, and I think there's only so much one can do.

The other thing that was putting me off was the awful unreliability that I could never pin down, but that's looking like it was almost certainly an out-of-memory problem: I guess the usual locations where there was an intermittent but high likelihood of a CTD (e.g. Barrowfields, Chorrol Hinterlands, and Cheydinhal Falls: always the same places with no obvious cause) were probably caused by it running out of memory which is why I could never find the culprit; just too much going on. Certainly removing QTP3 seems to have immensely improved its stability and overall performance. I guess one could say it was "before its time" considering even modern PCs still struggle with it! Anyway, the vanilla textures still look surprisingly good; I'd still like something to give them better close-up definition, but if it turns out it's a choice between that and stability, I think I'll take the latter. There comes a point where the game can end up so overloaded with stuff that you have to make a choice between what you keep and what you don't; either that or put up with regular CTDs, but that just puts me on edge and is too immersion-breaking.

[InsanitySorrow]

I guess one could say it was "before its time" considering even modern PCs still struggle with it! Anyway, the vanilla textures still look surprisingly good; I'd still like something to give them better close-up definition, but if it turns out it's a choice between that and stability, I think I'll take the latter. There comes a point where the game can end up so overloaded with stuff that you have to make a choice between what you keep and what you don't; either that or put up with regular CTDs, but that just puts me on edge and is too immersion-breaking.

I have some stuff that'd help, not sure how big the FPS hit would be though , Others haven't complained yet

[vometia]

I have some stuff that'd help, not sure how big the FPS hit would be though , Others haven't complained yet

Do tell! Actually, the fps hit wasn't a major problem with QTP3, though stuttering was bad: even mirrored Velociraptors can't keep up with Oblivion's erratic loading schedule; I'd live with that except for the crashing. Though I may find it's still too much since QTP3 Redimized caused much the same problem...

I remembered one thing I want to do which is to update a very old mod, Survival Suite HTS, which is my favourite "hunger, thirst & sleep" mod: dunno why, it's not the most comprehensive, I just really like the way it works. But "very old" is the key point since it doesn't even include the Shivering Isles ingredients; I can add them myself easily enough but the multitude of stuff added by other mods makes it a bit unwieldy to do everything manually. I figure I need to COBL-ise it but the last time I looked at COBL, it seemed to complicated that I ran off shrieking about a giant haddock or something.

So I suspect that with my insistence that City Life is made to work with the open version of Better Cities (not difficult, just needs me to trawl through countless packages either adding conditions or movable markers and plopping the NPCs into interior cells) and Survival Suite HTS (potentially more difficult, probably a lot of effort either way) my idea of a playable game could still be some way off. Of course I could play without them... but I don't want to!

[InsanitySorrow]

Do tell!

I've been working on my own texture pack lately, texutres are the usual higher res (Good portion are 2048x2048) and more detailed. Mine are more colourful and have more depth on top of the usual stuff.

Pics:

The only problem is they could hit the FPS quite a bit, but I've not had anyone complain yet

[vometia]

I've been working on my own texture pack lately, texutres are the usual higher res (Good portion are 2048x2048) and more detailed. Mine are more colourful and have more depth on top of the usual stuff.

The only problem is they could hit the FPS quite a bit, but I've not had anyone complain yet

I rather like the look of them! I'd quite like to give them a try; as I say, my main concern is really memory consumption rather than fps drop, but I'm not sure anything can gobble up quite as much memory as QTP3.

I also like the way that they seem to reduce tiling somewhat, especially the snow one. I'm not sure if that was by intent or by accident, but it's certainly welcome!

[InsanitySorrow]

All that was done on purpose, tried to make them as seamless as the game would allow , I'll PM the link to the WIPz files.

[vometia]

It's been a few days since I've been having a few crises at home (everyone needs a good crisis now and again) (actually they don't) but I've tried out the new textures now. I have to say, I'm very impressed: whether it's the nice new snow, the Morrowind-esque roads (or something from one of the Better Looking kits) or the new, hairier roof on the Wawnet Inn, I love the way it looks! Always nice to have an extra bit of colouration, too.

Nothing too bad to report performance-wise, except a slight increase of stuttering, but considering that's just what Oblivion does... I may eventually need to bite the bullet and get an SSD drive for my most demanding games since there's no other way round it. There were a few slight seams on the snowier textures, but a minor quibble in the grand scheme of things. Overall, I love it! Almost certainly a keeper.

