Building Oblivion

[Xelene]

I forgot how badly this game runs Uninstalled all the visual upgrade mods and it still slows to a crawl in combat.

It shouldn't run so badly unless you have a very old computer, what's your spec? (I had it playable with a lot of visual mods on a dual core laptop with a 3-4 year old mobile gfx card)

 

[Xelene]

bunch of stuff I guess - stability, graphics and a few gameplay fixes, wasn't it an OBSE plugin?

 

[Xelene]

:S

Q9550 running between 2.8 and 3.2, 8gb RAM, 5870 with 2GB onboard.

Pretty much the only thing I can't run maxed out is Metro 2033, but Oblivion stutters to the unplayable levels.

Well there's something else wrong then as it's pretty playable with a c2d 2.0, 8600GT 256 and a 5400rpm hard disk if you don't go too heavily on mods. It drops to 20fps on my desktop which aint that much faster than yours with graphics mods up the wazoo.

 

[Xelene]

delete oblivion.ini and renderinfo.txt

 

[Xelene]

So after playing around with BAIN for a while i've come to the conclusion that neither install method is better than the other, Bash is a lot quicker and on the surface appears more powerful but is let down by some things that just dont quite work how they are supposed to. Some complex mods are OMODs and some are BAINs and it's not really viable to maintain a stable Oblivion mixing and matching them. Le Sigh. So i've gone back to OBMM for package management (but did pick up some good habits on the way, and now understand Bash patches a lot better).

So yet another fresh install (tm)



This is what i've got so far, all the graphical stuff really. It's stable, been fast travelling to try and break the game. Everywhere except the bloody docks runs a steady capped (by OSR) 30fps. Full RAEVWD installed.

Time to install Better Cities and break stability again I guess

Screenshots as I go here:

http://steamcommunity.com/id/sldsmkd/screenshots/

 

[Xelene]

Are all your in game settings maxed out?

Yes, will see how it's going once all the graphics stuff is done and i've hooked up the shaders - then take grass distances & such beyond normal distances and do some more ini tweaking. Going too run a lot of these mods through PyFFI this weekend also, optimise the meshes which should help framerates.

 

[Xelene]

Going too run a lot of these mods through PyFFI this weekend also, optimise the meshes which should help framerates.

Thank god for an i7 & 12GB

 

[Xelene]

The arrow thing looks ridiculous.

I would knock down a lot of the settings mate. Its not your cant run this game. Its just this game is very buggy and never like max settings. Turn down shadows. turn off self shadows, Drop a lot of the sliders down to 50s and your fps will stay nice and high.

The only area I have problems with is the Imperial city, particularly the docks. Steady 30fps (capped by OSR) everywhere else. I'm going to pull the Imperial city out of my better cities install and replace it with the lighter ImpeREAL city. Still need to get OBGE working for Godrays/SSAO/Water etc.

 

[Xelene]

The only area I have problems with is the Imperial city, particularly the docks. Steady 30fps (capped by OSR) everywhere else. I'm going to pull the Imperial city out of my better cities install and replace it with the lighter ImpeREAL city. Still need to get OBGE working for Godrays/SSAO/Water etc.

Note, I was getting slowdowns all over the place before optimising the core Oblivion BSA files with PyFFI - afterwards framerate was much better. Apparently the original meshes were made entirely out of triangle strips whereas it's much more efficient to use meshes. Most of the user generated stuff seems to be a lot better.

I've also tracked down the source of my crashes, a combination of the Waterfront & Anvil Docks areas in conjunction with RAEVWD/Ted4LodGen and QTP3 basically overloads the engine and causes the CTD. (city areas in the world space) - i'd imagine the Open Cities option of Better Cities also makes other areas a bit more prone to problems.

I'll be installing the non Open Cities / non Merged version of Better Cities skipping Anvil and the Waterfront, then manually improve those areas. I'll also use the Redimized + Reduced version of QTP3, and then selectively improve certain areas with other Texture Packs. There's also some LOD files that can be manually deleted from those specific areas that can help with it but i'll see if the other stuff fixes the problems first.

 

[Xelene]

Everything you just said then sldsmkd went completely over my head I'm sure the next time I have a clean install (PC not Oblivion) either from a new pc or formatting this one, I'll give Qarls 1 more try and it'll still not work like it always does ><

Blowing more brain cells While you wait for the rewrite here's some Eye Candy.

 

[Xelene]

Trust me before you do try what i said. I too had the same issues and dropping a number of settings help. The settings you drop will not affect your graphical experience and you will keep open cities.

Don't quote images It's a bug in Better Cities - there's a big thread about it on Tesnexus. Humour me on this

 

[Xelene]

Don't quote images It's a bug in Better Cities - there's a big thread about it on Tesnexus. Humour me on this

Fixed my crash to desktop(s) I hope, I did a bunch of Fast Travels to and from the suspect areas and nothing fell over. There were two specific areas of Better Cities that caused an overload on the Engine which is somehow related to a combination of Better Cities, RAEVWD & QTP3. None of those mods were particularly at fault, it's just the combination.

