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zuluhour
Village Dweller
Joined: 22 Apr 2006
Posts: 2
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| Question about Rendelius oblivions mods |
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This message will introduce you to a point of confusion I am having regarding Oblivion\Data\Textures type of mods. Then the message has a more specific question about the Jarrod textures mod.
I am following the suggested mods of Oblivion Rendelius, his article can be found here:
http://www.rpgdot.com/index.php?hsaction=10053&ID=1218
Rendelius mentions three (3) mods before he mentions the Jarrod texture mod. Each of these 3 mods unzip to make a lot of .dds files, all of which are to be placed into the folder: "Oblivion\Data\textures\landscapelod\generated" folder.
Now I am familiar with addings mods to a game, so I thought to myself, "Ok. No problem."
But I had a surprise -- There is no Texture folder in the stock game installation folder!
In other words, I found this: Oblivion\Data
... but there was no Oblivion\Data\Textures
This was a surprise, because I thought surely I was making replacement files in an already existing Oblivion\Data\Textures folder. But there was no such folder. So I definitely was not replacing any files, only adding files in a new folder.
Well, I went ahead and added the folder structure anyway, I figured it could not hurt.
Question A: But it left me wondering how does Oblivion know to use files in a new folder????
So at the moment, I now have: "Oblivion\Data\textures\landscapelod\generated" folder.
Then I came to the fourth Rendelius mod, which is Jarrod texture.
The readme for Jarrod seemed to give me a clue for the answer to my question. The readme tells the user to add a file called archiveinvalidation.txt to the base Oblivion installation folder.
The path for Jarrod textures is slightly different, it is textures\landscape\ .
This file archiveinvalidation.txt has only the text "textures\landscape\s" on one line, but it seems this might answer my question above.
Question B: Should not these other (3) mods also have some sort of archiveinvalidation.txt text line also???
I very much appreciate any help. Right now, I have these 4 mods "installed" but I am not really sure Oblivion knows how to "reach" them. The discovery that there is no stock Texture sub-folder has me confused.
THANKS! |
Sat Apr 22, 2006 12:30 am |
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Dhruin
Stranger In A Strange Land
Joined: 20 May 2002
Posts: 1825
Location: Sydney, Australia |
I haven't installed the same mods as Rend but there is indeed no default \data\textures folder, so I wouldn't worry about it - just do what the readme says. I like Natural Environments (incompatible with some of Rend's recommendations) and that created a textures folder. I assume either OB looks for that folder or it is referenced by the ESP...but it doesn't really matter because either way it works.
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Editor @ RPGDot |
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Sat Apr 22, 2006 12:51 am |
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zuluhour
Village Dweller
Joined: 22 Apr 2006
Posts: 2
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quote:
Originally posted by Dhruin
... there is indeed no default \data\textures folder, so I wouldn't worry about it - just do what the readme says ... I assume either OB looks for that folder or it is referenced by the ESP...but it doesn't really matter because either way it works.
Ok, thanks very much for the quick reply! |
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Sat Apr 22, 2006 12:57 am |
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vois2
Village Dweller
Joined: 16 Apr 2006
Posts: 12
Location: St. Louis |
With apologies for making three simultaneous posts, I am placing here a review-of-sorts regarding my experience in using the Rendelius mod package recommendations, below.
I'm also providing a quick list of hyperlinks for most of the mods mentioned by Rendelius.
All credit goes to Rendelius for putting all this together!
NOTE TO RPGDot Admin: It would cool if on the web page for Rendelius: Oblivion Review and on the web pages for Rendelius: Optimising Oblivion, a link to this forum thread could be provided. I found info posted by other members in this thread above to be very useful. People coming in to read Rendelius' work may not be aware of the forums. With a click-to link to this forum thread, it would tie the community experience together. THANKS!
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firefighter@graffiti.net |
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Sat Apr 22, 2006 1:12 pm |
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vois2
Village Dweller
Joined: 16 Apr 2006
Posts: 12
Location: St. Louis |
| Using Rendelius: Optimising Oblivion |
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.
.
-----------------------------------------------------------
MY EXPERIENCE WITH RENDELIUS MODS (a good experience!)
