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Post by sleepygirl on Jun 21, 2019 2:23:37 GMT
Ooooooo nice. Thank you very much for those links. I like wildness transforming mods since my characters like to explore and not just follow the roads. Certainly the Leyawiin/Black Marsh region is an area that I've severely under explored during my hours of playing Oblivion so your mod should prove to be a good incentive to change my habits.
The only landscape modding I've done is for the Trainz railway simulator and certainly things in Oblivion like the speedtrees and the ground texture patches look familiar.
From what you've said it seems that removing the Oblivion gates isn't as straightforward as I hoped, so keeping their numbers down is at least better than nothing.
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Post by dogonporch on Jun 21, 2019 7:25:45 GMT
Ooooooo nice. Thank you very much for those links. I like wildness transforming mods since my characters like to explore and not just follow the roads. Certainly the Leyawiin/Black Marsh region is an area that I've severely under explored during my hours of playing Oblivion so your mod should prove to be a good incentive to change my habits. The only landscape modding I've done is for the Trainz railway simulator and certainly things in Oblivion like the speedtrees and the ground texture patches look familiar. From what you've said it seems that removing the Oblivion gates isn't as straightforward as I hoped, so keeping their numbers down is at least better than nothing. Typical terrain in Black Marsh...it was all rock/no texture before.
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Post by jgf on Jun 21, 2019 7:33:54 GMT
Gates are always there...just disabled. If you look at them in the CS, there is usually a bunch of large rocks covering the site that are disabled in-game to reveal a standing gate. The reason for the rocks is to cover Oblivion terrain that can't just be simply disabled.... Well, I still think the mod I want is not only possible but feasible; but only for people like me who do not want respawning gates (if the gate is going to respawn why bother "cleaning up" the landscape). From what I've seen and read of the game, this seems to be the process for one gate: 1 - gate exists but is covered, let's say by one large boulder 2 - when the game decides this gate should "appear", a script removes the boulder and spawns a handful of daedra nearby 3 - PC kills daedra, approaches gate, portal activates and places PC in Oblivion plane 4 - eventually PC takes sigil stone, which activates a script placing him/her back in Cyrodiil near the gate, which has simultaneously been replaced by a ruined gate with smoke effects and no portal5 - at some point the gate respawns via a script which replaces the ruined model and smoke with the normal model and portal I see two ways of accomplishing what I want: 1 - replace step five with a script that removes the smoke effects and replaces the original boulder (landscape is returned to original appearance and gate never respawns) or 2 - at step four, instead of replacing the gate with the demolished one just replace the boulder (PC returns from Obilivion to find landscape back to normal) I do not know if either option could be done with one script being fed the coordinates of each gate in turn, or if it would require a dedicated script for each gate; but since I'm only interested in having the minimum gates anyway it probably wouldn't make much difference (but admittedly i know nothing of scripting). If a dedicated script is required and someone wants all the gates to appear but never respawn this could involve quite a bit of repetitive scripting.
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Post by jgf on Jun 21, 2019 7:43:54 GMT
... The only landscape modding I've done is for the Trainz railway simulator .... Wow, I haven't played that in years. Enjoyed running the Cannonball on the Hooterville - Pixley - Crabwell Corners route.
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Post by sleepygirl on Jun 21, 2019 11:44:39 GMT
Ooooooo nice. Thank you very much for those links. I like wildness transforming mods since my characters like to explore and not just follow the roads. Certainly the Leyawiin/Black Marsh region is an area that I've severely under explored during my hours of playing Oblivion so your mod should prove to be a good incentive to change my habits. The only landscape modding I've done is for the Trainz railway simulator and certainly things in Oblivion like the speedtrees and the ground texture patches look familiar. From what you've said it seems that removing the Oblivion gates isn't as straightforward as I hoped, so keeping their numbers down is at least better than nothing. Typical terrain in Black Marsh...it was all rock/no texture before. From what I've seen so far it's all looking very nice indeed with well chosen ground textures and everything looking much better and more finished than the usual run of vanilla texturing in the game world.
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Post by sleepygirl on Jun 21, 2019 11:49:54 GMT
... The only landscape modding I've done is for the Trainz railway simulator .... Wow, I haven't played that in years. Enjoyed running the Cannonball on the Hooterville - Pixley - Crabwell Corners route. Then you wouldn't recognise the TS2019 version of the simulator which is the present version. It has a whole new graphics engine and game engine with lighting and shadow effects and much more highly detailed ground textures and trees.
