Getting ready to POOP again...[Oblivion Mods]

[triggercut]

So yeah, where were we?

Oh yeah, I was getting smacked around pretty good (and probably a little deservedly) by the Oblivion modding community for having put together a collection of mods for that game without having asked permission of the various mod creators themselves. We credited them, absolutely...but in hindsight, we probably should've been a little more proactive about our initial approach.

Whatever. Water under the bridge. After a few hardware failures (mine) and vacations (most of the folks working on this have taken at least a week or two off this summer), we're finally thisclose to releasing the Popehat Oblivion Omods Project, version 2. I actually have installed it all twice and it all went swimmingly. What we're waiting on right now is:

1. Me to finish the installation documentation.
2. We're giving one or two modders a chance to finish an update to their work so we can get that into the package,
3. A group of 5-10 folks to install it early this week and report any problems or glitches or difficulties.

At any rate, here's the Mod List for POOP v.2:

Oblivion 1.2.0416 official patch (US/North America)
Shivering Isles 1.2.0416 official patch (US/North America)

Oblivion Mod Manager 1.1.10
OBSE v0015a

Oblivion Unofficial Patch 3.1
Oblivion Unofficial Patch hotfix
Unofficial Official Mods Patch v13(final)
Unofficial Shivering Isles Patch 1.3.0
Unofficial KOTN Patch 1.0.8

Qarl's Texture Pack Redimized and Further Reduced
Better Tiling (BTQ) in 1024, 2048, and 4096 flavors
Normal Maps in 1024, 2048, and 4096 flavors
Koldorn's Noise Replacer in Light, Medium, and Strong*

Beaming Sunglare 1.0
Natural Environments 2.1.4
Enhanced Weather 1.2
Enhanced Water 2.0 HD
Enhanced Water v2.0 SI Addon
Gorier Blood 1.1
Weather Inside (Seasons) 1.2
Real Lava 1.3
Water Reflection Blur 0.3.0
Low-Poly Grass 1.0*
Low-Poly Grass for SI 1.5*
Real Night Sky 2.0
Dark Dungeons 1.1
Krensada's Moons*

AEVWD 2.6*
AEVWD Fixes*
Tamriel VWD + Chapels, Extras 0.5

Improved Doors 1.0
Improved Signs + Update 1.1
Clocks of Cyrodiil 1.0
Illumination Within Revived 0.92
Crowded Roads Advanced 1.3*

Color Map Mod 1.1
DarkUId DarN 1.5.6
DarNified UI 1.3.1
Loading Screens Themed Replacer 1.0.1
LSTR Compatibility Patch
Map Loop And Oblivion Logo Replacement 1.0
Dude Where's My Horse 99.99

Cliff's Better Letters 1.1
Book Jackets + Book Placement
Denock Arrows 1.0
Durable Equipment, Harder Repairs 1.0
Drop Lit Torches In Combat 1.6
Harvest [Containers] 0.99.9
Harvest [Flora] 3.0.1
COBL 1.44

Francesco's Leveled Creatures 4.5bSI
Francesco's Optional New Items 4.5bSI
Quest Award Leveler 2.2.0
SM Plugin Refurbish 1.8
Kobu's Character Advancement System
Realistic Levelling 1.5
Oblivion XP Levelling 2.2* (awaiting update to 3.0)
nGCD 0.17

Better Looking Tools 1.2
FineWeapons 1.0
Oddbasket's Imperial Armor Replace 1.3
Kafei's Better Amulet Replacer 1.0
Kafei's Better Ring Replacer 1.0
Rusty Items 1.0
TNR-Tamriel's NPC's Revamped + SI 1.0.6
VA's Better Gold 2.0
Visually Enchanted 2.1
Mike's Clothes Replacer 10.0*

Action Ragdolls 1.0*
Real Lights 0.7.2

Unique Landscapes: Colovian Highlands 1.0
Unique Landscapes: Entius Gorge 1.1
Unique Landscapes: Lush Woodlands 1.2
Unique Landscapes: Rolling Hills 1.3
Unique Landscapes: The Heath 1.1
Unique Landscapes: Ancient Redwoods 1.5.1
Unique Landscapes: Ancient Yews 1.3
Unique Landscapes: Chorrol Hinterland 1.2

Realistic Fatigue 1.13
Real Hunger, COBL 1.6*
Real Sleep 1.5*

Glenvar Castle 02.10
Let The People Drink 2.5
Kvatch Rebuilt 1.1*

Wrye Bash 206 (Installers for Python and ansi included)
Streamline 3.1
TES4LODGen 1.2.44 Beta

*=permission still pending

[triggercut]

The Popehat Oblivion OMODs Project FAQ

Introductory note to players:

Awesome! Finally a mod compilation that all self-installs and doesn't require anything of it's users. How cool is that?

