Cobl Races is now available as part of Cobl 1.52. (Now available at http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=21104, available soonish at http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=OblivionMods.Detail&id=3508.

Cobl Races
Cobl provides a large assortment of popular hairs and eyes plus five new races.
* Eyes from Capucine and Miss Onatop.
* Hairs from: Rens, Capucines, Babe, Soya, Throttlekitty, Saram, Corean, Kafeid.
* Races: Playable Aureal, Mazken and Xivilai. Plus Ohmes-Raht (based on Luchaire's Tabaxi), and Hidden Elves (based on Ren's Mystic Elves).

New Races
* Aureal (Golden Saint)
--* This is a playable version of the existing Aureal race from Shivering Isles.
* Mazken (Dark Seducer)
--* This is a playable version of the existing Mazken race from Shivering Isles.
* Xivilai
--* This is a playable version of the existing Xivilai race.
--* This based on Alien Slof's Playable Xivilai race. The unbalanced version is close to Alien Slof's original design. Balanced version is by bg2408.
* Hidden Elves
--* This based on Ren's popular Mystic Elves race. The unbalanced version is close to Ren's original design. Balanced version is by bg2408.
* Ohmes-Raht
--* This based on Luchaire's Tabaxi race. The unbalanced version is close to Luchaire's original design. Balanced version is by bg2408.

Default vs. Balanced
Without CRB (Cobl Races - Balanced) installed, the default version of each race is pretty much the same as the way it was originally created (either by gamesas or by other modders).

The CRB mod however rebalances both races and birthsigns to "level the playing field" i.e. to make all races and birthsigns have roughly equal value. We'd like to explain it at length -- but we're a bit short of time at the moment!

Suffice it to say, that CRB is roughly a cut down version of bg2408's RBP (Race Balancing Project). You might want to look at [[http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=867983|RBP]] to get a rough idea.

Upgrading to CRB
If you start a new game with CRB active, then gameplay will proceed as normal. You'll get new options in the race selection area, but other than that things will be as usual.

However, if you activate CRB for an existing character, then you'll need to go through a procedure to adapt your character to changed birthsigns and racial spells and stats. Fortunately, this is mostly automatic. Shortly after loading your savegame, you should get an option to adjust to changes. If you follow this procedure, it will proceed in three steps:
* Changes to birthsigns will be applied. Old abilities and spells will be removed from your character and new ones will be added.
* Changes to racial abilities and spells will be applied. As before, old spells will be removed and new ones added.
* Changes to racial beginning stats will be applied. This will affect skills, attributes and health.
Each of these steps is optional and can be skipped. However, skipping step two (changes to racial spells) will also force skipping step three (changes to racial stats).

Keep in mind that adjustments to racial stats may confuse player leveling mods. You may have to reset such mods, or simply live through an odd level up or two.

Generally, adjustments to stats will work better when applied to lower level characters. Keep in mind that you can always try the changes first, and then if you don't like them, revert back to the original save and try it without. Or you might hand tweak some of the stats through the console.

Upgrading from a different race balancing mod (e.g. bg2408's RBP) is likely to be difficult. We can't offer much advice for such a conversion.

Note that if you've been playing with CRB for a while, but wish to switch back to vanilla balancing, you can do that. After reloading, Cobl will again recognize the change and revert your player back to Oblivion birthsigns and racial stats, etc. The procedure will be the same as above.

If Cobl fails to autosense the change (or if you canceled the automatic update), you can force start the transition process by starting the appropriate quest from the console:
* startQuest cobBalToBalancedQ -- To switch from vanilla to balanced.
* startQuest cobBalToVanillaQ -- To switch from balanced to vanilla.

CR/CRB Credits
* Mucho thanks to contributors of hair, eyes and race mods!
* Alien Slof, Luchaire, and Ren for letting us incorporate their race mods.
* bg2408: Cosmetics aggregation, race balancing, conversion to Cobl.
* Wrye: Misc. tweaking, coding etc.

Beware of Finger Chomping Monkey God!
Wrye (main monkey god for Cobl) has a notoriously low tolerance for questions which could easily be answered by a) reading the readily available readme/manual, b ) reading back in the topic a little bit, c) doing a google search, and/or d) using your brain to put two and two together. He's also mostly retired (from modding) and thus even less patient than he was before. So, please, do a little research before asking your question. If Wrye http://www.uesp.net/wiki/User:Wrye#Warning in response to such a question, he later won't be available to help you if you have a more serious problem.

