Often the culprit when a mod just stops working is something else is superseding it in the load order. But that cannot be it if you put it last in the list.

That is Max Tael's Natural Environments right? I have it too. Or Natural Habitat. I just looked at it in OBMM, and it comes with 5 .esps:

Natural_Habitat_by_Max_Tael.esp
Natural_Vegetation_by_Max_Tael.esp
Natural_Weather_by_Max_Tael.esp
Natural Environments Unsupported Extras\Brighter_Torches.esp
Natural Environments Unsupported Extras\Natural_Vegetation_200%_by_Max_Tael.esp

I only use Natural_Habitat_by_Max_Tael.esp and Natural_Vegetation_by_Max_Tael.esp. The Weather one was giving me weird weather, like snow in Oblivion, so I turned it off. I just never bothered with the other two .esps.

Yes, that's the one, SR. Natural Habitats works for you, eh? Strange. I really want this one in my game, I loved seeing flocks of birds flying overhead, and crows and swallows and buzzing insects (etc.) during the hour which this mod actually worked.

I only use Habitats and Water. I don't use the vegetation one because I've read some funny things about it. And I have All Natural going, which includes Natural Weather (assuming I have NW on), so I don't need to add it again.

Hmm, that actually is a thought. Maybe I will try deactivating Natural Weather in All Natural, and switch this to Enhanced Weather or AWS instead. See if this makes any diff, for whatever reason.

I think I got this figured out. This mod only is supposed to work in certain cells, right? I notice if we're around the Imperial City especially, I see bugs & birds, and when it initially worked that's where we were, around the I.C. area, and as far south as Cropsford.

Which makes me wonder if it's possible to copy / paste some creatures in other cells? Hmm.

Nehrim.

Took some doing, but I was able to install it as a separate folder from my Oblivion game (with both Tallei and Julian). So I'm playing it for the third time, and thought I'd try my hand at modding it as I did with Oblivion. I really want to add a "special" horse companion for this character.

However, I'm stuck with trying to launch the CS. AGAIN! It's in the Nehrim folder with the game.exe as well as the ssce5432.dll it needs to run. Yet I keep getting the same error messages as I did when I first started modding Oblivion and didn't have it installed correctly.

Here is a screenshot of my Nehrim folder. Neh[url=https://www.flickr.com/people/61021683@N07/]hauteecole_rider]Nehrim Folder Screenshot

The error messages I'm getting when I'm trying to start CS are:

Unable to load CTL file
Cannot load atmosphere model
Cannot load the stars
Cannot load the clouds

Then it stalls, and I get the Windows message to close the program as it has stopped responding.

When I look at the Editor Warnings this is what it says:
Unable to load CTL file
Cannot load the atmosphere model.
Cannot load the stars.
Cannot load the clouds.
CreateFile('Data\DEFAULT.esp') in CreateTES failed with error:
The system cannot find the path specified.
Unable to complete operation due to failure removing previous file.
Temp file remains.

I've looked at the CS ini as well as the oblivion ini that's generated by Nehrim to make sure the relevant file paths match. Here's the archive section from the oblivion ini:
[Archive]
SMasterMiscArchiveFileName=Oblivion - Misc.bsa
SMasterVoicesArchiveFileName2=Oblivion - Voices2.bsa
SMasterVoicesArchiveFileName1=Oblivion - Voices1.bsa
SMasterSoundsArchiveFileName=Oblivion - Sounds.bsa
SMasterTexturesArchiveFileName1=Oblivion - Textures - Compressed.bsa
SMasterMeshesArchiveFileName=Oblivion - Meshes.bsa
SInvalidationFile=ArchiveInvalidation.txt
iRetainFilenameOffsetTable=1
iRetainFilenameStringTable=1
iRetainDirectoryStringTable=1
bCheckRuntimeCollisions=0
bInvalidateOlderFiles=1
bUseArchives=1
SArchiveList=ArchiveInvalidationInvalidated!.bsa, Oblivion - Meshes.bsa, Oblivion - Textures - Compressed.bsa, Oblivion - Sounds.bsa, Oblivion - Voices1.bsa, Oblivion - Voices2.bsa, Oblivion - Misc.bsa