Or not. That isn't what POOP is, and it isn't one of the goals of the Popehat Oblivion Omods Project at all.

I'm of the opinion that there are two kinds of folks who'll be interested in this collection. The first is the looky-loos, who'll spend a day or two in Cyrodiil and then move on to something else. Hey, there are few folks that have “gaming ADD” as badly as some of the POOP team (including myself), so believe me, we get it. The gamers in this first group are probably more curious than anything, wanting to see what Oblivion looks like with a bunch of mods installed to it. The folks in this first group are looking for a “fire and forget” mod compilation that will self-install while they're out at the movies. They're like my friend Jim, who last month offered me ten bucks and a six-pack of beer to come over to his house and install all his mods for him.

For folks in this first group, POOP probably isn't for you. It doesn't self-install, it requires you to read documentation, and it will take the better part of an evening to get everything up and running. For folks in the first group, looking to see what a fully-modded out game of Oblivion looks and plays like, I'd suggest Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul; OOO is a magnificent piece of work, and it installs a whole lot easier than POOP does.

I think a lot of folks interested in this Project will be folks like the POOP team itself, and we fall into the second group. We're gamers who bought Oblivion on release day, spent a bunch of time with it and eventually got frustrated with some of the gameplay conventions in Vanilla Oblivion. We also saw a bunch of cool graphics mods come out that were far beyond the reach of our 2006 GPU's and CPU's. We moved on, but always looked at Oblivion as a game that held a ton of promise, thanks to its infinite moddability. We'd set aside a weekend to reinstall the game and get a good start on a character...and then find ourselves at sea when it came to modding the game, facing a paralyzing number of choices and an almost inscrutable set of instructions all resulting in a learning curve that looked like a sheer cliff. For gamers in this second group, the purpose of POOP is simple: we'll give you a bunch of baseline mods and show you how to install and manage them and how to use a bunch of tools that smooth everything out...and then we hope you'll take the knowledge you picked up installing POOP and run with it. We hope you'll install many more mods, graphic overhauls, and user-made quests and campaigns. We hope you'll find mods that are especially suited for the class of character you're playing. Heck, we even hope you'll decide to second-guess some of the mod choices in POOP and uninstall them and use other mods. When you finish installing this collection, you're going to know more about mod installation, troubleshooting, and management than most of the folks installing mods in Oblivion ever learn. That's what POOP is—instead of giving you fish, hopefully we're giving you a fishing pole.

Introductory Note to Modders:

We know you hate mod compilations, and we understand why. We've talked to modders and gotten the straight dope from you; mod compilations are silly, and past comps have really done a disservice to modders by having little regard for conflicts, documentation, or understanding how mods act with one another. Mod compilations invariably result in a bunch of folks who've been led down a path into the wilderness with no idea how they got there or how to go further, and then they fill up forum threads, email boxes, and PM space with questions that show not even the least bit of familiarity with how your mods are supposed to install. They go to TES Nexus and give your hard work a rating of 3/10, and post a nasty note about how they unzipped your OMOD into their textures folder, and why won't it work?

We'd like you to try to meet us halfway, though. Realize that with two years of modding (longer if you figure that a lot of Oblivion modders got started with Morrowind), the Oblivion Mod Community has its own shorthand and lingo much like any other group of hobbyists. Mods have been created on top of mods that depend on other mods and all require knowing how to use tools like OBMM, OBSE, Wrye Bash, and more recently stuff like TES4LODgen. Those are just the circumstances and requirements of making more and more ingenious and complicated mods, but boy does it make for a nasty learning curve for even the savviest of gamers outside the community. Spend a little time on the Bethsoft or TESNexus boards, and sometimes it almost feels like the same 40 or 50 folks are making mods for one another, to the exclusion of a larger group of potential fans.

That seems like an incredible shame to me. The stuff you all have created over the last two years is some amazing and astonishingly polished, professional work. There's a wider, hungry audience out there dying to appreciate what you've done...but they don't know how to do it. That's what we hope POOP will do for them—create a new-user friendly means of discovering the larger world of the mod community at large.

Frequently Asked Questions About POOP
(fair warning, from the point on, the POOP puns fly fast and furious. Yuck.)

1.So these mods are the best available for what they do? They're “canon”? No! These mods are just a group of mods that play well together and make Oblivion look and play better than it did at release. Realize though that there are so many Oblivion mods out there that these are all choices, based on personal preference of Team POOP as much as anything. This isn't THE collection of mods, it's just A collection of mods.