Great news! Downloading...

Thank you Cobl Team

COBL, just gets better and better....excuse me while I scurry off to download this.

Thanks for sharing and the linky, will add this to the list ! ! !

Buddah

Whoa thanks a lot for the mod!
I never heard of Cobl Races. Great surprise for me.
Downloading now!

A bit of history/motivation...

Race resources was actually one of the things we first considered when starting Cobl (about two years ago!). But at that time MidnightVoyager still actively updating her Beautiful People compilation, and so it seemed best to leave the job to her.

Since then, MidnightVoyager has left the scene, but many new races, hairs and eyes have been added. Other compilations have been created. (Including an update to BP by Capucine.) But Cobl has also grown, and I thought tbat there would be a benefit if Cobl (optionally) included race and cosmetic info.

Last spring, I looked (briefly) at merging BP or one of the other projects into Cobl, but I found myself rather daunted at the download size, and number of difficult choices (e.g. which body types to support, etc.). Also I felt that the existing compilations gave too many options (e.g. five varieties of the Mystic Elves race. And I was busy, so I shelved the idea for a while.

However, it kept bugging me, and I was aware that bg2408 had put together a smaller compilation for his Race Balancing Project. So I recently asked bg to port that over pretty much intact for Cobl. So that's what this release is.

Salient features:
* Large selection of popular eyes and hairs.
* Five new playable races based mostly on popular existing races.
* Eyes use vanilla mesh.
* Bodies all work with vanilla, but have re-textures for popular body mods.
* (Optional) Race/Birthsign balancing by bg2408.

Usage by Modders
I'm hoping that modders will feel free to start using the new eyes hairs and races in their mods -- in the same way that they use other Cobl resources. I.e. if you're using The Luggage, you might as well make use of the new hairs and eyes while you're at it.

Eye Mesh Conflicts
The major problem with that plan is the potential for eye mesh conflicts. However, this can be resolved through patches. In the same way vanilla eye texures/meshs are replaced, so vanilla+cobl eye meshes/textures can be replaced. As I understand it, all of the eyes that Cobl is using already have converted textures available -- so all that is needed is to package those with a patch mod. Of course, a bit of racial record merging is still needed -- but that's what bash is for. (Though there would still be some options for the determined non-bash user.)

Anyway, that's the story! Again, much thanks to all of the modders who have generously contributed to this!

I just spent all day setting up my modes making merged mods of hairs and eyes to get what I wanted and you roll this gem out... I know I have to try this! Thanks, but next time use some of that monkey god power and warn me when you see me going astray! No really, thank you very much for your work, inta-download for sure!

Thanks you very much for this gem.

I have no idea about the results we get with this Cobl Race mod, but I have some questions:

- Is there any diversity mod for some overhauls mods planned? or this will be integrated as feature with Wrye Bash?
- What about compatibility with some spell mods like SM and L.A.M.E ?
- Is there optional mod for Less starting Health?

I will start a new character and test this one as soon as possible.

Now if only we could get all race mods to use reasources from Cobl we wouldn't have as many bugs caused by extra race mods.

Googly eyes.
Hairs or eyes being locked out after scrolling though a certain amount of races.
Missing hairmesh due to partially downloaded archive!

I was very pleased to see this done with cobl. I already played around with the races balanced with the cobl 1.51 version and really enjoyed the variety to choose from.

Now if we could get throttlekittys' head mesh and the eyelashes packed in, I can't think of any way this could be improved

First, great release!
Next, a question: How similar is the balanced version to bg's project in terms of the less racey tweaks? Specifically, does the Cobl plugin include the Endurance tweaks detailed in the RBP readme, but any other interesting differences would, of course, be interesting.

TK's Head mesh. Nope. Though I think it would be compatible. Ask me on the Bash topic if there's some bashing to be done. (But I've been burning through my "Wrye" time fast recently. And Bash is up on the blocks for another reason.

Hopalong: Eye meshes. Errghh. If companions (e.g.) built on top of cobl, then they could just pull the eyes from Cobl. Then if someone overrode the eyes for Cobl, that would automatically apply to every mod that used Cobl eyes. So, that would work so long as the npc in question was not using an asymmetrical eye style. (Cobl does not define any asymmetrical eye styles.)

And while Cobl's race selection is limited, Races could still build on top of cobl, using Cobls eyes and hairstyles. So again that would resolve a lot of problems.

