Heya. I've been an avid player of TES, Morrowind and OB, specifically, for the last 8 years or so. I've always played on the Xbox, however.
Today, I picked up OB GOTY for the PC. Now, I can run it on high settings on this mac (I use bootcamp and windows XP to run it), but I was wondering if there were a few mods I could pick up to make it feel..a little "more alive".
I've seen screenshots of modded Oblivion, the imperial city actually, where the streets were covered with flora and fauna, flowers, grass growing out of the cracks of the stone paths, etc.
Does anyone know what mod this is? Can anyone provide a link?
Also, are there any decent mods that are "must haves"? I'm not looking for game breaking mods, overpowered items, or anything like that. But just good "essential" mods for PC players. Links would be appreciated, since I've never looked/modded OB before anyway, I don't know where to find them.
And lastly, any body replacer mods? The bodies in OB are a bit "meh", are there any good replacer mods?
Thanks in advance.

The IC plugin you are asking about sounds like something to kill a laptop. It was probably a specific part of Better Cities or some other mods that aesthetically overhauls the cities, but that is a surefire way to kill performance. Post your specs. You should learn about what mods are before tossing them onto your computer.

http://sites.google.com/site/oblivionpoinfo/intro
http://sites.google.com/site/oblivionpoinfo/downloadmods <-- The only mods I consider "required" are the Unofficial Official Patches. You will not miss them going through that page.

I'm not running a laptop, I'm running a quadcore iMac. 0.o

OOOOhhh. Well, you still need to learn about using mods. If you do the prep work you will save yourself a lot of troubleshooting posts and general stress.


Edit: Other starter threads...

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1088677-i-need-help-please/
http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1088766-new-to-the-world-of-mods/


Edit: After prepping, I recommend downloading Better Cities for the city aesthetics, Roberts Male Body v5 and Roberts Female v1.2. For the female body, there are a ton of choices, however. You should pick out the one you like best. Robert's Female Body actually has the least support of the available female bodies. The body with the most support is HGEC, a variant of another, older, very popular female body by Exnem. The UFF/TFF body is also well supported, and now a new body is on the scene TGND. They are all very different, so you should search for them on TESNexus. I cannot link the mods here because their pages, inevitably, have images with nudity uploaded. Another popular female body is Bab.

Search terms: "Robert v5 Beta" (vanilla and SI replacers are included in main download) "Roberts Female Body v12" (vanilla and SI replacers are included in main download) "HG EyeCandy Body" (search "EVE HGEC" for the main replacers project) "Fantasy Figures" (main replacers show up in that search) "Exnem" (lots of search results) "TGND" "BAB"

Sort by "Downloads" "DESC" to try and get the actually body download on the first page (i.e., for BAB).

What?! No mention of DMRA! You can't proper appreciate perversity until you've at least tried DMRA! Guaranteed (especially if played with the standard armor replacer made for it) to either fuel wild and crazy Oblivion dreams or leave you huddling in a corner screaming "Why?" into the darkness of the night.

Anyways, more on topic, once you get the basics down you can use the following for a reference:
http://www.gamesas.com/?showtopic=1010109

That is list is linked on the "Downloading Mods" page multiple times.

For somebody that's played the game already, you should most definitely get these mods:
Darn UI (or something similar) - the default interface looks horrible...especially on a PC when you're sitting about a foot away
Natural Environments - the graphics on this game might actually blow you away again like as if you had just played it
Unofficial Patch - I don't know how many bugs you ran into on the xbox version, but trust me, there is literally hundreds. This fixes almost all of them
Unofficial SI patch - same as above but not quite as many bugs/glitches

eh....I know there's 1 or 2 I'm missing but I can't think of them, sorry


As for body replacers I'd recommend HGEC or Robert's male. For the HGEC, most definitely should look into EVE. It's a mod that not only comes with the body mod, but also changes all the clothing in the vanilla game to fit it. Normally a body mod gets "overwritten" when you put on a standard armor so you wouldn't even notice it until you take it off.

Just yesterday, in response to a challenge, I managed to narrow down a list of my top 5 mods which are not the UOP, Streamline or a world scaling overhaul. Three of them were my own, and of those, two might not be best for your first time around the modblock. So, I'll clip those out and just give you my top three.

1. http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=2037
When you pick a flower, harvest a tomato, pull the cap off a mushroom... you see it in-game. You can know, just by looking, which plants you've picked and which you haven't, and later, you'll know when they grow back.

2. http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=14065
This one's mine. The project began planning before Oblivion was released, and I only really became satisfied with it within the past year. It completely replaces the level advancement system with one that scales smoothly: your attributes rise automatically along with your skills, and while you gain levels, there's no special event associated.

Advancement overhauls are one of the areas where it's widely accepted that something has to be done, but there are several options which different people prefer; in the interest of fairness I should point out two popular and actively-supported alternatives: http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=13879 (which is fairly similar to nGCD), and http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=15619 (which is very, very different).

3. http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=22819
Reduces or removes ambient lighting in caves, dungeons, basemants and other places. The point is: torches aren't worthless, and Light spells aren't a waste of Magicka! While it seems like a fairly simple change, in my opinion this mod does more than any other graphical enhancement to improve the environment, immerse you in the game, and instill a sense of danger and adventure.

My advice is READ READ READ. Read Tomlong's stuff, read the stickies at the top of this forum. Read popular forum threads, there's always plenty of threads around in the first few pages asking for advice on 'best' mods or similar. You'll quickly get a flavour of which are the most popular mods. Also look at the top 100 lists on TESNexus.

Above all, when you start downloading mods, read the readmes.

Here's a few suggestions you might want to look at-

Unofficial Oblivion Patch (UOP) Virtually everyone will tell you this mod plus its rerlatives for Shivering Isles and the DLC are essential mods.
Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul (OOO) or its big brother FCOM, but FCOM installation is not for the fainthearted
Quarls Texture Pack III Redimized
Less Annoying Magic Experience (LAME)
Race Balancing Project (RBP)
Common Oblivion (COBL)
Really Almost Everything Viewable When Distant (RAEVWD)
Animated Window Lighting System + Chimneys
Unique Landscapes
Better Cities
DarN UI or Dark DarNified UI


Some quest mods:-
The Lost Spires
Windfall
Heart of the Dead
Integration-The Stranded Light
The Ayleid Steps


Tools you will need-
Oblivion Mod Manager
Wrye Bash
Better Oblivion Sorting Software (BOSS)
TES4LODGEN

Take it easy, load one mod at a time and playtest. Enjoy.

This all seems pretty confusing. I'm not tech savvy; I thought mods were just downloading and installing, seems like there's a bit more too it. Not to mention, I'm not a PC user, I honestly have no clue about the directories/etc on a PC. I'm a mac user, using bootcamp to install windows XP on it, and playing from there. =/
I guess I'll have to do a bit of reading. Thanks for the replies, folks.

You could try downloading the Oblivion Mod Archive (see my sig); it has over 18,000 mods, split up by category, with a brief description for each. This is especially handy if you're looking for an alt mods, because each has the supporting mods listed with it (and no, Tom, Robert's Female is NOT the least-supported; it has more mods than Corwyn, Eshme, and BAB put together).

Also, definitely download BOSS - it will make your life a lot easier.

I have been very tired lately. I did not mean it was the least supported of all female body mods. I mean it was the least supported of the three female body mods I had first listed, the ones that had been on my mind at the time. If you do a tag search on TESNexus, that should tell which has the most support easily enough.

Okay, you're close enough then.