2.Why did these mods get picked then? There were a variety of factors that entered into the choices here. We have a group of longtime Oblivion players helping us out, and comparing their mod loadouts, we noticed there were areas where there seemed to be some consensus among them. A great modder named Dev_AKM has a site at http://devnull.devakm.googlepages.co...extureoverhaul that does a masterful job of explaining how various graphic overhauls and related mods work and work together. It was a tremendous resource in putting this all together. One of the final things that went into our choices was a desire to not get too class- or race-specific. There are a bunch of great mods for various races, great mods geared to rogue classes, magic classes, and fighter classes, but we tried to stay with more generalized mods to put a baseline down, and then let individual players go from there and install mods to customize and flavor Oblivion to their own respective tastes.

3.What are the system requirements? We've tried to put enough different choices in the Project to give a variety of rigs and hardware setups the ability to get something out of this. But since you asked, we'd recommend at least an 8xxx generation nVidia card, or 3850 or higher ATI card with at least 512mb of video RAM. A dual-core processor will help, as will at least 1-2 gigs of system RAM.

4.What about VISTA? Yep, it'll run.

5.What about language? The Project has been tested extensively with North American/English versions of Oblivion. It appears to work well with UK/English versions as well. All the mods are english-language versions.

6.Will I need the official expansion packs? We recommend the expansions, but they're not necessary. The OMODs in the pack are scripted in a way that allows you to tell the mod whether you're running an expansion pack or not.

7.Hey, are these mods or OMODs? What's an OMOD? POOP is indeed full of mods that will modify various things in Oblivion. They're packaged here in a special file extension format that ends in .omod. OMODs are a proprietary file format that works only with Timeslip's Oblivion Mod Manager, or OBMM. One of the first things you do when installing POOP is install OBMM.

8.Why use OMODs though? What's great about OMODs is that if they're correctly made and scripted, they should install with a simple click of a button (ok, a few more clicks if the OMOD is scripted in a way that it needs you to answer questions about your Oblivion install). Better yet, you can remove them with another single click. This is incredibly useful to someone installing a whole bunch of mods, since it allows you to plug them in and unplug them if suddenly your framerates fall off or your game crashes entirely. After about the third mod you install as an OMOD, you'll never install mods any other way.

9.Why not just give links to where these mods are, and let people download them on their own? Many reasons, but we'll start with the obvious: downloading individual mods takes a long time, certainly longer than just a few hours. Once you get the biggest mods, you're doing a lot clicking on each separate mod, you're jumping from one site to another, and one of those sites moves rather slow on download speeds. With POOP you start off by doing the only “fire and forget” move in the installation: you download one massive zip archive. With POOP we also know for sure that you've got the exact version of the mod we're installing that doesn't conflict with other mods.

10.Do I have to read the POOP install documentation? Nope, only do that if you want the game to run when you're finished.

[triggercut]

11.What if something doesn't work or crashes or I just have problems? We have a support site at http://www.poopmods.com. Ask your question there! Or post your question to the RELz thread for POOP in the official forums. Chances are good that we can sort what's gone wrong for you.

12.Are all the mods in POOP up-to-date with the current version? All mods in POOP are current versions as of August 17, 2008. If you see something with a newer later version, we want to hear about it!

13.Don't mods get updated all the time? They sure do, and much moreso than I ever believed when we started discussing POOP. When we contacted modders to secure their permission to include their mods, one of the first things we felt we needed to do was to offer some mechanism to keep the individual mods in the Project updated. That's what the POOP official website at http://www.poopmods.com is for.

14.Speaking of permissions, aren't you guys the jackholes who put out a mod collection earlier this summer without anyone's permission? Yep, that's us! In our own defense, we acted out of ignorance, rather than malice. POOP started out as something for a pretty small group of a dozen or so folks, but it snowballed on us pretty quickly and we got a pretty rapid education in Oblivion Mod Community etiquette.

15.Why isn't [insert favorite mod here] included with POOP? Once again, POOP isn't supposed to be anything more than some baseline mods that our team really likes. It isn't supposed to be definitive or complete or canon or anything else. If you like Bubba's Supercalifragilistic Magic Overhaul, by all means use it yourself, but Team POOP tried to stay pretty much in the realm of generalized mods as much as we could.

[jpinard]

Awesome Trigger!

[JMR]

That's some pretty complex shit there.

[Pogo]

God almighty if someone gets through the whole game without one issue from all those mods, I would be amazed.

Cool work though man, I'm sure a lot of people will be thankful for this, and impressed.

[godhugh]

Originally Posted by Pogo

God almighty if someone gets through the whole game without one issue from all those mods, I would be amazed.

Cool work though man, I'm sure a lot of people will be thankful for this, and impressed.

