i see, thanks for the info, i haven't done pyffing before, and don't know about it, so i guess i have to figure that out one day, although i see that lots of mods have pyffied meshes already by the author. I tend to use popular mods so that i can avoid this. And i probably should clean my mods...it just takes such a long time. I need to switch from omods to bain too..well maybe if i did all that i'll get a few more hours per crash.

edit: well amazingly i've just ran across a problem, i'm doing the forlorn watchman quest and after i'm told to go to bawnwatch camp he never appears...i wonder what mod is breaking this quest. i've tried waiting for 3 days in testinghall and return there and he still hasn't showed up. damn it.

Most vanilla quest questions can be found answered http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Quests. Although with that quest I can think of Bravil Barrowfields (which messed it up for me) & perhaps Enhanced Quest Roleplaying. And I think he only appears at a certain time meaning if you're not there at that time he will not show. But to be sure - check the UESP.

http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/TES4Edit_Cleaning_Guide & http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Tes4Mod:Tes4Edit#Cleaning_a_Dirty_Plugin

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1112284-inforelz-pyffi-python-file-format-interface/ you have to install it and if you already have Wrye Bash and python it is a snap - it is configured for Oblivion and which meshes to optimize and which not to. Just leave it running while you sleep and wake up - move the optimized meshes in over the original the zip up into a BSA with OBMM and redate and you are good to go. (well you probably want to read that thread too )

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1078392-oblivion-and-memory-usage/

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=23208

^^^ all these are the best stuff to do to improve performance short of new hardware ^^^

I'd recommend finding the baseline of how good it can get first then think about how to add more mods than adding more mods with vague ideas and fantasies that optimizing will bail you out later.

After that then it is about finding the balance between replacers (graphic overload) and mod activity (AI-processor power overload).

I can mod my game out to be crippled from replacers alone or likewise with AI activity and no replacers. The key is balance - I prefer more AI activity and game play to beauty and replacers.

So many 'I can't get my FCOM game to run' threads and yet they also are using QTPIII (Even R&R variant) which does not show in the load order.

the only thing outta this is the pyffi which i have no idea, the rest i've read them all and well..yeah, i guess the balance is a good point. I think i just decided that with my computer i can go all out with anything i want and it'll be fine..well, obviously not. I have a pretty good idea about all the processes involving getting the game to run better however they're time consuming and i'm too lazy sometimes, but then i probably shouldn't be complaining.

about that quest: usep doesn't talk about this problem, so i'm almost certain some mod is messing it up causing the ghost to not appear at all. There are various other bugs possible related to this quest but none of it talks about what happens if the ghost doesn't appear at all..i could always use the console to skip a quest stage but i really don't like doing that. I wonder if theres any known issues with bravil barrowfields, or blood and mud, both changes the area around bravil. i'm not using enhanced quest roleplaying, so thats outta the question. and i've been there at 8pm, waited til morning, and i've tried going there in various different ways (fast travelling, running over, coc bawnwatch camp).

The issue I had with Bravile Barrowfields was the ghost getting stuck on landscape, so likely no it. skipping stages always messes my game up.

You can load all mods in tes4edit and put in the quest ID: MS06 and start looking for conflicts.

I can't help you with the lazy part - you are on your own with that. Mod added meshes will never equal the enormous amount of vanilla meshes. I was astonished at how much snappier my game felt after doing it and kicked myself why I didn't do it sooner. In fact each of those fixes I'd swear by as I recall at each one going "wow" .. but just think each of these you only have to do once.

best of luck.

Oblivion only uses one thread. If your cores are split into two threads (which I still cannot fathom the reason CPU developers choose to do this), it technically will only use half your core.

Regardless, I've always had CTDs with vanilla Oblivion and Fallout 3. Heat wasn't an issue, hardware was ruled out.
The only conclusion I can come up with is this: The engine is just flawed. It has poor resource management.

Well from what I've read the gambryo engine shows its age.

I've never once had a ctd with vanilla Morrowind, Oblivion, or Fallout3. Not once - and each I played a fair pace before modding.

Start adding mods and hello ctds and the whole process of optimizing and troubleshooting. And Oblivion the least stable of the three.

My system for the past 2 years:
Quad core 2.66
Asus rampage formula
8 gigs of Ram
ATI 4870 1 gig vram
Soundblaster of the $100 variety
... and the best part - the 28" viewsonic screen.

well amazingly the whole PyFFI process seems pretty straight forward. I just have to do it on my meshes folder, and also all the BSA files mods add, plus the vanilla BSA...the automation utility is great and i've already started doing it on my meshes folder, then i just need to do it on 30 other BSAs.....