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Post by dogonporch on Jun 21, 2019 14:30:18 GMT
From what I've seen so far it's all looking very nice indeed with well chosen ground textures and everything looking much better and more finished than the usual run of vanilla texturing in the game world. It uses the Black Marsh terrain pallet so that distant LOD matches. The Hammerfell mod uses a mixture of Gold Coast terrain plus autumn & winter pallets where needed. Be sure to use Land Magic as recommended. It will solve 99.999% of all your terrain patching issues. www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/30519
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Post by ghastley on Jun 21, 2019 16:14:53 GMT
Well, I still think the mod I want is not only possible but feasible; but only for people like me who do not want respawning gates (if the gate is going to respawn why bother "cleaning up" the landscape). From what I've seen and read of the game, this seems to be the process for one gate: 1 - gate exists but is covered, let's say by one large boulder 2 - when the game decides this gate should "appear", a script removes the boulder and spawns a handful of daedra nearby 3 - PC kills daedra, approaches gate, portal activates and places PC in Oblivion plane 4 - eventually PC takes sigil stone, which activates a script placing him/her back in Cyrodiil near the gate, which has simultaneously been replaced by a ruined gate with smoke effects and no portal5 - at some point the gate respawns via a script which replaces the ruined model and smoke with the normal model and portal I see two ways of accomplishing what I want: 1 - replace step five with a script that removes the smoke effects and replaces the original boulder (landscape is returned to original appearance and gate never respawns) or 2 - at step four, instead of replacing the gate with the demolished one just replace the boulder (PC returns from Obilivion to find landscape back to normal) I do not know if either option could be done with one script being fed the coordinates of each gate in turn, or if it would require a dedicated script for each gate; but since I'm only interested in having the minimum gates anyway it probably wouldn't make much difference (but admittedly i know nothing of scripting). If a dedicated script is required and someone wants all the gates to appear but never respawn this could involve quite a bit of repetitive scripting. I don't think any gate re-spawns, ever. There are 100 gates, and they don't spawn unless the player is near, and the concurrent gate count hasn't been exceeded. So your replacement of step 5 actually becomes the creation of a step 5, which could be a bit harder to do. It probably requires that the existing script not be stopped at the end of step 4. I believe all the gates (except maybe the special ones at the cities) use a common script, and all the enable/disable objects are linked to a marker for easy swapping. There would have to be a point at which gates revert, and that could be determined on a per-gate basis, or from a global such as the MQ end. The script on each gate would have to test that, so it needs to keep running after the destruction. Such a variable has to exist to stop the remaining gates from spawning after the MQ ends. It may just be a GetStage check on one of the MQxxx quests. Some gates destroyed structures other than boulders, so you need to decide if that structure should also restore - Wayshrines in a couple of cases, and I think one destroys a house. If there are a few non-reverting instances, that could make the script(s) a bit more complex, but not much. Returning to the original state is also a bit incorrect, in that the gate is not longer waiting to spawn. You've really got a visually identical final state, and so any triggers need to stay disabled etc. And if it were trivial, someone would already have done it. It's likely to be a lot of repetitive work updating 100 gate instances for their individual circumstances.
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Post by jgf on Jun 21, 2019 22:57:34 GMT
I don't think any gate re-spawns, ever. ... Well, I've only played through the main quest a couple of times, a few years ago, and not long enough to notice respawning (I quickly tired of Cyrodiil looking like a WWI battlefield and started a new game). But the mod I referenced states the default is a max of 50 (or 60?) gates active at once from a total of 100 possible; and one of its options is to make all 100 active at once and they respawn, so I assumed this was default behaviour. "This mod allows you to control the scope of the Oblivion Crisis, in terms of how many gates will open. To give a few examples: Difficulty of 0 = No Random Gates, only the 10 scripted gates open Difficulty of 3 = Vanilla Difficulty of 5 = Up to 100 gates will open Difficulty of 9 = Infinite gates, and gates will always reopen soon after you close them." And if it were trivial, someone would already have done it. It's likely to be a lot of repetitive work updating 100 gate instances for their individual circumstances. I daresay with the mod I'm using many many more people are using it to have all 100 gates active and respawning than are using it to have just the minimum number with no respawning. While I deem the Oblivion planes one of the weakest parts of the game, from what I've read they are the favorite for the majority. It may well be quite a repetitive task, but I've seen plenty of mods that must have been equally repetitive (such as one that adds a marker near the entrance to each dungeon you've explored) ...perhaps no one else has desired such a mod. But for what I want it would only entail working with those ten gates required by the main quest; and there is already a mod that removes the first gate, at Kvatch (it rebuilds the town during the first days of the game).
