The Mods, Part 1: Performance

Thought I'd make a brief note about some of the mods I'm using. Oblivion is one of those games that, while excellent on its own, can be tremendously improved with community mods. First, I'll cover those mods I use to increase performance.

I run Oblivion on a laptop. That means onboard graphics, which are notoriously sucky for playing games. Even on my machine, Oblivion is playable without mods. Careful tweaking and experimentation allowed me to keep my game running smoothly. If you want to tweak your Oblivion install, I suggest checking out Tweak Guides. Koroush Ghazi goes into great detail not only on how different settings affect your performance but also on the technical aspects of the settings. Dunno what anisotropic filtering is and why you might or might not want to turn it on? He explains it thoroughly. I highly recommend running through this guide and seeing how you can increase performance before you install any mods.

Here's the list of performance-increasing mods I use:

1. Oblivion Script Optimization: Each second, hundreds and even thousands of scripts run per second. For the most part this goes smoothly. However, Bethesda has been rather lax in its code optimization, which means busy areas with lots of scripts can run slower (we're talking lag here, not FPS) and that your load times can increase. This mod improves the efficiency of scripts throughout the game.


2. Unofficial Oblivion Patch: Fixes all the bugs that should have been fixed in Oblivion's patches. Currently, that's over 1800 bugs and 70,000 object placement errors. Probably won't increase your performance terribly, but will stop lots of annoyingness.


3. Unofficial Shivering Isles Patch: As above, but for the Shivering Isles expansion. If you don't have the expansion, you don't need this. If you do, you do.


4. Unofficial Official Mods Patch: As above for Bethesda's official mods. I have Knights of the Nine, which was included in the Game of the Year Edition, so I use this. If you don't have any of these, don't bother. If you do, do.


5. Operation Optimization: Optimizes meshes throughout the game with no loss in visual quality. It takes out unnecessary polygons that you never see, meaning things run faster with no difference in how the look.


6. Operation PolyGone Overhaul: Decreases the number of polygons in many objects around Cyrodiil. Note that this, unlike the above mod, does have a noticeable reduction in quality. However, it's not excessive. The goal is simply to correct Bethesda's "overly generous" use of polygons.


7. Optimized Distant Land MAX: Two mods in one. The first reduces the number of polygons in the distant land (distant land is what gives the scenic vistas in so many of my screenshots; distant land reduces my framerate, but it's just soo pretty :) ). After all, why do they need to be high-poly if they're so far off? The second mod reduces the texture sizes in distant land, since you don't really need 1024x1024 textures for distant objects.


8. Low-Poly Grass: Grass is one of the biggest performance eaters in the game. Without this mod, turning grass on ate about 10fps. Now, it eats only 1-2fps. Highly recommended.


9. Wiseman's Reduced Textures: Absolutely essential. This mod provides the largest performance increase of any mod I've found. It essentially uses medium quality textures in place of many large textures, letting you run the game with a large texture pack with the performance of the medium one. For example, a large wall needs a large texture. But a ring or a shirt doesn't. There's a slight drop in visual quality, but the only place it's stood out so far is in the Burgundy Shirt (see the screenie of Gogan in my last entry). If you use this, be sure to grab parts two and three.


10. Streamline: I no longer use this, as it introduced some problems for me. If you're still hurting for FPS, though, you might consider it. Essentially, Streamline optimizes your graphical settings as you play in order to achieve what you've told it is a good framerate. It's especially handy in combat, where it reduces your graphics to keep your FPS solid during the battle. I found that using its fog settings turned the sky black, and after uninstalling it, things didn't return to normal (I had to reinstall Oblivion to fix it). Also, it kept setting Actor Fade (which says how close creatures need to be to you before you see them) so close that I couldn't see enemies until they were right on top of me. Some folks swear by it, though, so try it out and see how it works for you. Requires the Oblivion Script Extender.

There's plenty of other performance increasing mods out there, but these are the ones I've tried and swear by.

Happy gaming!

Noooo!

So, I've gotten about 25 days into my non-adventure, have gotten a quaint little farmhouse, accidentally fought (and killed) liches, minotaurs, trolls, and atronachs, amassed a sum of 15,000 gp from hunting and alchemy, and so decide I might as well come make a post about it.

And... I come to find I'm missing screenshots. About 200 of them covering the next five or six days of Sharlassa's life. Which are pretty important.

Yeah.

So, what to do now? Well, I've been using the screenshots to remind me exactly what's been going on in the story, and without them it's hard for me to remember how I got to the point I am when the screenshots next appear. So I can't really paraphrase and pick back up later. On the other hand, I don't want to go back to 23 days earlier so I can pick things back up. I think the only thing I can really do now is to call it quits.

I hate to do that, but I don't have much of an option here. I may decide to roll up a new character and get underway, but I want to fix things up so it's not just more of the same, so there's a real character being fleshed out in the game.

I'll let you know what I'll do soon enough.

EDIT: Well, I was going to pick the blog back up with the other character I mentioned, but among the screenshots I lost were all but two of her first two days in Cyrodiil. Argh * 2.

Instead, I've chosen to go back and pick Sharlassa up from where the blog left off with her. I save my game quite frequently in case of crashes, and I have saves reaching all the way back to Day 1. I wasn't excited about trying to redo things to get to where I was. While I encountered quite a bit of excitement, I didn't want to have to relive all those days and try to get them right.

But Oblivion is a game that's never the same twice. I couldn't bring the game to where I was even if I tried. So why not try to do things different and watch how things play out? So I'll be loading the old save and picking things back up from Day 3. Hopefully an update will come tonight.