You will see the largest impact from just doing the vanilla meshes in the BSA.

Unless your game is uber modded like mine it is doubtful that all the meshes added by mods and the other modded added BSA files will equal a half or even a third of that main BSA. Think that is everything you see and it is very likely that much of what was installed with mods is already optimized these days.

When repacking the BSA don't forget to reset the time stamp to the original and back the original up. Then you can also opt to not compress the BSA making it faster to access as well.

I cannot advocate for cleaning plugins enough. Just follow the guides, clean top to bottom, and don't clean these circumstances:
Overhauls
esp with other esp as masters
the UOP plugins

and ask questions

Still even if you do all of this expect ctds and having to do bug and conflict hunts. It just goes with the game and the better you get at it the faster it goes and then back to playing instead of tall this. A necessary evil but remember the more you add the more you will be here instead of playing.

According to an interview Todd Howard gave around the time of Oblivion's release, Oblivion does make some limited use of two cores.

Well gosh Pseron you've seen just about everything on these forums and I'd defer to you.

Still somewhere I saw posts where the OBSE crew did testing of all the ini settings for multithreading and found that most (certainly the essential ones) had no effect on the game. They were in the ini but not implemented.

So yeah some. And again your computer gets to use the other cores giving the game one full one.

i forgot to mention about this, all of my cores are split into 2 threads, so technically i have a 8 thread system, which means oblivion is only using half of 1 core? oh god..1/8 of potential processing power

IS that what hyper threading means? they just divide the existing cores to up the supposed numbers?

Well the minimum required processor is 2.0 so not sure what that i7 then comes out to if you split the power of one core.

Well the to test your issues cut out more AI mods and see how much that helps.

basically hyper-threading allows for multitasking better, which is its intended purpose. For each core the cpu creates 2 "virtual" cores which could then simultaneously run different processes while sharing the resources from the same core. So basically...each thread's processing power isn't really lost, the speed would still be 2.8GHz, i guess i just have to set 2 threads to oblivion that way the game won't share resources with other processes that might be running...not that there is that many background processes running on my computer anyway.

i thought it splits the processing power but only if both threads are running things at the same time, which i'm not.

Yes, I use Oscar's low poly grass, and the speedtreee utility recommended by corepc in his Vibrant Textures mod.

BTW, if you get low FPS in Bravil while using QTP3 while using Blood&Mud, just use Blood&Mud textures there, not QTP3+B&M (that's the only area, not even waterfront, that gives me fps<15 with QTP3+B&M).

Good discussion here - I also wanted to chime in for the new overhaul around the block - ROM (again, like TIE, it is not modular, but is also supposedly quite good - I haven't played with it yet, but with my current stable FCOM game, I don't expect to either).

ROM also requires OOO to be installed (full or light 1.33). I have ROM with 1.34beta5 and MMM and it works fine. I am also testing with TIE thrown in this mix.

As for difference between TIE and FCOM? My opinios is: FCOM is meat and potatoes and TIE is a salad. FCOM you fight, TIE you think and sneak, lean and mean. Either one is a challenge and fun.

FCOM is more than meat and potatoes - it is an all you an eat buffet - excess in all directions and usually the only option is fight.

A Golden Corral buffet or Country Kitchen buffet? Or a Las Vegas casino buffet?

With FCOM your fingers hurt from the fighting, in TIE your shoulders tense and hurt from all the stealth.

Gonna get a Tylanol now, thanks.

hmm yes, i'm not using any of those performance tweak mods, so i guess thats one reason, although my fps around landscape is quite good, just with some drops around large ares of trees and grass sometimes. I don't see how Bravil B&M is that much different to the waterfront in BC. Both are simply full of clutters everywhere. I never get a decent fps around these 2 places, but then I feel fine with anything over 15fps, it's playable to me, just not very comfortable.

@the overhauls, tbh i still want to stick with FCOM, i've decided to resort to doing all the tweaking to increase performance rather than taking out mods. Still TIE is pretty much on my hit list as a last resort.


The thing with TIE, from what it's described as, is quite specifcally aimed at stealth type chars...but i actually think FCOM can be played just the same. I mean, yes you do meet really tough opponents early on, but so do you in TIE, and i think deadly reflex fits in incredibly nice with FCOM to make everything deadlier, but also make stealth attacks just as good if you have a good sneak skill.


