Oblivion Performance and Utility Mods Options

[SubRosa]

I did some tinkering with Oblivion and its array of helpful mods today, and thought I would share some of my discoveries.

All of these require OBSE

Oblivion Display Tweaks = this helps with microstutter and other things. It is compatible with OSR, but only if you Turn off bReplaceGetTickCount in Oblivion Stutter Remover's .ini file.

Oblivion Stutter Remover = of course.

OSR Optimized .Ini File = Is just the .ini for OSR, and has the bReplaceGetTickCount disables, among other tweaks.

Engine Bug Fixes = A bunch of bug fixes.

SkyBSA = Changes the way Oblivion puts BSA assets in your load order to act the same way Skyrim does, namely by no longer mucking with timestamps, and just going by your load order.

[Lena Wolf]

I have installed SkyBSA hoping that it would allow the different BSA files to "overwrite" each other's assets according to the load order, as advertised in the mod description. Unfortunately I found it not to work, and I wonder if I've done something wrong setting it up (although it's just drop this file into the folder sort of thing). So I'm looking for comments and ideas from other people who have more experience with it, please.

In more detail. I have converted the vast majority of loose files in Meshes and Textures into BSAs, that is I re-downloaded those mods, packaged their assets in BSAs separating resources from LOD, and removed loose files. Everything is loading, there are no yellow exclamation signs or missing icons, so I know Oblivion has got it all. But... and here it comes.

I also have a few files loose, and those are things I'm working on. So according to the SkyBSA write-up, loose files will always overwrite their counterparts from the BSA. Problem is, they don't.

I have generated my own LOD - land and objects - for my load order. This is obviously stored in loose files, and I expected it to overwrite whatever other LOD is stored in the BSA archives (some mods already come with BSA archives and they are not always separated into resources and LOD, so some LOD was loaded that way too). But alas - where LOD was available in the BSAs, it got loaded instead of loose files. Where there was overlapping LOD, it got loaded too... multiple versions! You don't want to know what those mountains look like... And grass flickers like crazy, even though I don't have any grass replacer mods at all - no landscape texture replacers at all, actually. The problem was that conflicting landscape textures got somehow loaded from several BSA archives from different mods.

Another example concerns the menus. I made myself a different map menu, it's an XML file stored in Data/menus folder, loose on the disk. But of course there is also its counterpart in one of the Oblivion master BSA archives ("misc" archive). All of a sudden my changes disappeared - for some reason Oblivion archive took precedence. I quit the game, opened Wrye Bash, DID NOTHING, closed it again, restarted - my map is back on. Quit the game, restart - default map is back. This wasn't exactly alternating, it was just random - you never knew which map was going to be loaded. The same with grass - sometimes it would flicker, sometimes it wouldn't, and mountains would look different every time you load, sometimes duplicated as LOD got overlayed - very weird.

So I disabled SkyBSA and everything is loading normally again. May be assets don't get overwritten correctly, but hey, at least I can't see it in the game! Files on disk now always take precedence over BSA archives... And this is VANILLA!

But obviously SkyBSA was created for a reason. People have been having troubles, and it was supposed to help. It works for a lot of people, so why not for me?

I have two suspects: GOG Oblivion and Wrye Bash. I wonder whether GOG Oblivion that I'm using has already been patched somehow and that interferes with SkyBSA? But I doubt it.

Wrye Bash. It touches the ESPs when you open it and changes their "last modified" time stamps to fit with the load order. I wonder if it does the same to the corresponding BSAs thus playing up to Oblivion vanilla behaviour of looking at the time stamps? Does anybody know? But even if it did that, according to SkyBSA write-up, the whole point of that mod is to make Oblivion ignore the time stamps... So I don't see why updated time stamps should matter for SkyBSA.

Note that I do NOT use bashed patch - I had problems with it before, it threw away things and changed load order so things got overwritten wrongly.

When I load SkyBSA, behaviour changes, so it clearly is loaded and does something. It just doesn't seem to be what it was supposed to do but almost the opposite... Anyone seen this before?