Obscuro's Oblivion Overhaul and other oblivion questions

[mediaboy]

Having just installed OOO1.3 (first time I've used any mods from this line.. never had OOO1) and decided that the full version is alot more fun than the lite version I've been noticing a few things...



1) There's suddenly alot more deadly traps around.

Realistic.. but just plain irritating... does mean I've become a lot more ovservant. However... I step on a trap, my FPS drops from 60-65 to about 40.... which is alright, and certainly still useable. It's just irritating.


2) The Arena kills my computer.

The Arena... possbly the smallest map (excluding houses/shops) in the game. Only partially outside, where all the fighting is done. POOF! Goodbye Framerates. Was fighting my way through the arena... shooting things with the bow you can steal from the Dark Brotherhood during Purification... and my framerates were hovering around 10-15 (as opposed to 60-65, which is normal.) Of course, not all of them were this low... average was probably 20-30. Which is still pretty low. But 20-30 is playable and 10-15 isn't playable when you're trying to shoot stuff... imagine trying to snipe with that framerate


3) So many new armours and forts.

Yay... lots and lots of stuff for me to steal. Look.. a new set of armour. Oh look - a new fort. Oh look - another quest! Another place for me to.... Oh drat... LAG!!!! I presume it's due to processing lots of different armour types all at once, having to process all those graphics must be hard on my HD3650.


Anyway, apart form the lag... I've got a few questions for anyone that actually has this mod:


Is the Dark Eldar/Shadowmail osmething new or have I just always missed it before now? Blood Leather as well... The Dark Brotherhood seems to be full of unique items that I haven't found anywhere else.


Narind. That place. With the Sylvan rangers. My only problem with them is that I can't remember whether or not the very useful Jephre's armour used to be around on the Ranger camps everywhere. I can find about 2 or 3 suits of Jephres armour, then lots and lots of Sylvan armour, but I have no idea who the storyteller is, and next to no idea as to how to hack 'n' slash my way through Narind to get to them. Fixed monster levels be irritating.
So tell me: was Narind always as irritating and was the armour something added in, or just something else that was lying around? And the prerequities might be useful for the armour as well if they were around previously


Can you join the Putrid Hand? I keep on finding forts/Aleid Ruins with entire hordes of necromancers and putrid hand members in. I just can't seem to get them to stop attacking me. Are they all automatically hostile or is it just because my personality is at rock bottom? (it's about 20 at the moment... as lots of items take it away and replace it with strength or speed... )
The idea of doing quests for the Putrid Hand seems amusing to me, and I think it would be fun. I just don't know if it's possible.


What does the message "You don't have the strength to bash open this lock" mean? Is it realated to the type of chest or the difficulty of the lock?


non-OO question: Where are the goblin totem staffs? I've seen refernces to them all over the place ingame, but can't seem to find it. or them. Ingame books be very imprecise.

Maybe a few others as I work my way through the game..

[kalniel]

OOO adds a ton of crap and whenever you load an area all that crap has to be kept track of, so lag. Likewise new monsters, new AI scripts and so on also increase lag. Personally I don't like it and just use francesco's levelled lists for a different feel without adding so much crap.

The goblin staffs.. oh those are fun! There's one for each goblin tribe, and the tribe will pursue them relentlessly.. across the whole world if necessary. You can find them in the base lairs for each tribe usually. It's fun to nab them from two tribes and then swap them over, dumping the wrong one at each lair - they'll constantly spawn in their lairs and try and recover their one, fighting whenever they encounter a goblin from another tribe.

Alternatively dump them in the imperial city and watch the gobbers invade

[mediaboy]

I want to do this... but I can't find the lairs! Whiteskin city doesn't seem to have a totem staff at all

Will find list of cities/tribes and go and grab all 8 of them (There is 8 isn't there?)

Then lets see how good the imperial guard is! Might be useful for dead drops as well

[Zadock]

I used OOO for a while, and after a while it started to irritate me... ended up running for my life a lot of the time even with the difficulty down.

I ended up re-installing Oblivion and going for a series of smaller mods and tweaks, currently using:

Ren's Beauty Pack
Exnems female body (with underwear, it is available naked if you REALLY need it).
Midas Spells: mental mod, not really started using it properly yet. Check out the youtube videos
Attack and hide: allows you to make true stealth kills, i.e. once you attack someone you can hide again your not stuck on being visible until you've killed everyone.


will be adding some others, probably a couple of houses;

Anyone got any nice little tweaks they can recomend?

[kalniel]

I want to do this... but I can't find the lairs! Whiteskin city doesn't seem to have a totem staff at all

Will find list of cities/tribes and go and grab all 8 of them (There is 8 isn't there?)

Think so. I've got the prima guide somewhere so can look it up later if you like. Alternatively the roleplaying solution would be to find a goblin and then follow them stealthily - they should lead you to them

Anyone got any nice little tweaks they can recomend?