And here's the same section in the CS ini:
bInvalidateOlderFiles=1
SMasterMiscArchiveFileName=Oblivion - Misc.bsa
SMasterVoicesArchiveFileName2=Oblivion - Voices2.bsa
SMasterVoicesArchiveFileName1=Oblivion - Voices1.bsa
SMasterSoundsArchiveFileName=Oblivion - Sounds.bsa
SMasterTexturesArchiveFileName1=Oblivion - Textures - Compressed.bsa
SMasterMeshesArchiveFileName=Oblivion - Meshes.bsa
SArchiveList=Oblivion - Meshes.bsa, Oblivion - Textures - Compressed.bsa, Oblivion - Sounds.bsa, Oblivion - Voices1.bsa, Oblivion - Voices2.bsa, Oblivion - Misc.bsa
SInvalidationFile=ArchiveInvalidation.txt
iRetainFilenameOffsetTable=1
iRetainFilenameStringTable=1
iRetainDirectoryStringTable=1
bCheckRuntimeCollisions=0
bUseArchives=1
The italicized section here is added from the oblivion ini file after the initial launch of the CS. Still the same error.

I'm out of ideas at this point. Any help?

Hi all,

My build of Oblivion on the new GPU is going well.

However I am noticing something off. I've loaded up Robert's Male and Female body replacers. I'm seeing glowy textures around the eyelids and lips of the female Altmer and Nords. Just those ones. It's like shining a light upwards from below their chins - where there should be shadows, there's light. Also the skirts on the upper class gowns are - umm - a little more revealing than they should be - hips are exposed. I know it's an issue with the Roberts Female body replacer, but I'm trying to figure out what went wrong.

Also the men have tattered robes, and two textures on their legs.

Female was installed manually, Male was installed via Wrye Bash (BAIN version). Both are the latest versions. I might download and install the next older version of the Female, with the foot fix separate, though. (after removing this current version first, of course)

I do believe I have the Hi Res facial texture pack for Roberts Male and Female installed as well.

I'm guessing, but this could be the normal map not matching the diffuse. I don't remember what races share maps, and which have their own, so they may be using the same wrong file.

There are a few outfits that are mis-configured, and don't replace all the body parts they cover. In one case, I determined that the character had two set of legs, as the skirt was semi-transparent, so it included legs to be seen through it. It was set up for the upper body only, so the character's own legs remained when the extra set were added. Some of yours are probably the same thing.

If an outfit is marked for a body slot, then that part of the body is removed when it's equipped. The usual method is to include pieces of skin in the garment, which means using parts of the same model to avoid seams. That's why you need new armor for the new bodies.

ghastley, that certainly sounds like the issues I've been seeing.

So any way to fix them? Uninstall and reinstall? I'm new at textures and so am not sure of the best way to get these mods working. I did once before, so I know it's possible!

With textures, the install order is as important as the load order, if they're replacement files. Using Wrye Bash can help avoid that issue, but even that's not perfect.

However, if it's missing files, and not an overwrite, then a re-install could help. Again, if you use Wrye Bash to install, it will tell you if a mod's files are missing are overlaid.

The issue with extra pairs of legs won't go away with a re-install. That probably needs CS or NifSkope work, depending on which part is in error. If the legs in the clothing shouldn't be there, you can delete them in NifSkope. If they're meant to replace the character's legs, then the form in CS needs updating to say so.

Thanks for the response, ghastley.



Umm, okay. I'm not sure how I got it working last time, but I never had to go this far!

I'm sure the problem is the install order. Should I return the game to the vanilla texture/mesh files for the Characters and Clothing/Armor and reinstall? If so, here's the dilemma.

The Male replacer is BAIN ready. No problem there, I just follow the Wizard's instructions and go with default for most of it. Should that be done first?

Roberts strongly recommends the manual install for the Female replacer - it is not WB friendly. I suppose I could create an omod in OBMM, but I'm not sure that's the right way to go, as it does not give me the nude option. I suppose that I should do the manual install of this AFTER I install the Male BAIN. Also the Female replacer is tagged No Merge in WB, but shows as importing the graphics in the Build/Rebuild Bash Patch. Is that correct?

Then the Hi-Rez Face Textures for Roberts should be last, right? And I think that is also a manual install, too, having it overwrite all the existing textures.

I do not know if I should also install the existing Clothes/Armor replacer that is available on the Nexus. According to the readme's for both Male and Female, these replacers include the Clothes and Armor replacers for each, so it would seem redundant to me.