----------------------------------------------------------
I think the 'Optimising Oblivion' article series from Rendelius is going to be pretty popular as more people learn about his work. The author hasn't "thrown us to the wolves" as other mod package recommendation/reviewers have done in the past. So I thought I would describe a bit of my experience in using his Optimising Oblivion Part 1 guide. This is simply to share with other Oblivion newbies like myself. Before this, I hadn't tweaked anything on Oblivion except for a couple of minor .ini tweaks, and I was not at all familiar with the March/April 2006 mod packages and procedures as they developed in the
community.
First, let me tell you right now that the recommendations of Rendelius have both improved my game speed (FPS) and made the game MUCH more beautiful and user-friendly. Rendelius doesn't classify any of the Part 1 mods/tweaks as 'gameplay' mods but effectively many of them are (in my opinion). This is because you can do so much more with the improved interfaces: life simply becomes easier for you in the Oblivion world. I was excited when I first became aware of Renedelius' initial review of Oblivion, because I could see that this man was going to save me possibly hundreds of hours of experimentation. And he does so, below.
In addition, the mods described here can change your tactics, too. As an example, have you ever been in a cave? (in the real world). Generally, in the
complete absence of light, most guys I know cannot see 10 meters distance in a cave. In fact, I can't see 10 centimeters in a cave with no light source. So a mod such as 'Darker Dungeons' (and Caves) forces you to ensure that you have enough artifical or magical sources of light available to you. This brings about a change in your use of Magicka and thus changes your gameplay.
I can say that all the changes brought upon by the Rendelius mod package are "good" changes. There are a few tiny suggestions I can add based on my
experience, but of course your mileage may vary.
Ok, enough of the blabber. My system is a Pentium-4 3.0 with HyperThreading, 3072MB of DDR2 RAM, and a PCI-Express 6800 GS. (No overclocking on any component for me.) I was actually very happy (before mods) with the performance of Oblivion as far as game speed, loading times, and beauty are concerned. Now, thanks to Rendelius, everything is enhanced and even better and more beautiful, thanks to Rendelius' guide.
One quick comment: I read through his guide a few times before ever sitting down to my gaming computer. In doing so I discovered that it seemed to be a good idea to have VSync turned OFF. If you are following his guide, you may want to do that now. You can do so on the very first small splash panel Oblivion offers to you, in the 'Options' menu.
He carefully describes a way to find a 'hot spot' for your "most poor performance" and use this spot as a baseline to see what improvements to FPS can be made. I found that to be a perfect benchmarking method. What you get as a low FPS using the manner he described will be your low FPS for any location, anywhere. I tested this by walking all over Cyrodiil, so trust me, he found the best place to do this FPS benchmarking. When you do find that hot spot, 'look up' just slightly into a swaying tree, and you probably will get your lowest FPS.
I should mention that all of my testing was done in high winds and heavy rain. This just happened to be unlucky, it rained for a couple of game days while I was testing. However this might have been a good thing as far as stress on the graphics card is concerned. Perhaps on a calm, sunny day, my FPS mentioned below would have been slightly higher. (Maybe?)
The .ini grass tweak he describes seems to be the biggest mover on the FPS front (as he mentions). For all changes to the oblivion.ini file, I chose to use
a very convenient freeware program called Tweaper for Oblivion. This program allows me, for instance, to make the grass tweak Rendelius described with just
the click of a button. There are about 35 such .ini changes you can make using Tweaper for Oblivion, with no need to load up a text editor and dig through the .ini file itself. Any change is immediately reverseable, and you can switch back to your original .ini configuration easily as well. Again, this is freeware.
The grass tweak brought me from 13 FPS to 16 FPS. On my machine, the coolbits driver application didn't happen to result in any FPS increase. This was OK, since I had been wanting forever to put coolbits on my machine anyway. Now I have it.
I did not mess with any other Oblivion graphics options (moving sliders, etc), since I was up to 16 FPS now. However, using Tweaper again, I did click to
turn on a few CPU- and Memory-related ini tweaks, and to this I give credit for getting me up further to 17 FPS.
At this point, I could now have played with many more sliders in the Oblivion Options --> Video menu. But since Rendelius was happy with a low of 18 FPS on his machine (better machine than mine), then I decided I would be very happy with my 17 FPS. So I turned now to implementing the mods.
