A couple of basic questions

[vometia]

Still endlessly tinkering with my map (or rather Thacadian & Yian's map with my rather messy rendition of Eldarie's province!)

I'm quite pleased with the results, although I think it still looks a little bland and untextured compared to the rest of it; I suspect I'm not being very confident with just giving it a good going over with a more textured appearance, though having some vague idea of what I'm doing would help! I also think I've been a bit lazy with my "this looks like a town... drawn in crayon" approach rather than something with fine detail that closely resembles the town in question (though the boundary is at least correct in most cases) but I suspect I'm seeing why I never release anything, which is my ability to endlessly nitpick my own efforts! Here's a close-up of Valenwood, anyway; which is subject to fairly continual change as I modify and re-upload the same image... Oh, and I realise I need to move the border again, though there is a fairly fat chunk of "no-man's land" between Elsweyr and Valenwood anyway that's best left unexplored!

I'm also thinking I should get a move on if I'm going to get in any Oblivion playing time before Skyrim appears! I'm wondering what's holding me back; I think because I want to try out one of the levelling changers like Progress or nGCD or whatever, but I have no idea at all which I'd like best. I would like to rid myself of the standard system with its inclination towards power-levelling or counter-intuitive choices, though...

[InsanitySorrow]

nGCD is problably the way to go there

[vometia]

nGCD it is then! Hopefully it works with Elys' Uncapper, which I kind of liked the sound of too.

The map couldn't escape being molested again, but for a good reason this time: I realised I'd put the Tenmar Forest in the wrong province, which I think is the sort of thing that would be considered a slight gaffe. Which is a result of me caving and actually moving the border, still based on guesswork but at least attempting (vaguely) to follow one of the ancient Arena-dated maps. Still not perfect, I reckon that the river and lakes down by Haven would probably define the border, but apart from the fact that I don't fancy moving it again, I suspect it would look a bit messy and confusing given the map's style. Which sounds like an excuse to leave it alone, though going by my past form, the likelihood of more faffing about with it is significant!

[vometia]

Blimey. Oblivion with FCOM and nGCD is tough: even at level 10 I have only just over 100 HP, and most of my stats are pitiful; I'm getting pwned left, right and centre. I guess the answer is to reach for the difficulty setting, though I can't help feeling that there must be a better solution; as things are, it's crossed the line where it's not really fun.

What else is not really fun is that it crashes so often, most frustratingly just as I was nearing the end of an extraordinarily difficult battle today. Seems that all but one of the crashes (that was some weird AI bug) are down to Oblivion's notoriously bad memory management. I'm sure I read about a crash preventer somewhere that tries to fix the utter mess that Bethesda made of the relevant libraries, but I seem to have mislaid the link...

I'm actually really quite worried about how wobbly Skyrim will be: I think Bethesda take all five positions in the "top five buggiest software I've ever used".

[vometia]

Oh, I just discovered it's possible to modify nGCD's settings to be a bit less meagre with its strength, HP etc. Durrr. Life is now a bit easier!

[Arthmoor]

Best to leave that crash preventer alone. Allowing an app to remain running in an unclean state is usually not a good idea.

I wouldn't worry so much about Skyrim. I think the fact that Bethesda had the last 5 years to really get to know their target platform will mean it turns out for the better. Although I'm sure plenty of us wish their target platform was still the PC.

[vometia]

Best to leave that crash preventer alone. Allowing an app to remain running in an unclean state is usually not a good idea.

Yeah, I'm wondering how much it might be a crash inducer in certain circumstances--by which I'm talking about the OBSE DLL, not some standalone thingy. Which isn't to criticise those who worked on it, but I'm wondering if it may have compatibility issues with things like the Stutter Remover.

I wouldn't worry so much about Skyrim. I think the fact that Bethesda had the last 5 years to really get to know their target platform will mean it turns out for the better. Although I'm sure plenty of us wish their target platform was still the PC.