As an update now to my ongoing work at making my game more stable, i'm still waiting for QTP3 redimized to dl -_-, running out of dl data, but otherwise i've pyffied my meshes folder and vanilla meshes BSA. And i can say that there is a *noticable* performance enhancement when i tested the game again. I'm actually going to pyffi everything except for the FCOM mods, and do some other tweaking. From recent observation from vram usage etc, it's not overloading the 1gb limit, and i can be quite sure oblivion is making use of at least 2 threads since i tried with 1 and there was also a noticable decrease in performance.

Told ya!

Before tearing off to optimize the overhauls - I think OOO has been already and Warcry to if you use the BSA - MMM is creatures so not much would get optimized if it isn't already. Check the readmes many mods today are released with Optimized meshes.

Now about mod cleaning - I really recommend looking at that.

oh i know about that i just have to "want to do it" I cleaned all the DLCs before, but thats as far as i got before i gave up. soooooo time consuming, at least with pyffi with the large meshes folders i could sleep on it, this...well, i need to use a few hours just on this

edit: if anyone can be bothered please go to the UL relz thread and have a look at a problem i posted there, it's about the the forlorn watchman quest, i'd rather not post the question everywhere, but this problem i have with it is a bit quest/game breaking.

Just do chunks at a time. Start with DLC and then branch off into doing just quests or houses (those are always the two dirtiest types anyway).

What I did was as I cleaned the plugins and optimized the meshes I'd repackage each mod into a BAIN package that I also archived if ever I want to reinstall or use again. So all that is done for me. My BAIN folder has mods to remod my game 10 times over and all optimized and cleaned.

If your repackage the mods then again it is something you do only once unless there is an update.

Forlorn Watchman: I already told you that my issue with Bravil Barrowfields was the patch griding and it looks like that was addressed. Petrus is now, in my book, an expert on C&C and EQR so that is not it either.

One google search revealed http://www.gamefaqs.com/xbox360/927345-the-elder-scrolls-iv-oblivion/answers?qid=15168 and it states, just like I said before, that you have to be there at a specific time. I showed up at 10 minutes till then he appeared.

I do something like this too. Nowadays for any ESP I clean I redo that BAIN package to include BOTH the original ESP and the cleaned one as selectable alternatives, something along the lines of "00 ESP_original" and "00 ESP_cleaned". Those few times I PyFFI'd mod meshes I've done the same.... "03 Meshes_original", "03 Meshes_PyFFI". Sadly, my PyFFI experiments haven't panned out well. On at leave two occasions I've had to revert to normal meshes, which is easily accomplished when both versions are housed in the install package.

-Decrepit-

as you can see most of the problems is people follow him, but then after he stops still couldn't get any dialogue happening for the next quest update. my problem is that he isn't even appearing. i've already tried waiting 3 days for sell reset, i've gone there at exactly 8pm, sometime around midnight and sometime around morning (3amish) but he just isn't appearing..there is nowhere that mentions the problem of him just not appearing at all at the camp when he's supposed to.

Have your tried returning to a save prior to meeting him and trying again - like make sure that your character is there right at 7:30 and just wait by having your character stand there - instead of doing cell resets and the like.

Have you put the quest ID in with all mods loaded in tes4edit - just because Petrus does not see a conflict does not mean you are running the same mods.

Have you tried the last resort of advancing the stages with the console.

I've had issues like this with a few quests and often I find it is because I missed a step in the activation of the quest, so really think it over.\

Other than that - I got nothing.

but what does "as you can see most of the problems is people follow him" mean? That is not what that link said.

well, that link went to a forum where a user was asking about the problem when the ghost isn't talking to him after he stopped his trek, aka not my problem

anyway, amazingly i loaded the game again, and just waited til the next day 8pm, and he appeared. really weird, it's like the script wouldn't run at the start then suddenly it picked itself up again..so i was able to finish the quest.

so just getting back on topic a bit, i actually find that i'm getting a regular 30fps outdoors, which sorta surprised even me, since i've not tweaked anything in the ini or using low polygon grass, heh it still seemed pretty bad when the fps would suddenly drop to 7 sometimes. I think i need to update on the random crashing a bit later on, been too busy these 2 days and haven't even played oblivion for hours on end, so i'm not sure how frequent is the crashes now, maybe the pyffing fixed it

edit: while on the topic of fps hits, could someone give me an idea on how much RAEWD reduces fps? I'm thinking about getting that mod