What puzzles me about the whole thing is that where I am seeing two skirts, or two legs, they are from two different outfits!! I am using TIE, which is the only other mod I can think of that may change the NPCs' clothing from vanilla.

I would love to continue building my mod loadout, but I want to fix these body replacers before I go any further! Argh!!

I don't think the body replacers can be the source of the problems. However, if any other mod replaces the armor/clothing meshes, or the race facial normals, they could introduce your symptoms. Since it worked before, you have good instances of the content, somewhere!

Meshes and textures aren't something that load order fixes, if the mesh or texture gets replaced, it's install order that matters. However, using Wrye Bash shows you where mods conflict, and gives you more control over what pieces get installed. If you get a conflict like this, you can often just re-install the parts that got overlaid.

New character, new problems.

I installed the Enhanced Economy in Komotai's game prior to starting it and for some reason it broke all merchants, they were either selling nothing except their unique items or they were selling only a few items, much less than they should. So I uninstalled EE, as instructed but their inventories won't reset. Not even of those merchants that I've never visited. I tried waiting for three days and even more but their inventories never resets. Just to make sure that EE was the culprit mod, I created a new character without EE activated, and their inventories are full as they should be. Unfortunately I don't have a save without this mod for Komo's game and I've been searching for a solution for entire day but nothing worked.

I'd suggest re-installing EE and figuring out what ini setting disabled the regular goods. Ole's mods don't usually break that badly, but the initial values for options can be weird sometimes.

I use his Map Marker Overhaul, and when installed I saw no map markers until I changed a range setting so that I didn't have to be standing on one to see it.

I keep having my game "crash" when I exit Oblivion. In other words, whenever I quit my game, it will go to the CRASH menu. I know there's a way to make this not happen anymore, anybody know how?

Mine has been doing that for about the last 6 years. It may be a mod conflict or could be related to using quick saves instead of hard saves. As long as your saves are not corrupt after it does that, then it probably isn't hurting anything.

Mine did that too. Fast Exit will stop it from happening. It does require OBSE though.

Ahh, Fast Exit, very very good, SubRosa, I salute you. I knew somebody had invented something for this.

I use Fast Exit also, Renee and it works very well for me.

How would I "color" some clothes? I have a mod-added cuirass in one of my games and it's purple. All I want to do is change its color--make it black. Not seeing how to do this in the Construction Kit, is this possible? ... Or would I need some other program?

You need to find the texture file for the armor. It will be in a *.dds format. Open it with a graphics editor that supports .dds files (not all do). I use Paint.Net. Then just change the color and save it.

Sweet thanks! I'm going to try this right now.

Solid purple is the color the game uses when it can't find the texture for the mesh. Usually you have it, but it's in the wrong folder, so it may be just a case of moving it to the right one.

How did you install the mod? Some of the mod managers will show you where they put things.

oh okay, cool thanks. I'm pretty sure the author meant for purple to be the correct color (that's what the pictures at Nexus show) but I want this armor to be black. It'll be neat to learn something new, too.

I use OBMM Extended

Unintended purple is a shade you can't miss, which is why it was chosen. Glad you don;t have that issue, as a recolor of a .dds you CAN find is much easier!

Awesome, thanks again. If I manage to figure out what the heck I'm doing, I'll show you folks a picture of the armor I'm going to color: before and after.

First hurdle: downloading Paint.net. Seems simple enough, right? The page I found had this BIG GREEN BUTTON which said DOWNLOAD NOW!, so of course that's what I did. No. Bad idea. That put a bunch of software on my comp I don't need: some sort of 7zip program, some sort of software protection program. X-\ Don't worry, I already uninstalled all this stuff. So then, I see the actual paint.net download, which isn't as obvious. I start to download it, and I got some weird message about my Internet cutting out. Which it did. I lost my Internet last night, just by coincidence. So I'll have to try again later tonight.

Always fall for that BIG GREEN DOWNLOAD BUTTON though. Gets me every time.

I am finally looking into this matter with the paint.net. Wow, it's really intricate. I can get in there if I really wanted to, and get very specific about color tones. Sort of like Photoshop. My initial urge was to just change the color purple to black (simple as that) but the truth is, the mod author hand-placed a lot of subtle shades of purple when he or she made this armor set. So my temptation is to also get rather intricate.

