Hello Folks!

I've got some questions actually. I'm still working on "my" Oblivion to increase the graphical experience and also the general experience. While it's pretty easy to improve the graphics by referring to one or two guides, it's a bit more difficult on the rest.
First of all I've got something to question: While I've seen the work with god rays, there's also this little improvement called "Beaming Sunglare" - I'm not sure on how to go on here, since I'd like to have a mixture with HDR (or something similar) and AA, which is impossible to set, at least as far as I know.
So I'm quite unsure whether to use Beaming Sunglare or the Godray-Thing.

Second of all, I'm looking on improving the appearance of people; While there are pretty awesome mods out there, I'm not looking to make some filthy, too unrealistic Oblivion. I like the enhancements done by Robert, regarding to his male and female bodies, which are actually well done. But there's also HGEyecandy (or however it was called), which seem to have a way larger support in case of getting fitting Armor, Clothes, Weapons and so on. While Roberts work looks awesome, you just don't see any benefits on the improvement whenever someone wears Armor / Clothes, which pretty nullifies the improvements.

Last of all, I'm still looking to get a harder experience, which means, I'm using Oscuros Oblivion Overhaul, which makes the game pretty challenging, but I'm looking for something, which is might even better. (Which doesn't mean that OOO isn't good)

Mods I'm actually using / going to use:

- All Natural
- Animated Window Lightning System
- Beaming Sunglare (Not sure, yet)
- Better Cities
- Better Storms and Weather
- Better Amuletts
- Better Rings
- Better Staffs
- Blackluster Armor and Weapons
- Bomrets Shivering Isles (Improved Textures)
- Can't Wear Broken Armor
- Corean Hair and Eyes
- Deliverance (Additional Sword, superrior Weapon)
- Enhanced Economy
- Enhanced Water
- Extra Horses
- Face Textures (Enhanced Faces)
- Improved Signs
- Improved Sky
- Improved Trees and Flora
- Improved Fruits, Vegetables and Meat
- Initial Glow
- Landscape LOD Replacement Textures
- Natural Environments (At least "Natural Habitat")
- Oblivion Polygone Overhaul
- Oscuros Oblivion Overhaul
- Oblivion Stereo Sound Overhaul
- Quarls Texture Pack 3 Redimized
- RAEVWD (Really almost everything visible when Distant)
- Real Sleep Extended
- Roberts Female Body
- Roberts Male Body
- Tyrael Armor (Maybe I'm going to let this one down, not sure yet)
- Unique Landscapes
- Water Reflection Blur
- Xenius Race Compilation (Not Sure yet, maybe I'll just delete this one)

So, I'm looking to get the "best" Oblivion experience available. I'm grateful for any suggestions or hints to make Oblivion something fresh and new.

Best regards and thanks in advance,

KILLTHIS

Just a quickie...

You can indeed use HDR and AA together. What you need to do is enable HDR within Oblivion, but DO NOT enable AA there. Then go to your graphic card driver control panel and tell it to enable AA in Oblivion, overriding the game's settings. Works like a charm, at least for those with nVidia products. I'm sure ATI cards offer this functionality too, but I've no experience with those.

For nVidia, launch the Control Panel, select 3D Settings, select Manage 3D Settings, select Program Settings, selection Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion from the drop-down list, click on the Antialiasing-Mode Setting option and change it to "override any application setting", then go to to setting right below that and change Antialiasing-Setting to what whatever compromise of quality vs. performance-hit works best for you.

While there, if you haven't already you might as well enable Anisotropic Filtering (AF). I personally think it adds as much or more to the game's visual quality as/than AA, with little performance penalty. Be advised that some older generation ATI cards don't do AF well, but that was supposedly fixed with the 5xxx series cards. (nVidia never had issues with it.)

-Decrepit-

Ah, yes, I've read about this before, I'm going to try it soon, once I'm done with the mods. Even though I'm using ATI it's still a test worth, altough my graphics card probably won't provide enough power for this.

Regarding body mods, I would actually recommend using TGND (short for the girl next door) It's probably the most "normal" looking body next to Robert's Females, and it's also compatible with all the clothing made for HGEC! You can even use HGEC's body textures is you prefer them. Make sure to also get EVE HGEC. That's the megapack that replaces the clothing from vanilla and most of the overhauls.

With RAEVWD you need HDR, but for Godrays (and other similar effects) you need to turn off HDR (at least when I last checked). So, basically, you'll have to choose between the two.