Ayleid_People: Cobl Races has been pretty much flying under the radar, so there aren't really any plans that I know of.
* A diversity plugin would be nice. See some Ohmes-raht and Hidden Elves strolling around cities or mixed in with bandits. Or just more varied hairstyles... But no plans that I know of yet. Feel free to bug the overhaul guys about it. Such a thing would most likely be done as a patch plugin.
* Spell compatibility. Dunno. BG might be able to answer that. Probably the only thing to consider here is the CRB (Cobl Races Balanced) patch. I'm not fully sure how that differs from RBP. You can dig around a bit in the two mods (CRB and RBP) for differences and/or check with BG for explanation.
* Less Starting health. There's no change to that. Keep in mind that CRB changes races stats, hence edurance changes will have some effect. But the mod does not change the gmst that determines how starting health from endurance. (Of course that's an easy mod to make for anyone who's interested.) I should mention that the gmst factor is used when cobl is http://wrye.ufrealms.net/Cobl.html#UpgradingtoCRB from vanilla to balanced (and vice versa).

ishmael: I haven't gotten a chance to thoroughly review it. But it does not have the gmst tweaks that I would expect if endurance was going to be messed with. And I kind of thought that magicka allocation under RBP was more dynamic. If so, it's not dynamic in CRB. Might review and discuss it with BG a bit more. (But I'm kind of short on time.)

Having used bg2408's Race Balancing Project for quite some time now, I can say that this is one of the best upgrades you could possibly make to COBL ... superb idea, guys!

Awesome, on my way to DL and spend a few more hours messing around at the character creation screen with each new character.

1. Don't know about this. I'll do this only for RBP, because it's a lot of work, and I'm not going to do it twice :shrug:. Also RBP is, I confess, a bit feature bloated. Cobl races shouldn't be .
2. Full compatibility. Only exception are - of course - the Mighty Magicks. While it would have been possible to make an extra compatible version, Damar was so opposed to integration effords that I quite honestly don't saw a reason to do so.
3. You can use the one from RBP. This is just a gamesetting tweak .

1. Unfortunately these are in nearly all cases caused by a ... problematic design decision of one specific cosmetic mod. Nothing we can do about it, except recommending players to not use that mod.
2. This is also a bug we can't do anything about. As soon as a mod features a race that should be unplayable and has no playable hair and eye choices, but is set to playable, then this happens.
3. Never had that one .



About the less "racey" tweaks in RBP: They're not part of Cobl races. I mean, just look at all those discussions about RBP's changes to the magicka system - many people don't like them, so now I have an alternative to point people to .

This is a must have. Thanks for sharing and keep up the good work.

p

But I liked the default RBP magicka tweaks and you explained it. It's not an overpowering system but just a balanced system to get more casting spell experience. Now with my new character created with Cobl I only get 50 in his starting magicka pool in comparison with 125 with the default RBP tweaks. Does this mean that those using L.A.M.E will have less chance to cast more spells especially those high leveled?

Thanks wrye...still the hardest working 95% retired person i know ;D

thank you!! I been waiting for this for some time :goodjob: .

i have been playing with RBP for a long time now and i like the mod, but there are some tweaks that i could live without. I have reviewed this topic as well as RBP topic and what i am wondering is what are the differences between RBP and CRB? the only tweak i see missing is the magicka tweaks. are there other things missing? maybe a list of what the differences are? or a point to where i could look to find the answer myself (besides cs as i have no idea about cs and modding in general) thank you wrye and bg for all the hard work the two of you do.

Then how about using RBP?

No. RBP and Vanilla work entirely different when it comes to Magicka. Especially when it comes to http://www.tikanderoga.net/bg2408/pics/tes/RBP-Spellcost-Reduction.gif and similar aspects.


I've got no time for a complete list (neither seems Wrye), so what I can say is that everything not directly part of races / birthsigns got axed. Which is a lot. So e.g. if you didn't like the armor penalty for magic, then that is gone. If you don't like Bretons only having 25% resist magic, then that's not gone.

Cobl vs. RBP: See bg's post on his own topic for his "http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?s=&showtopic=867983&view=findpost&p=13349202" to integrating CRB and RBP. As bg says, if you want the full RBP experience, you can still use it alongside Cobl.

And let me say again, I very much appreciate bg2408's work on generating both Cobl Races and Cobl Races - Balanced. It's very nice work and it greatly expands the desirability/utility of Cobl.