As you delve into the suggested mod structure (Part 1) from Rendelius, you can see these mods have been carefully selected so as to complement each other in the 'big picture' sense, and they also do not interfere with each other in the file/folder sense. He was sensible to refer users to the readme.txt file for each mod. Unfortunately, some of the readme.txt files for the mods he links to are not quite as good or descriptive as his article. So I'll mention a few things which I ran into.
Keep in mind I had not previously modded one thing on Oblivion, so it was all new to me. As mentioned by someone in the original NewsComments forum thread,
I immediately ran into the issue of being asked to place mod files into a subfolder structure which does not exist on the stock game. Experienced Oblivion modders probably know that this isn't a problem, but for the new modder in this case it leaves you scratching your head a bit. It turns out fine, you just need to add some subfolder structures which literally aren't there in the stock game. So with regard to the first three LOD mods, you will end up adding a new layer of subfolders:
Oblivion\Data\Textures (The Textures folder is the item you are literally adding.)
If you follow through on ALL of Rendelius mod suggestions you will eventually also have:
Oblivion\Data\Textures\DarkUI
Oblivion\Data\Textures\landscape
Oblivion\Data\Textures\landscapeLOD
Oblivion\Data\Textures\menus
as well as a Oblivion\Data\menus (note difference from the line immediately above)
And each of those have their own subfolder structure, and so on ...
One note on the water mods. I found that with the suggested Better Imperfect Water mod *AND* all five of the ini [water] tweaks suggested, there was a strange purple and/or light blue haze on the surface of the water day or night. This was on my machine, but as I learned more I came to believe it would occur to many others. So, I made one change and one change only (I got lucky) and found that I could make this purple haze go away. That one change is to make the line bUseWaterReflections=0. (Rendelius suggests setting the value to 1.) So there is one minor "mileage may vary" difference.
I continued to follow through with the suggestions of Rendelius, but I should note that I chose not to implement a few mods. The mods which I did not
implement (nor experiment with) are listed in his review as: the Burning Kvatch part of Darker Nights (Note: Darker Nights however is great!) ; Colored Map ; XLM MegaMod German (fonts for you) ; HUD ; and, Info Menu. Leaving these five smaller components out was simply a matter of choice.
Also, with Tweaper, you can implement a tweak concerning how far away the zoom is increased when you talk to an NPC. This way, when you stop to speak to a character, you don't have to look at the pimples on their nose. They are a bit farther away which is appreciated.
Finally, one note about DarkUI. It includes, and it uses, a modular type of install called BTMod. I didn't mess with BTMod at all, but it appears you can
use it for much more personalization of the in-game HUD (heads up display). I may fiddle with BTMod eventually.
As mentioned above, these mods are VAST improvements to the game for the PC player. Thanks so much, Rendelius, for taking the time to share this process.
Although I took my time, anyone capable with Windows will be able to implement these mods in three hours or less. This may sound daunting, but it is oh so worth it.
The next installment from Rendelius should include gameplay mods, and perhaps like many others, I am not even playing Oblivion until I can implement all of his suggestions in Part 2. I have only played about ten hours (real life) of Oblivion and my character is only level 2. After getting the whole Rendelius package up and running, I plan to start over from the sewers on up -- and I'll have a REAL rpg in which to do it. Hope this helps. vois2
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firefighter@graffiti.net |
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Sat Apr 22, 2006 1:20 pm |
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MCollins
Guest
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Very handy article. I've implemented pretty much everything (and a couple of other tweaks found in other guides) and the game runs and looks great!
One odd thing I noticed. When using the German fonts and turning off the "annoying text messages" instead of getting "Loading Area..." text, I get a little symbol (that I THINK is the oblivion image from the initial loading screen as a little icon, the upside down U with a sphere in it.)
If I put the fonts back to default, then the icon goes away. I'm wondering if there is something that the game does not know how to display, and displays it as that symbol.
Anyone seen this?
-Matthew |
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Sun Apr 23, 2006 11:47 pm |
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MCollins
Guest
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Anyone?  |
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Thu Apr 27, 2006 11:01 pm |
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