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Post by sleepygirl on Jun 22, 2019 5:29:39 GMT
As I've mentioned before I regard the Oblivion planes as a dangerous crumbling puzzle garden with added pyrotechnics and larva oceans nobody ever wants to take a paddle in. Everything there seems on the brink of being consumed by the larva oceans with plenty of evidence of towers and other structures that are well on the way to being swallowed up. In short it's a Health & Safety inspector's worst nightmare Eiolynn who is my chosen player character for the time being is a sword and shield fighter. She's also a barely passable archer, but makes up for it by using poisoned arrows. As a magic user she barely makes novice level which is deliberate nerfing on my part. On the Oblivion planes she takes great joy in her swordwork and will deliberately tease an opponent into a rash move, dodge them and stab them in the back. This time around she's using a short sword as her primary weapon just to make things a bit more challenging. Before I've always played her with a long sword or else a two handed sword if I really want her to run riot. Even though there are only a limited number of Oblivion plane maps I still enjoy them. As I've mentioned before narcolepsy fogs up my brain so that could well be one of the reasons why I don't mind the repetition so much. At higher levels there seems to be additions to the map to make things more of a challenge and that suits me fine. As to the Oblivion gate mod I've got it set for the basic 10 gates at the moment since I want to move on and do other things after the main quest.
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Post by jgf on Jun 22, 2019 10:15:03 GMT
The concept of the gates per se isn't bad but, like most of Oblivion, the implementation leaves much to be desired. I view them as little "hack-n-slash" fps games tacked on to an incomplete rpg; if there are going to be so many of them the game would be better served by a random generator creating each as it is accessed. But, this is in keeping with the rest of the game, and my major complaint with it - everything is pre-fab; a building is a tavern in one town, a merchant's shop in another, a guild hall in a third, and a private dwelling in a fourth ...but it is exactly the same building in each case; just like the dungeons, snapped together from building blocks in different order, so you enter a room in a cave and immediately notice, "Oh, this one; there's a loot chest over there to the right, and off to the left, behind that boulder, are two sacks and a crate". This negates much of the enjoyment of exploration in games like this. The difference between the Morrowind construction set and the Oblivion construction set is the same as having a box of Legos to play with and having a half dozen pre-made Lego structures to play with.
Perhaps Bethesda gave us so much with Morrowind that I'll never find Oblivion as enjoyable; don't get me wrong, it's a fun game (or I'd have dumped it by now), but like a problem child I see its wasted potential. And I'm not knocking fps games either, one of my favorite genres (System Shock 2, Half-Life 2, Deus Ex, No One Lives Forever 1 and 2, the Thief series...).
"As to the Oblivion gate mod I've got it set for the basic 10 gates at the moment since I want to move on and do other things after the main quest."
Same here; also you don't feel the need to do everything else until "nothing but the main quest left, might as well do it now" (or in my case, "only the main quest left, time to start a new game", lol; my current character is the first time in years I'll pursue the main quest).
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Post by sleepygirl on Jun 22, 2019 14:00:21 GMT
I think Oblivion is better than Skyrim though where everybody looks the same whatever the race they are and they are all surly and grumpy. It's as if fun is totally banned in Skyrim and not being intensely serious enough is a crime. I like the fact that in Oblivion you can build up whatever skills you want whatever your starting class happened to be. In Skyrim skills close off and can't be pursued anymore depending on the direction you take with developing your character. I like having a star sign and being able to build up acrobatics as a proper skill if I want to; - neither of which exist anymore in Skyrim. I've watched my daughter play Skyrim and I actually own a Skyrim disc, but I've never played the game because I just seem to prefer Oblivion much more despite its shortcomings. I loved Morrowind and played it for hundreds of hours, but I find when I try to return to playing it that I get frustrated by its control interface and aging menu system. So it looks like Oblivion will be the game for me for the foreseeable future.
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Post by jgf on Jun 23, 2019 8:41:01 GMT
I'll probably never play Skyrim simply because, as I wrote to Bethesda ages ago, "I loved Morrowind, I like Oblivion, I've looked forward to Skyrim. I will gladly give you $50 for a Skyrim disk I can install and play like the other two games, but i will not give 50 cents for a Steam version".