Stability has been affected slightly: again, not because of your work, but because of how wobbly Oblivion is. I've periodically looked at its memory usage in Process Manager (and figure it'd be easier to do that in windowed mode... oh well) and can see that as it heads towards 2GB of memory usage, a CTD is about to happen. I've turned on Streamline's purge-on-travel feature to see if that helps things out, though I seem to recall it can sometimes interfere with AI, in that NPCs can forget what they were doing (such as chasing you with a thought to relieve you of your spleen) so we'll see; if not, I'll just have to remember to do it myself.

Apart from that, very little productive work. Decided to spend the afternoon adapting Comit's Backpacks to include the subsequent Shivering Isles quivers, and then decided to do all the new FCOM ones while I was at it. Good way of getting RSI.

[InsanitySorrow]

Glad you liked them.

Tried to fix the seams many times but only managed to reduce it to what it is now, seems like it's a problem with the way beth has textured the area.

[vometia]

Well it's not like it's a major problem and I've seen similar things elsewhere (such as New Vegas) so I guess it's one of those Bethesda "features" we've come to know and love. I think my favourite bit has to be the thatch, though: dunno why, I just like cottages that look as if they need a haircut.

And I'm glad my cutting-and-pasting of those backpacks is now completed. Some things end up taking much longer than you intend...

[vometia]

Another question I have to ask is if I'm really making things a bit difficult for myself...

Finally completed the Survival Suite HTS integration, which was entertaining: ended up adding the numerous ingredients from OOO, MMM, COBL, Better Cities and Elseweyr Anequina by hand. I was feeling rather smug thinking that was most of it until I realised the wells needed looking at, and finding that so did the pathgrids, cells and other gubbins that conflicted with Better Cities, Unique Landscapes and my own dribbling. Bet I've missed something. Several somethings... At least the COBL-ised wells were easy enough to integrate since I could just override the script with Survival Suite's.

Then I realised it nuked See You Spleep, though fortunately the scripts in question only needed one line changing, and it alerted me to lots of new beds I wouldn't have known about otherwise. Though I bet there are others lurking in the depths of Better Cities and Anequina that need looking at: hmm, did I say "completed"...?

Still, even though this contributes nothing to my own modding work, at least the one thing (or rather its absence) that has been a key part of putting me off replaying Oblivion for years is now fixed!

[vometia]

Actually, I do have another question, before this turns into my personal blog of "stuff I'm doing in Oblivion"!

A while back I wrote a program to create a plugin based on a list of character names, its purpose being to flip their essential flag on: this was something that'd been bothering me for a while, and when I arrived at the Kvatch camp to find only two surviving NPCs (there should be around 10) I decided that something must be done. So along comes my program which I can merge using Bash.

Problem is, the essential flag won't stay on. As far as I can see, there's no script or quest turning it off again (unless it's some random scriptlet hidden in the likes of a piece of dialogue that works on the current reference) so it may just be another of Oblivion's esoteric bugs, but does anyone have any ideas? I have a feeling that it may have something to do with the way Oblivion saves stuff (though I can no longer remember why I thought that) so I may be out of luck other than using the respawn flag too, assuming that isn't also unset.

Oh, and I did finally remove those stray nails from the Chorrol house interior! Sigh...

[Khettienna]

Oh, and I did finally remove those stray nails from the Chorrol house interior! Sigh...

But now you'll have no regrets!

[vometia]

Oh, I can find plenty of things to regret! Mostly making them too complicated.

Another thing that's causing me a headache: anybody know how to get rid of "not so distant" LOD? I figured I'd give Valenwood Improved a try, but I can't get rid of these awful, sludgy "spectral mountains" where the revamped landscape presumably dips beneath what was there originally, and no amount of playing with TES4LODgen or fiddling with the contents of my LandscapeLOD folder will get rid of them. Anyone...?

[vometia]

Landscape problem fixed in this rather well-timed thread. Huzzah!

[vometia]

Figured I'd add Valenwood to Yian's map featuring Elsweyr. I've redone the coastline and stuff but as well as being incomplete it's probably full of mistakes. I was about to say I'd be a useless cartographer but on second thoughts I think they were the most important features of historic maps!

For the curious, here's a picture of the picture, or something...

[vometia]

I may release my map, if nothing else to try to stop myself from tinkering with it constantly! It's been fun, though. Just waiting for the word from Thacadian, Yian and Esmerelde, though I've just realised yet again that I haven't checked their readmes to see if derivative work needs no permission. Still, it's polite to ask anyway.

They're quite tricky to do; in the end I grabbed the dds files from the landscapelod/generated folder and used them as overlays to trace stuff onto the map, but it's incredibly hard to see where stuff like roads are, and lakes, towns and so on are impossible: to begin with I pretty much guessed going by the very vague contours of the dds files, but later on opened up Construction Set to at least get an idea of how they should look. Though I used a pretty lazy freehand approximation of how the towns might look regardless! Their outlines as well as the roads should be pretty accurate though, which is the important thing. One of the roads is off by a few units because I positioned the dds overlay incorrectly; I can't face re-doing it though, and most people probably won't notice anyway. So much for perfectionism!