To fix this I installed QTP3 Redimized, and then a modified version of QTP Reduced for the Redimized version (just the Lite level).

I installed Better Cities, but chose not to use the merged plugins or open cities options. I installed all areas except Anvil and Imperial City Waterfront and corresponding FPS patches.

I then improved Anvil by installing:
Pretty Anvil (city only)
ImpeREAL unique castles for Anvil
** these are the core mods Better Cities is based on, Pretty Anvil (docks) causes the same CTD so i'm running this Vanilla.

I improved the Docks by installing
ImpeREAL city - waterfront
** again this is the core of Better Cities, it's missing a couple of shacks and the Elven boat. I can live with that.

I will next add in the two new lands, and some new areas and test for stability but it's looking much better so far. I have all of the character improvement mods ready to go in, but they never hurt stability then it's just a case of tuning the shaders and adding in some gameplay stuff and it should be done.

I'm getting ~30fps (capped by OSR) everywhere except the Waterfront currently - but even a Vanilla install has terrible framerates there. This is with all sliders maxed (except self shadowing which looks awful).

Gameplay wise i'm going to look at putting in either Oblivion XP or fGCD and bug fix type mods. I may put in Francescos mod also, but undecided on this as it doesn't really fix the level scaling issues I have with the game and unbalances it a lot.

Sadly there isn't an overhaul I like. Maybe i'll go look at Levelled lists and see about making specific kinds of caves support specific level ranges - i.e. a Bandit cave always scaling between level 5 & 15, the Wilderness capping at level 5 or something. Make it more like Morrowind (except for Cliff Racers!) so some places will destroy you if you go in too early, and other places just being trivial if you go in too late. Oscuros does this, but changes far too much in addition.

 

[Xelene]

I agree, tesnexus became so overrun with those crappy mods along with the numerous argonian/khajit sex mods it was intolerable, there should be one site for "proper" players and another site for all the lingerie, and bestiality tat.

I thought that skin was fine, could use some simplification maybe but fairly fitting for a Pirate / Swashbuckler. All that bondage / fan service gear has no place in my game tho.

 

[Xelene]

I think ooo has a submod that allows you to change respawn rate of monsters. Default is 3 game days, I set mine to two weeks. You have over a year if you please but it takes more resources from your pc. Shame this game does not has multicore support, role on skyrim

Installing OOO is clearly going to fix his game

 

[Xelene]

Shaders installed, need another GPU to crossfire...

Funny that as i have better cities and it improved my fps a lot by dropping settings.

What gpu are you running?

It's not the FPS I care about, I never fight in the Docks so who cares? I care about the bloody crash to desktop you get as soon as you have Better Cities, RAEVWD, AWLS & QTP3 installed. Streamline manages the sliders anyway.

flashed 6950 2gb

 

[Xelene]

That second screenshot looks so grey. Frostcrag Spire does look impressive though.

It's just one of the Shaders, can't see me using it for day to day use - but it certainly adds some drama to the scene. I'll not use the Depth of Field either for playing, it gets on my **** but got for screenshots. The thing that's killing my framerate is some new shaders they've put in for lighting, it looks great but my GPU bottlenecks with it - running 100%. Some optimisation work to be done in the new version of OBGE I think.

 

[Xelene]

My goal is to have them gently fade in and it doesn't have a 0.5 second pause as it loads them in.

Any advise would be very very welcome

There's some INI tweaks you can look into, just Google for them. Remember the game is optimised for a 5 year old PC - so you can make some stuff a little more multi threaded and have a larger memory cache internally.

http://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/453122-oblivion-tweaks/

Remember the game is still a 32bit application when calculating memory cache size, i'd be conservative and try:

iPreloadSizeLimit=52428800

 

[Xelene]

Update on 4GB Patch. This is indeed the trick to stabilising Oblivion, the base game will crash whenever more than 1.8GB is used (easy to do with mods). If you have the disk version you are lucky, the patch works fine.

If you have the Steam version the patch will not work. There is a workaround if you own a copy from Steam, but it's borderline against the rules here so I will only say look at OBSE/src/obse/loader_common/EXEChecksum.cpp line 224.

 

[Xelene]

Ok well ive stating a fact that lower sliders help more than you think. i have all the shaders myself along with all the same mods you have and i get a lot more than 12fps.

I get 30 to 35 with an overclocked 470.

Crossfire wont do anything the game doesnt scale well whatsoever as its cpu dependant. You will hardly see any improvement.

I am also running the max QP3 not the redimized.

Don't quote images!

READ WHAT I POSTED. Streamline is managing the sliders, dropping them when framerates go down. Grass distance etc in those shots is probably at 25% because:

I have been trying out the new Volumetric Screenspace Global Illumination Shader, Parallax Occlusion, Water, Global Lightbeam and Sky shaders that came with OBGE3 (which was released less than a week ago). These are VERY heavy on the GPU, taking utilisation from 50% to 100% and bottlenecking frames, they are also done entirely on the GPU outside of the Oblivion engine hence an extra 6950 (or two) would help.

 

[Xelene]

Wish I understood how the hell to use Git though

I actually don't bother with it now, Wrye Bash seems to cover most of the functions.