I've recently come back to Oblivion and am enjoying playing through with the mods that have come out since my last play through, one thing still bothers me though. Despite a rig an order of magnitude better than the one I used to play with 3 years ago the game can still grind to a halt with too many actors on screen even with Quiet Feet/Streamline etc. This is more annoying still because Oblivion seemingly only uses one core, I cannot understand why Bethesda didn't make the game multicore friendly, with it's separate actor scripts Oblivion seems like a perfect contender for multithreading.

So, my question is, would it be possible to create a script handler that synchronizes all actor/creature etc. scripts into separate threads, and could it be done without disassembling the game code?

While I personally would love to see something like that, I doubt it will happen, for several reasons:

• Either an uber-sophisticated set of scripts would have to be written on top of the executable, which as a script-heavy mod would slow down Oblivion's execution (negating the reason for doing this to begin with!), a plugin similar in sophistication to Oblivion Stutter Remover would have to be written, or the executable itself would have to be altered. The plugin is probably the best course of action but very few modders have the necessary skill set.
  
• Any such mod would be likely to introduce additional instability to Oblivion. We all know how bad of a thing that would be!
  
• With Skyrim coming in a few months, the Oblivion modding community is winding down. (I won't say "dying", because I don't think it will die anytime soon, just as Morrowind's hasn't. But many of the big-time modders have moved on.)

Buzz kill

I do not see any indocation that Oblivion modding is winding down, but then again I do not follow too many threads, and still see a multitude of smaller mods (I guess you can overhaul only so much).

Once UL covers all of Oblivion then yeah, that is the end of that. Only quests remain. And if Skyrin has a super great game engine, then we move to that world.

If they release a construction set for Skyrim to make mods as easy as for Oblivion, I hope it is not long before the overhauls come out for it.

Neither do I. Quite the opposite, in fact. :celebration:

Lots of new mods, revised/refined/expanded mods, ideas, discussion, etc., etc. Heaps of awesomeness, that is very unlikely to stop, even *way* after Skyrim has been out for some time.

The modding scene seems to be thriving, I'd say. :yes:

I only got Oblivion like six months ago, my modding phase hasn't even begun yet! haha but seriously one of the things that surprised me so much about the Oblivion mod community aside from its sheer awesomeness is just the fact that it's still going strong five years later. When I finally got more involved in the forums after browsing tesnexus exhaustively I was just shocked so much was still being done.

I figure it'll be a little like what happened when FO3 came out, except to a slightly larger degree (since Skyrim is a new Elder Scrolls game): several folks got excited over the new game (FO3) and it's possibilities and started making mods for it instead of Oblivion. After a while when the newness wore off, things stabilized a bit: some came back, some didn't. I figure Skyrim will do that except to a somewhat larger degree: the new game will get a lot of attention for a while, and then things will equal back out.

I wasn't here when Oblivion first came out, so I don't know what effect it had on Morrowind's modding community in the short-term afterwards, but looking now, MW modding is still doing quite well (I'm reluctant to say thriving because I didn't see MW's modding community at it's height, so I can't compare).

I have noticed that the Oblivion modding forums don't seem to be as quite as busy as they were a couple of years ago before FO3 was released, but there's still a lot going on.

I'd definitely say that both Oblivion modding and activity on the forums has wound down.

I recall when I first started posting 2 years after the game came out - there would be an average of 15-20 pages of threads per day. Yes a lot became vaporware but overall there was less help me threads and more innovation.

Serious modding was going on. Same with Fallout3 - as soon as New Vegas came out a mass exodus to that game and literally 5 days go by before a new page of threads are created. A lot of help me threads there too.

There are of course exceptions and we all know them ... they post and update their mods here and nexus and alliance regularly - I speak not of them. But a lot of modder 'giants/greats/talented folk/whatever' have moved on and did so over a year ago. I remember it. Again the folks that have stayed have made and refined their goods and that is awesome. But the level of activity has fallen off greatly even in the last 2 months since the announcement of Skyrim.

I still planned to have Oblivion installed but I know it will be different once Skyrim is out - it will no longer be the central focus.