Pretty neat stuff.

Sounds like the mod author did a great job on them!

I have this really wacky idea. I'm not good enough to implement this idea, but I just want to know if it's possible.

Okay, is it possible to write some scripts that will make our character do something random, if (let's say) 10 minutes go by, and I haven't done anything with him/her? ... So what I mean is.... I'm gaming with my character for an hour, then I take a break. While I take a break, character X is just standing around. After 10 minutes though, now he or she will begin reading a book, without me touching the controls.

Is this possible, or would it screw up the game to try to write scripts like this? It's just that I notice NPCs can have scripts that make them roam around and do other things ...

No, in general, the game's not set up to run scripts on the player. There are places in quests, however, where the game will disable the player's controls, but only so that he/she can watch something without interfering.

Skyrim has some possibilities for this, but not Oblivion.

Ah dang. I knew this must be so though, otherwise somebody would have made a mod for this. Thanks anyway.

Hmm. You know, I think it might be at least theoretically possible. It is quite true that you cannot run scripts on the PC, but you can run them on NPCs and objects that will affect the PC when the PC performs some act. A common one is to have something happen when the PC goes to sleep, for example.

A trivial one would be a timer script to establish how long the PC has been in one place, then have something happen after n seconds. (I can already imagine a very annoying curse - which can be lifted by a quest, of course - that materialises increasingly nasty creatures. Hey, thanks for the idea...)

So, the issue is, can the PC be compelled to perform an idle animation from a spell cast on them? It is possible to craft a spell to force NPCs to do animations: Hilarity does this (brilliant stuff, in this case it sets everyone disco dancing...) Probably not, but it's an interesting thought.

After writing my first response, I re-considered the sweeping "no", and noted that some mods like Sexlivion, the various pose mods, and See You Sleep do manage to run idle animations on the player. But that may be the limit of what's possible, and each of those starts with a voluntary action by the user. You generally have to cast a spell, or perform some similar in-game interaction to kick them off. I'm not sure if doing nothing for a time counts.

Ah. This gets better (I'm not at all sure I'll actually test this, but I've noted it down, so maybe sometime). The doing nothing schtick can be a quest script. So we have an invisible object/NPC moved to player location after n seconds of doing nothing, then casting an invisible spell on the PC, which is the final bit that probably won't work. (I spent a while trying to get an activator to cast a summon spell, still haven't managed it - although a number of other spell types will work this way - the game engine has its quirks).

Or "Personality Idles," where after 15-30 seconds of idling the character will assume whatever pose you have selected for their idle. Maxical always put one hand on her hip when you left her standing too long without activity.

Umpa had a script that made the PC dance when they heard music from his radio, and of course you could change the animations to whatever you wanted to (if you wanted to do something other than dancing), but you would still have to click on the radio yourself.

The problem with that script was that you could not stop yourself from dancing, you were stuck and would either have to exit the game and reload a save before turning on the radio.

I tried to add it to my "Wobbly/Lucky Mudcrab" mod and when my PC couldn't stop dancing I managed to hop (dancing the whole way) to the door and exit the cell; but it wasn't easy and I didn't know for sure if I'd be able to, lol. I immediately went into the CK and disabled that mod script, lol.

Our pc's do some random things occasionally, right? I notice my current lady has a habit of adjusting her daggar. Isn't that from some script?

I don't have a problem with activating something to make the animation happen, by the way. If I have to have my PC cast a spell, this is okay. The idea is that the PC eventually starts doing something else, other than standing around.

I got this idea from the Actor's Ball mod. That's a good mod if you want some sort of instant action, but it's rather clunky to use, going through all those menus. What we're talking about is something which would wind up feeling more natural.

So I'm looking at this brand-new mod called Betty's Animal Planet? and I'm pretty much drooling. That's what I've packed my game with: not more hostile creatures, but more peaceful ones. Problem is there are a couple animals I'm not interested in adding. Am I safe just going into the CS and deleting these altogether?

Oh, a new one of Betty's, they're always good (been AFC for a week and more, back to modding things up now). Anyway, Renee, I would not do that, at least not so simply. The animals in question will have spawn points, and they will likely be part of levelled lists (I will have a look for you when I get a moment), so any references to them must be deleted too. The CS will actually warn you of this, but thought I'd point it out just in case.