I'd recommend using either nGCD or Realistic Leveling as both will make the game more challenging, both because they "nerf" the PC compared to vanilla - and also because you loose control (mostly) over modifiers, so no x5 Endurance at each level up etc. Also, Progress to control the leveling rate.

Some notes on your mod list:

- Corean Hair and Eyes - Perhaps Cobl Races instead as you'll have more options of hairs and eyes with it.

- Face Textures (Enhanced Faces) - I'm personally using Improved Facial Textures (for the ageing textures) and F-IN evOblivion (previously: Enayla's).

- Oblivion Polygone Overhaul - Doesn't affect much really. Better to pyffi the vanilla meshes.

Allright, thank you Arkngt.
I'm still working on everything in order to improve the overall quality of the game. OOO seems to work good, even the simplest Arena-fight tends to be more stressing - and challenging.
These are my currently used mods:

- Oblivion- Shivering Isles- All Natural (+Real Lights and SI-Plugin)- Cobl- Quarl's Texture Pack 3- Bomrets Textures for SI- Unique Landscapes- Improved Trees & Flora- Improved Rings- Improved Amulets- Improved Staffs- Improved Fruits, Vegetables & Meats- Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul- Better Cities- Unofficial Oblivion Patch- Unofficial Shivering Isles Patch- Natural Habitat + Natural Vegetation (Parts of Natural Environments)- Enhanced Water v2.0 HD (+SI Addon)- Storms & Sound- Better Storms- Window Lighting System- Improved Signs- RAEVWD- Enhanced Economy- Roberts Male Body v5 beta- HGEC Bodies- RealSleepExtended- Cant Wear Broken Armor.esp- Rens BeautyPack full + Soya's hair- KT_CustomRaceFix- Initial Glow - Water Reflection Blur- Visually Realistic Deadly Lava.esp- Real Hunger

Actually, this improved my experience quite a lot. With the need to sleep and the need to eat it's actually harder to archieve my goals, but also more challenging. With OOO the overall difficulty improved, but that's okay. The imagequality also raised significantly. Now I am trying a texture Enhancement for the HGEC-Models. Hopefully this will increase the quality of the textures. I'm also still looking for better hair.
Edit: Goddamnit, that one screwed up the textures for the Khajiit. Now the Hands and the feet are a little bit human-like textured.... gotta work that one out. x3

OOO is awesome. Personally, I wouldn't want to be w/o MMM either - and OOO+MMM works very well together so it's a nice combo.

As said, Cobl Races comes with lots of different hairs and eyes.

Huh? Explain, please.

From the readme:

That is strange, I use Bloom because I really don't like HDR, and I have never experienced this issue.

Well, I don't use Bloom nor HDR and I've never had any problems with yellow or black objects.
So I think it's better to say that it will not work with Bloom.
Heh, sometimes I feel so special - like I'm the only one playing without Bloom or HDR.

OBGEv2 (which enables the usage of Godrays and the other WiP shaders does not require you to disable HDR. However, the way that the fullscreen effects work, you will not be able to apply AA (even with nVIDIA/ATI overrides) while playing Oblivion with those shaders enabled.

Then I'll check out Godrays again (not using AA anyway). I seem to recall that I had to switch off HDR for best effect when I tried out Godrays the last time - but I guess I remember wrong on that one then.

I think the AA issue comes from the way OBGEv2 exposed the depth buffer. So shaders that use the depth buffer disable AA...although I could be wrong.

I think it was because of the brightness issues. I always turn HDR on while developing the shader. Be sure to check v4 of godrays, it is quite an improvement from the earlier versions.


That's right. But you can force Supersampling AA with some cost of an FPS hit.

Allright, I've enabled HDR ingame and AA over the catalyst control suite. Looks way better, since I've encountered the "black"-error of RAEVWD.
I'm still looking around for better textures for characters. Do you guys mind giving me a good link or two? I've found quite a lot of stuff, but not all of them are working. And even for playing around, it's just wasting time in some cases.
I'm using HGEC (maybe I'll switch back to roberts female) and roberts male v5 beta.

Make sure you did archive invalidation(BSA redirection is recommended) to make texture replacers working. Since body textures are usually marked as 'advlt content', I can't link to them.

For better face(for vanilla races):
- Install either Natural Faces or Improved Facial Textures to get age maps with higher resolution.

And body...
- Ozmo's HiRez Texture Pack
- F-Inev Oblivion Skinset for HGEC by navetsea
For other body replacers, I haven't seen any high resolution texture packs around.

Ah, thank you. That's what I was looking for. :>