My avatar is a knight-errant, traveling the length and width of Cyrodiil in search of adventure and fulfilling contracts. As such he journeys on horseback, except when a particular quest requires traversing rugged wilderness terrain. For quite some time I've noticed that while ahorse I encounter brief pauses when nearing a corpse. These were all but imperceptible at first, but have sense grown to become somewhat bothersome. It only happens ahorse. I can pass those same corpses on foot without a hiccup.

Is this a known issue, especially with older games (my current avatar has existed well over a year now)? Or could it be mod related? (It dawns on me that while I've noticed this behavior with several different horses, all of them come from mods. I've not owned a vanilla horse.) Whether game limitation or mod-induced issue, is it fixable via either ini or a mod of some sort?

Here's my load order, though as you will see I run no horse-specific mods. (That said, several of my mods, such as Castle Seaview and VHBloodlines, supply horses.)


Hardware wise, I run Oblivion with:

Spoiler
Intel Core 2 Due e8500 @ 3.16ghz
4gb DDR2 800 ram
Geforce 260 core 216 graphics (197xx drivers)
Creative X-fi sound card (with an Oblivion profile for Alchemy)
Windows Vista64

Thanks for the ear!

-Decrepit-

Sounds like your horses have 'Can Corpse Check' enabled. This will cause your horse to stumble over every corpse. If these are mod-added horses, load up the providing mod in Tes4Edit ... Corpse-checking can easily be disabled just by unticking that check box.

My hero! :bowdown:

Arrowspeed (my Castle Seaview provided mount) did NOT have Can Corpse Check enabled. In fact TESedit found that Arrowspeed had no corpse-check indication whatsoever. I looked through various NPCs until finding one that had it enabled, then returned to Arrowspeed and clicked to edit his properties. One option was to specifically enable No Corpse Check (or words to that effect). I did so. VOILA! No more bothersome stuttering when nearing corpses on horseback.

So you were a bit off in detail, but spot on as to what the issue was and how to find and correct it.

I'm surprised this hasn't been brought up before. The pauses are quite noticeable. I guess that either most horses automatically default to No Corpse Check or not many spend as much time on horseback as my avatar (who doesn't fast-travel). Or maybe most folk have better computers than me, so don't suffer the pauses. However that may be, from now on I'm gonna make sure any horse I acquire is flagged to not check corpses.

-Decrepit-

Actually, it has... I suggested it to Quarn and Kivan a long time ago, and it was eventually incorporated into the UOP. But that fix only affects horses that were added by the vanilla game. Mod-added horses can still be afflicted--albiet sometimes in reverse, probably owing to imports from the UOP. Nothing like galloping along, and then going head over heels when your horse puts on the brakes--thanks, Bethesda, but that's carrying realism a bit too far.
But honestly, I think the problem would be better publicized if more players used horses... I fear us horseman are in the minority.

Really? I'd think more players used horses than not - well I guess when people can fast travel wherever they want to then they figure "what's the point?"

I always buy, borrow or steal a horse as soon as I can b/c I resist the temptation to fast travel. I don't think I ever noticed that bug, or if I did, it must have gotten added to the UOP quick enough that I didn't pay it too much mind. :shrug:

But there you go, you should probably try to contact the maker of the mod or leave a comment where you DL from to see if someone can fix that for your mod horses.

Slof's Horse revamp mod works well, btw, And it adds a few "freebie" horses that you can borrow (they always return to the stable after you are done riding them).

So how do I go about finding every horse added in the game and changing the "corpse check" flag? A few sep-by-step noob TES4Edit instructions would be definitely appreciated!

I'm chuckling over this because I posted a bit of a complaint about Ulrim's Horses mod on Nexus because he overrode the corpse check flag that the UOP had fixed. I had to go through and put the fix back in again :angry: There were a couple of other things that needed fixing to... Unfortunately I think he's disappeared from the forums at the moment - wouldn't be surprised if he tired of the Nexus crap.

Anyway fixing these in TES4Edit is pretty easy. The main thing is choosing a mod that you are going to fix. For me, I chose Ulrim's Horses because it's loaded late in my load order and is a compatibility mod, so everything is in there. I'm assuming here that you have some other mod that is overriding the changes made by the UOP, otherwise you wouldn't need to do this!

Start up TES4Edit.
Leave everything selected.
I don't bother with mod groups (I don't run big overhauls). Mod groups just filter out some of the conflicts anyway and you might be better off seeing them.
Wait for everything to load. You should see the message "Background Loader: finished" at the bottom of the messages list when it's done.
Expand the mod that has most of your horses in it. You could use the Unofficial Oblivion Patch for this. (Click on the + sign next to the mod name).
Click on the EditorID tab at the top of the screen to sort by Editor ID.
Now you should see some horses. If you're looking at the UOP, then I think the first horse in the list will be Dark10Horse. Click on that record (you can just click on Dark10Horse).
Now you can see all the mods that have this record in the right hand side of the screen. In my list, Ulrim's Horses has them all and is last in the list - so that's the one I modified.
In the section titled ACBS - Configuration, you should see the flags. Under the UOP, the flags will be Essential, Walks, and No Corpse Check.
Click on the Flags entry under the mod you want to change. You'll have to click on the entry once to select the field and then click a second time to get TES4Edit to prompt you about changing the file. You might have to hold the mouse button for a second. Once you get the prompt, click Yes to proceed.
Now the field should change into a drop-down list. Just click on the check box next to No Corpse Check and you're done! Repeat for every horse record...
When you are done you can use CTRL+s to save the plugin or just close TES4Edit and it will prompt you to save as it closes down.

If you don't have a single mod with every horse record, then you'd have to do this for each mod that has some of the horse records or create your own plugin. If you create your own plugin, you'll have to use the CS. I think that would be easier than trying to merge plugins or creating patches with TES4Gecko, which I'm not as familiar with. I use it sometimes, but not often.

Thanks for walking me through this andalaybay - I'll try this and hopefully manage to do this without messing up... actually i almost started this, but got dissuaded by Tes$Edit's big warning symbol when I was about to actually edit something!

Whoa! I'd forgotten this old thread. Yeah, it's a pretty simple edit (via TES4edit) that should be all but foolproof. I've done it several times now without a hint of problems. (I ended up also slowing Arrowspeed (the Castle Seaview reward horse) a good bit (another easy edit) since his "normal" run speed was, in my opinion, unrealistic for an armored horse carrying a heavily armored warrior/knight.)

-Decrepit-

The nice thing about doing edits with TES4Edit is it backs up the plugin for you

This should be something added to Wrye Bash. As people have said mod added horses don't have this fix, I have had to do manually in TES4Edit as well.

Bash your horses? Sorry, couldn't resist...

I'm afraid I've used up my Bash change requests for the moment, why don't you suggest it?