I am nervous, though: they do have the sort of unblemished track record that's rather unenviable. That said, New Vegas was relatively stable for something coming from that direction (I'm assuming, perhaps erroneously, that the executable itself is still Bethesda's work) in that it crashed less often than anything else of theirs I've played and it didn't have FO3's nasty habit of corrupting savegames. Hopefully they'll continue going in the same direction with Skyrim.

If only they'd given it a better name. Still, I guess there's a few iffy lore decisions made at the time of Arena since they couldn't reasonably be that forward-looking...

[Arthmoor]

It's probably a miracle of epic proportions that NV works at all. Obsidian did all the work on that and they're about the only company I know of with an even worse track record for producing bugware than Bethesda. I've even been given to understand that their patches have only made things worse, not better. At least with Bethesda's own stuff the patches move toward actually fixing things. Unless you're Fallout 3 and the NPC skin color bug of course.

[vometia]

It's probably a miracle of epic proportions that NV works at all. Obsidian did all the work on that and they're about the only company I know of with an even worse track record for producing bugware than Bethesda. I've even been given to understand that their patches have only made things worse, not better. At least with Bethesda's own stuff the patches move toward actually fixing things. Unless you're Fallout 3 and the NPC skin color bug of course.

I have heard Obsidian's reputation and it's not good: certainly the quest construction was... well, let's say it could have been better. The executable itself seemed wonderful compared to FO3, however: though it's not everyone's experience, I found it ran much more smoothly (I mean much more, not just a bit), crashed less often, and not having to spend hours trying to debug corrupted saves was also most welcome.

I didn't know about the skin colour bug and just put it down to a random weirdy; I've noticed problems going back to Oblivion where the head and body skin colours don't match in the slightest, though. I guess that's what happens when two entirely different rendering mechanisms are hastily cobbled together with apparently no effort made to make them work seamlessly. Er, that pun was unintentional, in my defence...

[vometia]

Ugh, tinkering with the crash preventer and stutter avoider thing haven't really helped; I've timed it and it crashes on average every eight minutes of gameplay, though that includes things like reloads which are pretty much guaranteed to make it CTD within a minute.

Even after all this time, I'm still appalled at Bethesda's shoddy software; I don't think I've used anything else that comes close to being so badly written. Artistically I love the game, but technologically it's absolutely atrocious.

[vometia]

Hmm, looks like I've been making some age-old transgressions regarding the crashiness: I think I was always sceptical about autosave crashing, but I'm pretty sure that's what's been happening in a large %age of cases; and, sadly, the same seems to be true of Streamline's "streamsave": the Bravil Barrowfields crash I've often mentioned I've now long suspected to be caused by a streamsave that occurs once I'm a sufficient distance from the critters at the nearby Ayleid ruin. Bit of a bugger trying to work that one out: streamsave is invaluable when it works, speaking as someone who's often lost an hour's worth of adventuring due to no autosave point and forgetting to quicksave, but it's less cunning if it crashes the game itself.

The other one is the "don't alt-tab" rule; in fact this is mandatory with OBGE since you can't resume your game if you do so, which is why I disabled it. Sadly, following my recent health fiasco, I'm not allowed to take anything for my problem with a lack of attention so I often want to be elsewhere, obviously coming back to a more unstable game. I guess this is another reason to get my Linux desktop up and running again so I actually switch computer rather than putting Oblivion into the background, but the entire computer having a crashing bug (well, random power-off) means I gave up on it two years ago!

Sigh... and when I'm playing, I still find myself absent-mindedly thinking "well at least there'll be a new patch that'll fix this stuff" before I remember what I'm dealing with...

[vometia]

I've had to take my map pictures down; some Japanese gaming site helpfully deep-linked to them causing thousands and thousands of hits, which will likely exceed my monthly bandwidth quota: on a day-by-day basis, they're using up at least twice my allowance. Unfortunately reference-blocking only caught about 20% of them.

I wish people wouldn't do this: it's well known to be extremely bad netiquette, and can force smaller sites (like mine) offline.

Edit: replaced it with a much smaller version instead so they don't just go looking for something else. I'm pretty peeved about this, to put it mildly.

Edited November 29, 2011 by vometia