In somewhat related new, I have updated the http://wrye.ufrealms.net/Cobl.html. I always feel a bit guilty about incorporating other mods. There's a huge advantage to players and other modders in having such integration, but nonetheless, it steals thunder from the original modder. Hopefully the updated docs do a bit better job of giving credit where credit is due.

I still need to document CRB (how it compares to vanill and how it differs from RBP). I'll try to get to that soon, but I've been working on Wrye stuff in all my available working time for the last four days or so. So, might be a few more days.

if bg2408Ref.isinrantmode == 1
AddTopic InterestingResults
endif

Wheee, thanks . I hope it will get used. It can *greatly* enhance the playing experience. And I'm not even talking about the balanced race aspect here. Example given in RBP there are the "NPCDiversity" modules, which do nothing else than distributing new hairs and eyes to NPCs. This makes NPCs so much more unique... hm... I guess if there are a few files worth converting to depend on Cobl Races, I guess it would be them, then.

I mean I'm at a point where I make my own (often unreleased) NPCDiversities, just because I can't stand all NPCs sharing the same (Khajiit / Dunmer / Orc / Argonian) or the same three (everyone else together) eyes. And let me not get started on the hairs... .


Actually it's quite basic, I guess. Races and birthsigns are the only things affected (nothing else. No armor penalty, spell cost progression, or anything else). And for them compared to the original RBP readme only the part about "race endurance group" would need to be removed (retroactive race dependent endurance is not part of Cobl), and the variable RBP Magicka bonuses would need to be converted into fixed amounts (e.g. medium = 50).

Installed. Tried all races - balanced and not. Great job, great fun.
What can I say, thanks for making my existence on Earth bearable and my existence in Cyrodiil so nice!

@Wrye: Retired? Retired my leg. You, my friend are one of the main engines moving this boat ahead. Wish I had your skills (turns green with envy).

I finally took the plunge and installed. Wow so many options Thank-you so much for the work that went into it I appreciate it. It's nice to have the compilation because a lot of the mods that the graphics came from don't play nice together. I tried to remove Ren's from my install to change over but that didn't go so well hehe

Can I ask about the load order. I read your note Wyre in the BOSS thread I'm wondering if this is gonna work properly or if I should move the first races.esp higher somewhere,

*snipped load order*

6C  nGCD.esp6D  nGCD Oghma Infinium.esp6E  ProgressGSD.esp  [Version 1.1]6F  ProgressMBSP.esp  [Version 1.0]70  ProgressSBSP.esp  [Version 1.0]++  Immediate Character Generation.esp71  MidasSpells.esp72  Gather Ye Rosebuds.esp**  GrimbotsSpellTomes.esp73  Kyoma's Spell Renamer.esp  [Version 1.82]74  bgMagicEV.esp  [Version 1.62EV]++  bgMagicSpellTomes_for_WryeBash.esp  [Version 1.62EV]++  bgMagicEVStartspells.esp  [Version 1.62EV]++  bgMagicEVAddEnVar.esp  [Version 1.62EV]75  bgMagicEVPaperChase.esp  [Version 1.62EV]76  SupremeMagicka.esp  [Version 0.85]77  SM_ShiveringIsles.esp  [Version 0.85]++  SM_DLCSpellTome.esp  [Version 0.80]++  SM_OOO.esp  [Version 0.80]++  SM_MMM.esp  [Version 0.82]++  SM_COBL.esp  [Version 0.82]78  SM_EnchantStaff.esp  [Version 0.80]++  SM_Scrolls.esp  [Version 0.84]++  SM_SigilStone.esp  [Version 0.83]++  bgMagicEV_Conjuration_for_Supreme_Magicka.esp  [Version 1.5]79  Enchantment Enhanced.esp7A  bgMagicEVShader.esp  [Version 1.62EV]7B  bgMagicLightningbolt.esp++  Real Lava 1.3.esp7C  Cobl Races.esp  [Version 1.52]++  Cobl Races - Balanced.esp  [Version 1.52]7D  GM-PISC.esp7E  Willful Resistance.esp  [Version 3.1o]7F  Egress.esp80  Bashed Patch, 0.esp81  Streamline 3.1.esp

I ask because with nGCD+CRB my chars starting magicka is 198 I chose the Mage birthsign and have 5 major spell schools but that's the highest I've had yet. Mystic Elves gave me 127 in comparison so I was wondering bg2408 if you could let me know if starting that high was your intention. Health and Fatigue are 106 and 137 or there abouts and same as before. Starting Int is 43 and willpower is 60.

All the races and options work great, really nice work.