It seems in the evolution from Morrowind > Oblivion > Skyrim each game had progressively better graphics, better sound, better animations ...and progressively less to actually do. But apparently this is the wave of the future, most younger players do not want long involving games; as one posted in a blog, "I like a game I can play through in 12-15 hours and move on". And impressive graphics seem the major concern now, if you can spread 4k images across three screens it doesn't matter if there's not enough gameplay to entertain a three year old.
Menus? Lol, I actually prefer Morrowind's over Oblivion; in the former a couple of clicks and whatever I want is at hand, in the latter it's an immersion busting search through tabs and scrolling lists attempting to second guess where the game categorized that item or spell. Sadly, when I now return to Morrowind, in spite of how much I loved it, I cannot escape the "been there, done that" feeling; I keep hoping the Morroblivion project will be completed, but data on their site is so conflicting I'm leery of installing anything ("the project is a mess", "it's 99% complete"; "last update 2015", "2018, the quests are 100% functional").
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Post by sleepygirl on Jun 23, 2019 12:26:50 GMT
Yes the short attention span of the youth of today who want instant gratification without having to work for it...... Now when i was a girl....... Did I really say that (lol), but at six and a half decades in age I've seen this world of ours change so much and not always for the better. I left Eiolynn hunting stunted scamps in an Ayleid ruin as a way to improve her not so good archery skills and I guess doing something like that in a game would seem like madness to an 18 year old of today.
There's been more than a few games made with stunning graphics and little or no storyline. I find Oblivion has a good balance with its graphics with just enough left to the imagination to fill in the details. Earlier on I followed Eiolynn as she walked around the Imperial City at night, - she was actually looking for somewhere she could buy some wine (sigh, - yes I know she's drinking again) and I was struck by just how immersive it was to be simply walking through the sleeping city.
Too much of my game time was spent today getting my Steam install to behave; - though to be fair most of the problems was caused by a recent stealth Microsoft update that included two .dlls intended to gather information on what games people are playing. In Win 7 this caused all 8 cores of my monster of a Xeon workstation's CPUs to run at 100% due to the spy software being faulty and trying to call home to a defunct server and putting itself into an endless loop that saturated all 8 cores and sent them on the way to overheating. It proved impossible to disable in the Group Local Policy editor and I ended up having to do surgery in the registry to kill the thing off. Angry gamers all over the internet are getting out the torches and pitchforks since it affected both legacy games and the latest crop of games as well. Gamers running Win 7 seemed to be the worst hit which made more than a few people wonder if Microsoft was attempting to force Win 7 gamers to change to Win 10 instead.
You'd think Microsoft would have learned its lesson as my very tech savvy daughter tells me Microsoft did something the same only recently to try and find out what software people were using and it caused much the same effect with swamping computer CPUs on about 50% of all computers that were running Windoze 10.
I've installed EngineBugFix in my Steam install which has finally stopped it from crashing when quitting the game so at least something good came out of all the computer surgery I had to do today. I'd much rather be running the game from discs and hopefully once the 5th Anniversary Edition of the game I've just purchased arrives I'll be able to do just that.
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Post by jgf on Jun 23, 2019 14:56:54 GMT
Many of the issues with games, particularly non-MS games, in windows since Vista is due to "gameux"; it can slow, or even halt some games loading. We've been discussing this recently at flightsim, with several solutions and workarounds for it - www.flightsim.com/vbfs/showthread.php?311500-FS9-needs-second-startup (I'm the same jgf there, lol). "Now when i was a girl....... Did I really say that..." LOL, there comes a time when we discover we have turned into our parents. I was visiting my best friend about thirty years ago, his two sons were about seven or eight then; and as we talked: "I want you to do me a favor." "Sure, what?" "Go back there in the bedroom, get that shotgun off the rack, and blow my head off." "OK, but at least tell me why." "A couple of days ago my boys were acting up, and I found myself standing right here in my living room, in front of god and country, and coming from my own mouth I heard, 'When I was your age...'." And I must admit I also am guilty of that hoary old phrase; after, when younger and not yet a parent, swearing I would never utter it to my kids. Oblivion does provide good graphics without requiring exorbitant system resources; and with increased resources I would prefer more objects and animations rather than just higher resolutions. One thing I like about TES games is that, with mods, you can actually live and work in the game without merely running from quest to quest. In Morrowind Constance and I went hunting and fishing, tended a garden, sold our surplus to merchants, camped out in the wilderness on long treks; I'm perusing similar mods for Oblivion (I wish there were a mod to make Vilja compatible with eat/drink/sleep mods; if nothing else I imagine the comments she would have on our diet, my cooking, always sleeping in old ruins or out in the woods...).
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