There's already a Hexus thread with recommendations I think, and billions more elsewhere I pretty much just have texture/scenery improvements these days, though I have a couple of my own mods as well (custom compass/map icon pop up etc.). If I wanted a levelled critters system I recommend francecsos.

[Zadock]

Are you using Qarls texture re-vamp Kalniel? if so is it any good? I was thinking about downloading it but its well over a Gb!

I forgot to mention that I am also using the BTMOD, nice small tidy inventory I much prefer it.

Is there a mod that re-vamps the faces of all of the human like races? and/or the vampires, it seems that whenever I make a female vampire all the hardwork of making her look remotely feminine in the character creation goes out the window once she gets the disease.

[mediaboy]

I'm on the difficulty between lowest and middle. I can kill most things, but on moderate I get killed fairly often. Need to put it up a stage though. It be getting easier.

I would go without OOO, but I like the new armours
And - of course - the other small adjustments.

Timelags are irritating though. I might just wipe Oblivion off of my HDD and start over and this time actually THINK about what mods I stick on there instead of just choosing all the ones I want to do. I have the Natural Enviroments, and a few others that modify outdoors conflicting with each other, a few birthsign ones amongst them.

I need to restart.

My savefiles are all messed up as well, so I think after I've finished messing around today I'll borrow an internet connection or something


Thanks for the list of mods.. am dling them as I type

[kalniel]

Are you using Qarls texture re-vamp Kalniel? if so is it any good? I was thinking about downloading it but its well over a Gb!

I'm using the quarls redimized one (based on QT3 with reduced normal maps and some optimisation) as I've only got a 256mb graphics card. It's fantastic. Also one of the ones that keeps all forts and so on permenantly drawn in the distance rather than popping up, whose name I can't remember at the moment.
One of the water ones too of course.

Is there a mod that re-vamps the faces of all of the human like races? and/or the vampires, it seems that whenever I make a female vampire all the hardwork of making her look remotely feminine in the character creation goes out the window!

I'm absolutely sure there is.

[mediaboy]

Do you know that if you want to avoid the sun damage things from Vampirism, you should do the purification quest in Dark Brotherhood, and then steal Vicentes supply of blood (look in the chest next to his bed.) Unsure whether or not this is around without OOO though... I never used to steal everything from the DB, as I used to do it as a level 20 or 30 with next to no problems finding decent armour/weapons

Of course, once you've taken his supply of blood, you should probably then dupe them with that lil cheat if you want a constant supply, but it's up to you whether or not you do that, or whether you stick to the traditional methods of getting blood and go and break into a few houses every night.

[Zadock]

You can't feed from bottles in the unmodded game unfortunately...

I may give the texture mod a try; The problem with oblivion is that there are hundreds of similar mods and its difficult to know which ones are the best.

the sewer mansion is quite a good house though I used to use that, its a bit of a cheat though because there are some good items in it e.g. Masters alchemy set

Have you looked at the youtube videos of midas spells mediaboy? theres some really funny ones.

[mediaboy]

I think I may have had that one at some point..

Is that the one with the spell "Fireworks" in?

That's a good spell.. Might a compedium though.

I sometimes wonder how many spells there are out there, in all the assorted modpacks, and then look at my computer specs and realise that running that many mods would probably kill it. Again.

[Zadock]

I've not seen any with fireworks yet...

This one has a shop near the arcane university and to gain the spells you have to "react" different materials together; e.g. gold nugget, lockpick and silver urn. If memory serves that gives you a portable chest, which is really useful! you cast it and then a window pops up as if you've opened a chest and you can stash stuff it in and then re-summon it at anytime = massive hauls if your a thief

The only other spell I've tried so far is the acid arrow; not bad.

There are a lot of "force" type spells like push to... there is one that sends you and your target to anothr dimension to fight one on one... you can some these weird jelly things to. There is also a magic carpet. Do a search for Midas Spells in youtube and you'll see.

[mediaboy]

fighting one on one... and miss out on the fun of being massively outnumbered?

The more targets the easier it is to hit them! Maybe just me thuogh.

The portable chest sounds like fun though.... no more having to trek back to the waterfront everytime I wander into the first room of Narind (Where they all have light armour, but there's about 10 of them, and the armour weighs more than steel )

Magic Carpet.... force type spells sound like fun
Maybe useful in the arena for when I'm blasting everything to pieces with the bow you can find in Teeineva's chest (I think it's there in non-OOO... but not entirely sure.)

Any idea what the "Do you need couriers" topic is for? You get it if you stand around in the Imperial City, but I can't find anyway of actually starting any quest or thing to do with it...

[kalniel]

Any idea what the "Do you need couriers" topic is for? You get it if you stand around in the Imperial City, but I can't find anyway of actually starting any quest or thing to do with it...

At a guess I'd say try poking your head into a local branch of the black horse couriers

[mediaboy]

I did.. and the conversation topic isn't there

[Zadock]

Sometimes you have to find the people who are having the conversation first and then you get the quest activated and can go and talk to them in the courier office.