» Wed Sep 01, 2010 8:55 pm To honor the licensing and redistribution agreements in everyone's mods, I don't redistribute anything; you still have to download it all yourself. I just install it for you and fix the load order once you've got it. If you have a tesnexus.com subscription, you can download a lot of it automatically; otherwise you'll have to click everything. The load order is entirely conflict-free, near as I can tell.
http://www.hronk.com/jmromp/JMROMP%20V018.zip.
http://www.hronk.com/jmromp/Readme.html.
What Is This Thing?
Way back a couple of years ago I finished Oblivion. There was some cool looking mods out there, so I tried adding a few. And then a few more. And a few more. Unfortunately, Bethesda's modding system simply doesn't scale beyond having a handful of mods; everything overlaps with everything else, there's strange rules about what conflicts matter and what don't, conflicts result in content just being deleted, and it requires an elaborate amount of custom tooling to make mods work together. It svcks.
So I got to thinking - ok, I'll just figure out what exact order I need to extract everything in to have it all work, and the exact load order, and I'll be ready to go play. Hey, and why not document all that so other gamers can do it to?
Fat chance - you can't just do a single installation in sequence. Mod packs overlap. They all have different layouts when extracted. Some times you want to keep a few files from a previous mod, but overwrite the rest. Some of them include custom scripting. Some of them have installers. There's an entire project devoted just to tracking the conflicts!
So fine, I'll write a installer myself to do it all, and just include a load order. I don't trust the conflict tracking project to get things right, so whatever, I'll manually check the conflicts myself. How hard can that be?
About a 120 hours of work hard, that's what. Yeesh. Two years since I first started it, after reading the entire Bethesda oblivion mod forums both before and after they deleted their archive, it's finally ready. I hope you appreciate it.
I'd like to think dev_akm for his awesome modding explanations and reviews, TESNexus for providing such a valuable community resource, and the denizens of the Bethesda oblivion mod forums for their awesome work producing the content I link to here.
I'm just installing their work. Thank them, not me.
Way back a couple of years ago I finished Oblivion. There was some cool looking mods out there, so I tried adding a few. And then a few more. And a few more. Unfortunately, Bethesda's modding system simply doesn't scale beyond having a handful of mods; everything overlaps with everything else, there's strange rules about what conflicts matter and what don't, conflicts result in content just being deleted, and it requires an elaborate amount of custom tooling to make mods work together. It svcks.
So I got to thinking - ok, I'll just figure out what exact order I need to extract everything in to have it all work, and the exact load order, and I'll be ready to go play. Hey, and why not document all that so other gamers can do it to?
Fat chance - you can't just do a single installation in sequence. Mod packs overlap. They all have different layouts when extracted. Some times you want to keep a few files from a previous mod, but overwrite the rest. Some of them include custom scripting. Some of them have installers. There's an entire project devoted just to tracking the conflicts!
So fine, I'll write a installer myself to do it all, and just include a load order. I don't trust the conflict tracking project to get things right, so whatever, I'll manually check the conflicts myself. How hard can that be?
About a 120 hours of work hard, that's what. Yeesh. Two years since I first started it, after reading the entire Bethesda oblivion mod forums both before and after they deleted their archive, it's finally ready. I hope you appreciate it.
I'd like to think dev_akm for his awesome modding explanations and reviews, TESNexus for providing such a valuable community resource, and the denizens of the Bethesda oblivion mod forums for their awesome work producing the content I link to here.
I'm just installing their work. Thank them, not me.
Questions
Q: Why don't you use any BAIN, OBMM, or Wyre Bash to manage installations?
A: They don't operate outside of their packaging format and they have little in the way of command-line interfaces.
Q: Why don't you use BOSS?
A: I started this project before BOSS was released. Additionally, no command line support.
Q: Why don't you include mod X?
A1: Some mods just have too high an adoption cost. OOO overwrites practically everything, for example. I have my limits!
A2: Some mods change the fundamental gameplay in ways I don't prefer, so I don't include them. Francesco's leveled creatures and items is interesting, but I personally don't like it, so I don't include it.
A3: Some mods just have too high a performance cost. I'm targeting my own box here, and as awesome as Reneer's Guard Overhaul is, it's not worth a FPS drop from 40 to 36 in the Imperial City.
A4: There's way too many quest mods to include them all, so I only went for the best ones I presonally thought were interesting. If I left it out that doesn't necessarily mean it svcks, just that I didn't find it on the "best of" lists.
).