When I get a moment I'll have a look for you.

If there is a script involved in this mod that in any way references these creatures you are thinking of deleting, it could cause issues and even possibly crash the game looking for those references repeatedly and not finding them.

She made this mod by combining two different mods, have you looked at those other mods to see if using just one of them will eliminate the need to alter at all? One of the mods adds crocodiles, the other adds pandas and giants, etc.

If you just want a mod that makes the normal world animals friendly, SubRosa made an Awesome one; I would just use hers - it doesn't add any unusual creatures, just makes the ones already there more friendly.

I second mALX's recommendation to use SubRosa's mod if all you want is to make the vanilla animals friendly. It's part of my Oblivion default load order, and I'm so happy with it.

Why thank you. I do have Witchcraft in Lady Saga's game, and yes, I love it because it does exactly what I've wanted for many years. Saga also can summon bears, which is really fun. I have a list of friendly animals mods in my games so far: MMM's More Peaceful Animals, Redbag Friendly Animals, Gulls & Seagulls, Ducks & Swans, Natural Environments, a few others I'm forgetting. Yeah, I like my game packed with non-hostiles, that's another thing I was really wanting as I gamed on consoles for years.



Oops. I got impatient and deleted a couple animals, using TES4Edit. This shouldn't be a problem though, if you can tell me how to get rid of leveled lists, right?

I tried looking for these leveled lists (ghastley told me about them too), but where are they? Can't find them in the CS. I think I found then in TES4Edit, but this program wouldn't let me remove them.

I've been waiting for somebody to answer this, when the idea struck me: why not see if there are any video tutorials on You Tube? Duh. Of course there are! I was watching a few last night. Already learned a heck of a lot. It's cool to see what to do, too.

SubRosa also made a mod to summon forest creatures like bears/wolves, etc. (besides the mod that makes them friendly) - and a very fun Witchcraft mod for Oblivion.

I finally found these lists. In the CS' Object Window, they are under Actors > Creatures > Leveled Creatures? I am noticing the animals are under Creatures, but the leveled lists for these creatures are what you're talking about?

So what I did was left the Creatures in the game (Actors > Creatures) but only removed them from lists (Actors > Creatures > Leveled Creatures ). Hope that's right.

Is there any option to "fix" an .esp file so it doesn't get sorted by BOSS / LOOT? For instance, when it comes to Better Cities, BOSS auto sorts it in a wrong way, putting one of the .esps too high and each time I install some new mod and arrange a new load order, this .esp gets moved up, so I have to manually move it all the way down.

You can add a user list to override the master list. It's also useful for self-made mods that aren't released and therefore unknown.

Oh, I was thinking of changing the Better Cities mod that keeps getting thrown back (so it matches the one that is sorting right)?

If I'm not mistaken, I think Boss sorts by date?

Ghastley or SubRosa know this stuff better than I do

I don't know anything about Boss or Loot. I use so many mods I made myself that they are just useless to me. I sort all my mods manually.

The game itself loads in date order, so Boss alters the dates to make the order of the mods match its master list. If the BC file gets moved when you run BOSS, maybe you have another mod that is tagged to load after it, but before some other file.

So here's a weird one. I already fixed my own problem, but I don't know what went wrong in the first place.

Out of the blue, my game started crashing like crazy. Long story short: I figured out that it would only crash if my character was standing close by one of her followers (and facing them). After a bunch of trial and error I remembered I had recently cleaned several CM Partner esps. I was literally out of ideas by this point, okay? So I figured, heck why not? ... Let's re-install CM Partners so those esps are dirty again.

And now everything is fine. XD No more CTDs. I don't understand what just happened though. Why would the dirty versions of these CMP esps work, but the clean ones fail?

Usually CTD's happen because the game is trying to use a form that doesn't exist. So they're most likely after a mod has been removed, but something else has picked up a reference to something in the mod and is still using it. E.g. you enchanted an item that was added by a mod, and stored it in a container added by another, ...

Cleaning a mod removes overrides that aren't needed, but if one of them has replaced the missing item, it has kept it in existence, preventing the CTD that was going to happen. So the cleaning lets the CTD deferred from the mod removal happen at last.

tl;dr it wasn't the cleaning that caused the CTD, it was just waiting for a chance to get you.