The border was another thing that perplexed me. In the end I also hand-drew it according to a vintage map of Tamriel, but I guess as long as it doesn't place any cities in the wrong province, it shouldn't be too much of a problem; at least until some irate Khajiit visits in person...

[vometia]

Hmm, still waiting for the word from Thacadian and Yian to go ahead with a release, which is frustrating. Anyone know how to get hold of them? Unfortunately, neither says it's okay to submit derivative works (even though Yian's is based on Thacadian's). Or perhaps there's a similar map to Thacadian's that I can graft mine on to... that won't be the coloured "elven" map though, the style is too different and I wouldn't know how to match it even if I wanted to.

[Citrus]

Going on a slight tangent here but this is quite a big thread/monologue you have. I don't mean this the wrong way. It's amusing to know about all the mods you have made and are still working on, almost all unreleased. I think it is time for a compilation...

How long have you been waiting for an answer? I'd consider 15 days (unless stated otherwise) to be a reasonable time to wait for an answer. If it doesn't come, go ahead and give them proper credit. I believe most people that specify any time limits on their readmes always mention 15 days. That's what I've seen more frequently, at least, though most people just ask to be contacted, that's all.

Besides Thacadian's map, I can point you towards p1p3's Color map mod. There's a Shivering isles counterpart if it interests you. Besides this one, there's the Colour Terrain map by Xessive. Or, if you fancy wrinkled maps, this one might do too.

I haven't tried any of these (besides the SI one) so I'm suggesting based on the images on the mods' page. Keep in mind none of these has Elsweyr mapped.

[vometia]

Maybe I should get the title changed to "Vometia's random rambling thread".

Yeah, I'm terrible at releasing mods; partly lack of confidence, partly lack of organisation, but it would be nice to at least release something back to the community. I guess I think a lot of them are quite trivial, but I've seen far more trivial things released by others; some of which I've actually found extremely useful, or at least "nice to have"!

I haven't waited long, it's actually just been a couple of days, so I guess some patience would be good! I may check out the alternatives if I don't hear within a couple of weeks; I could even attempt my own recolouring though I don't really have a lot of aptitude for it: my effort has mostly been about tracing the pathways and stuff (and going back to ensure I didn't just trace a river by mistake, which I've done two or three times!) I may already have that Shivering Isles map, but I'll check it against the one I'm using to see which I like best.

[InsanitySorrow]

Maybe I should get the title changed to "Vometia's random rambling thread".

We can do that for you

[vometia]

We can do that for you

Probably a good idea: it's moved way beyond my original questions, and is a handy place to contain my pondering and pontification!

[vometia]

Ugh. More OBMM problems: this time it's managed to corrupt its own database and can't be persuaded to start, no matter what. I suppose I should really accelerate moving stuff across to BAIN; OBMM is a complete menace.

I decided it would be a good idea to do a full backup of my Oblivion directory before it arbitrarily deletes other stuff. Oh yeah, I read the documentation about it deleting people's WIP files if they're part of an OMOD: I thought the "deal with it" approach was a nice touch...

[AndalayBay]

BAIN has a bit of a learning curve (well actually it's Wrye Bash more than BAIN), but once you've made the switch, you won't look back.

[vometia]

BAIN has a bit of a learning curve (well actually it's Wrye Bash more than BAIN), but once you've made the switch, you won't look back.

Yeah, I'm already starting to appreciate it. Rather than trying to figure out what I'd installed through OBMM all over again, I figured I'd start transferring stuff over to BAIN since if I'm going to have to go through all the rigmarole again, I'd rather take some steps to stop history repeating itself for the nth time. So far I'm impressed: it's far easier (and quicker) to get the packages in sync with what I have installed, so I don't have to choose the exact same archives (there is a risk I may miss some installation files, though it seems to have a facility to go through orphaned files that I'll look into later) and it also seems to be modder-safe in a way that OBMM really isn't!

What could be a headache is when I come to look at fairly complex mods like MMM where I spent an entire day writing an OBMM script to handle its installation; I guess I'll need to look at these "wizards" files to see how they can help me.

But, though it's somewhat less friendly than OBMM on the face of it, it works much better. I guess in the same way that Windows seems much friendlier than Unix, but I'd much rather use the latter...

It might be a long process, though: I haven't even finished the Cs yet, so there's the rest of the alphabet to go...