Did that new Skyrim video show up today? I just learned of it here earlier, don't know if it's been around for a few days already. But it seems minds are on Skyrim today, hehe. Or maybe just mine. Kind of makes me wish I had picked up Oblivion when I first kind of wanted it around its release instead of ignoring it until within the last year. I am really apathetic about PC RPGs aside from like, Mass Effect, since probably about when I played the WoW beta, but picking up Morrowind on a whim when it came out was a great decision, from what I've gathered and played there's really no one doing what Bethesda does on the same level (but perhaps I'm wrong). Anyway, if time travel existed I'd probably give up being able to have all the wonderful mods fully developed at my fingertips immediately after getting the game to be able to follow the development of everything and learn enough to contribute myself. But if time travel existed it would be like it is in the movie Primer and people would just ruin everything doing stupid things. Plus my participation would somehow inadvertantly prevent the creation of every single major mod, Bethesda would announce they're working on their new "Bieber's World" series exclusively (I'd still play it), and Arnold Schwarzenegger would be elected governor of California.

Oh no I'm in an alternate universe again, dammit.

I just say wait and see. This is much like Starcraft. The original and the expansion were great but left you wanting for better things. When Starcraft2 was announced I could'n stay still waiting for it. When I finally got it and got it to play, I was dissapointed. Not only did Blizzard require you to register for Battlenet, make their licensing dependent on Internet, make it nearly impossible to install on a different computer, the game itself lost the feel of the original. I played through it once, that was enough for me. Perhaps it is me not realizing that gaming is different these days with the video scenes, the interfaces, and a differnet way to tell the story. Old dog set in old ways, that is me I guess.

Great thing about Oblivion is that it was a natural flow from Morrowind. If Skyrim follows that trend it should be good. Otherwise, well, let's wait and see.

Wow that trailer was exciting.

The parts that were actual game play that is. I think the dragon fight was cinematics though.

Just wanted to amend my post above a bit and say that still great innovation is happening today and that the work at refining and optimization are very important. What ShadeMe, Arthmoor, TheNiceOne, Onra, and probably several others I'm overlooking ... are all producing top drawer stuff. Great stuff.

Not to detract from that - just that the amount of that kind of stuff has waned.

No - Concurrent script execution will break gameplay. Your best bet is to use OSR; that's probably as far as "multi-threading" will get in Oblivion.

I'm gonna have to disagree here, especially when you take this into consideration:The way I see it you got two options, either:

• Go to a forum and ask if someone else could make it. Ofcourse it needs to be a different forum this time....
  
• Or look for a magical rainbow and make a wish to the pixie that comes riding down on a unicorn....

Now ofcourse both options are equally unlikely so I can't really advise on which one you should use.

Sorry Kyoma... I can't resist.

"Or look for a magical rainbow". http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=8927.
"and make a wish to the pixie that comes". http://waalx.com/RealSwordsForum/viewforum.php?f=12&sid=b9a9fe9674f869c1c062c7be61869a4b.
"riding down on a unicorn...." http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/search.php?name=unicorn&scid=20&author=&mname=&desc=&size1=&size2=&downloads1=&downloads2=&udate1_day=&udate1_month=&udate1_year=&udate2_day=&udate2_month=&udate2_year=&ldate1_day=&ldate1_month=&ldate1_year=&ldate2_day=&ldate2_month=&ldate2_year=&endorsemants=&images=&readme=&advltonly=&opensource=&page=1&orderby=name&order=ASC.

Vac :angel:

And I'm glad you couldn't, that certainly did wonders for my mood.

Hahah, does it mean I've been too hooked on Oblivion if I knew exactly where each of those links were heading before I clicked them? Well, okay, the last one was a toss-up. But I've been bashing too many pixies lately. In a wave of mutilation.

I don't kknow. I am done modding Oblivion. Haven't for a couple of years. (This time around, I am PLAYING OB, if you see the difference). But, I still mod Morrowind. Go figure.

I remember taking some screenshots from Oblivion and keep staring at them afterwards - as if they've been worked by photoshop or something. Perhaps the same illusion happens with the movie and it is real game footage :bowdown:


AHAH! That's a nice one! I do the same. There are some mods that I have arround but never got to polish and upload because I used to spend all my time thinking about scripts instead of playing.

You mean like the horse control/armor mod that I still have an alpha of ... oops I just outed you.

That would be a contribution many would appreciate.

There are two problems for releasing.

One is that it uses modified assets from various modders and the game itself to work properly. I'd have to ask permission, even though I had comfirmation that I could publish Bethesda assets without much trouble.
The other is compatibility. Since it chages core game mechanics related to horses, providing compatibility with dozens of other mods would be a patch-dependency hell.

The OBSE team included some functions that I asked for in v19 but it still proved inefficient to resolve some horse mod conflicts.