Jason McCullough's Ridiculous Oblivion Mod List - RTM Release

Did anyone grab that Morrowind pack? A year ago I spent a few nights piecing mods together for Morrowind. Then I never started the game. I’d rather take the easy way out this time.

I guess I can look for new versions of the mods I selected, but if I do that I will start fretting about things all over again.

In the early life of MW, a lot of people were extremely sloppy about resource dependencies. Like incorporating parts of some other person’s alpha-stage project into their own & releasing it without notifying & crediting the other modder, or warning the users [edit: also, it was insanely hard to check for conflicts & such back then]. Even worse, a couple of people lifted textures & models from MW mods and tried to sell them to game developers.

Somewhen things like that made the TES modder community so whiny & paranoid that they now transform into Ultimate Shitstorm Mode if, for example, you make a TES mod using some other guy’s resources, you credit him in your documentation, and you shoot him an email about it… But you also distribute the stuff of his you’ve used with your mod, so your users don’t end up having to download 50 different, semi-compatible mods & stitch them together like Frankenstein’s fucking monster, according to a 500 page set of arcane instructions that maybe a thousand people on the planet can understand without first having to spend a week learning a new vocabulary [pant, pant] …

TES modders are mental, no question. But like most nutters, they didn’t go crazy all by themselves. Not that you should feel guilty for wanting to slap them. I’m pretty sure they want to slap themselves most of the time. I promise you some modders stopped modding because of this evolution into psycho-cunt-hood.

That sort of makes sense then.

I considered bypassing all that completely by taking what I had and writing a full-bore downloader and installer in .NET, rather than writing a long list of steps, but it’s just too much damned work.

The complaint from outspoken modders is typically about updates – they update monthly or imagine they might want to. If they don’t control distribution the users might run into bugs that are actually fixed, be missing features, whatever. A pretty lame reason.

I think the real reason is that a decent chunk of the motivation of modding is feedback from users who use and like your stuff. Forum threads, comments, emails. They must think that being part of a mod distro means that people wouldn’t bother downloading their stuff individually, and they’d be disconnected from that feedback.

But there’s a tiny niche of people and modding Morrowind right now. The Morrowind compilation torrent had thousands of downloads in the few days it as up. Based on the comments, mostly from people who had played Morrowind but never got into the mods.

They don’t seem to get that if compilations were popular, they won’t lose individual downloads. They’d have as much or more people downloading the mods individually, plus an additional ten times as many players using their stuff who would never have installed any Oblivion mods if it meant tweaking load orders.

The mod compilation is still up on GamePron.


rezaf

Counting myself as extremely lucky here! A replay of Morrowind is on the cards for me and I was looking forward to installing that mod pack.

If Quaro’s post hadn’t alerted me to its discontinuation I would have missed the boat entirely! I’ve backed up the incredibly thorough installation instructions that used to be on the mod pack’s web page, thanks to the wonders of the google cache. Downloading the main file now using rezaf’s link.

Cheers!

Downloaded everything, compared sorted mods, everything correct. Run install.bat and winrar throws up an error for almost every archive saying access is denied.
Running Win 7 Home Premium x64, directory is D:\Oblivion Mods, Oblivion is installed in default directory under C:, I’ve taken ownershop of all folders and files in D:\Oblivion Mods and it hasn’t helped.

Any ideas?

Did you take ownership/adjust permissions on the Oblivion installation directory?

Had ownership, didn’t have permissions. Fixed, thanks!
Have everything installed, load order correct etc, all that’s left is to launch the game.

Jason, in the readme you say “Choose All files under filters.” for DownThemAll!, but if I’m not mistaken, All Files should be unchecked, not checked.

If it’s checked, you get the php and html files some people have mentioned, because DownThemAll! tries to download the “Name” links that just link to the nexus page of each mod. At least, I think that’s what happened to me.

One of the things I dislike about the distributions that hand everything over as one merged lump is the difficulty of removing mods that I’m less keen on using and merging them with additional mods I actually prefer (especially problematic when it comes to mods that update assets). I’m actually a fan of Jason’s approach because it allows me to pick and choose more carefully what mods I end up using.

For example, back in Morrowind, most compilations use that Morrowind Visual Pack 3, which is described by some people as an eyesore, while I prefer to just use Khalazza’s texture packs instead with an additional mod to replace the unfortunate rug textures he has. Likewise, I use a subset of Jason’s mods for my Oblivion install as well based on my preferences, and having the freedom to easily do that is what makes his such a valuable compilation.

I guess I lean toward a preference for customization over ease of installation, and as much as a pain the mod communities tend to make it for folks to put together compilations, it ultimately works to my favor as long as the those putting together the compilations can stomach the extra effort to put compilations together that don’t end up being just one big zip file full of merged mods.

FYI, if folks are interested in fiddling around with an updated Morrowind:
http://btb2.free.fr/morrowind.html

huhhuh huhhuh huhhuh

Am I being too obsessed with detail at that point? I can at least draw the line at having morrowind tapestry textures turned into nudy pics of winged chicks, right?

I can’t talk, I included better textures for parchment paper. I don’t think I’ll ever have the patience to do that level of detail again though.

You aren’t too obsessed, but you aren’t the audience that one click mod compilations would reach. You are already stitching Frankenstein together yourself.

The purpose of a mod compilation is to renew the gameplay experience so much, that any fan of the game will want to replay it.

To achieve that the compilation needs to maintain a high degree of internal consistency (like not using rug textures that clash with the game’s/mod’s art direction, or merging a dialogue mod that uses words like “dude” with one that uses words like “thou”), it needs to be (mostly) bug free, and the distribution, installation & documentation all need to be solid enough that anyone who played through the unmodded game, can successfully use the mod compilation.

Like Quaro said, you’re not the intended audience. You may know more about modding, and by extension troubleshooting/patch-making, than a given compilation author. You may even have a better idea of the mods available than the compilation author. And you most definitely have a better idea of exactly which mods suit you.

So hi Jason, I found your list, re-installed oblivion, and started downloading everything. I noticed a couple of problems though and didn’t know how much they mattered. I can’t find Slof’s horses anywhere at all, the nexus just sends an error of “no file exists for this id”. The other is that Animated Window Lighting System is now version 5.5.1, not 5.3.5.

Can I go forward without the one, and with the new version of the other without changing anything? If I need to change something what would it be? Any idea where to find the horse mod outside tes nexus(I googled it, but didn’t find anything)?

Of course I’m asking this right before leaving town ><

Hopefully someone will see this before i get back :)

I’m not maintaining this anymore, sorry. Slof has moved here.

If I’m trying to update a bunch of mods, do I just have to “deactivate” the old versions, or wipe them out of the game?

AEVWD is killing my framerate, but I’ve played for hours and I’m afraid I’ll have to reinstall the game if I do this wrong!

Try moving the DistantLOD subdirectory somewhere else and reloading a save game. You can always move it back.