It's very possible to get through the whole game with those mods, as long as they're properly installed. I'm actually playing through right now with ~200 mods, including FCOM and it works flawlessly.

[krayzkrok]

Sounds like we'd need to buy a new 500Gb hard drive just to have the space to download it onto. What's the total size of v.2?

[Aeon221]

You should change Frequently Asked Questions to Frequently Answered Problems. That way you'll have a section entitled FAP about POOP.

[triggercut]

Originally Posted by Pogo

God almighty if someone gets through the whole game without one issue from all those mods, I would be amazed.

Even un-modded, Oblivion is prone to the occasional crash every now and then. It shouldn't be any more crash-prone with these mods running.

[triggercut]

Originally Posted by krayzkrok

Sounds like we'd need to buy a new 500Gb hard drive just to have the space to download it onto. What's the total size of v.2?

Probably less than POOP v.2. About 3.2-3.4Gb.

[triggercut]

So. Consider this a call to beta testers for POOP v.2!

What I need are 5-10 folks who are willing to start a fresh install of Oblivion and willing to install POOP v.2. I'll get you a direct download link, and you should be able to get the 3.45 gig file that way.

Ideally, beta testers would:

1. Be able to install this by the weekend, hopefully by Friday or Saturday.
2. Give me a good mix of Vista and XP users
3. Be willing to follow the install documentation.
4. Be willing to give constructive, useful criticism of the install documentation and process
5. Be trustworthy to *not* give out the url of the download. If more than 10 folks get on it at this point, it could take down my web server.

Hit me with a PM if interested!

I'll start uploading the POOP file tomorrow.

[slikster]

Nice work. I was thinking of doing something like this myself, but I wanted a way to make omod scripting more streamlined for all the mods, so I started on this
It's a generic omod script where you plug stuff in and it does the auto install thing you were talking about not doing.. kindof :) Anyway, try it out on few files and see if it's something that would help you put it together. I don't have time to do anything else with it, but it's all yours if you want to use it!
Edit: It might have some kinks, I haven't worked on it in months, so I'm a little foggy.

[triggercut]

POOP v.2 is now available via torrent, hopefully just in time for a three-day weekend for some of y'all.

Bleah, tracker killed for one last bugsquish. Back in a sec.

We're also looking at a few direct download solutions as well. Enjoy.

[rrmorton]

Awesome! Happy release day, triggercut.

This time out, we went through a round of beta testing in order to improve the installation process for POOP. Hopefully it'll be smooth and painless.

I've been playing Oblivion plus POOP v.1 (with some additional mods) for months now and I'm still logging a few hours each night. What a brilliant RPG this is when it's custom-tailored for modern rigs and exactly to your liking.

Have fun, people!

[triggercut]

Just killed the torrent, had to make one final goddamned fucking change. Kill your torrent and delete the data folks. Sorry about this.

Back up in a few.

[triggercut]

All fixed.

Get your POOPv2.1 right here:

http://www.legittorrents.info/downlo...2.1%20.torrent

[DarkHorsePlague]

Wow!
This looks great Trigger!
I once went through all of the mod databases and tried installing the best of the best individually through wyre and obmm... and it ended up crashing oblivion all over the place.

I'm quite grateful someone else has gone and done the technical work - I'll let you know how it runs.

[Vincent19]

Sounds like a great collection of mods.

I have a really hard time getting over the name though...

[scharmers]

The whole thing is not being seeded :(

[0racle]

I'm not used to doing torrent downloads so I'm curious. Is it always this slow to do torrents. I download other things just fine. I'm just curious. Thanks

[triggercut]

Originally Posted by scharmers

The whole thing is not being seeded :(

Yes it is.

[Sam Jones]

It's in SuperSeed mode, right? So you look like just another leecher to other leechers?

[triggercut]

There are 15 seeders now, so a moot point.

[EvilIdler]

Just avoid superseed - more trouble than utility overall.

I'll join in on this when I'm done with the Kubuntu KDE 4.1 remix I just started. Maybe I can get it started on a server with more bandwidth, too, for some speedy seeding later on.

[Lum]

Worked great. BTW you HAVE to install Oblivion outside the Program Files directory in Vista or it will crash. (This is an Oblivion issue, not a POOP issue. Though it is poopy.)

One minor correction in your install doc: The GOTY version includes Shivering Isle and Knights of the Nine, but NOT all the various and sundry other DLCs.

[triggercut]

Originally Posted by Lum

Worked great. BTW you HAVE to install Oblivion outside the Program Files directory in Vista or it will crash. (This is an Oblivion issue, not a POOP issue. Though it is poopy.)

One minor correction in your install doc: The GOTY version includes Shivering Isle and Knights of the Nine, but NOT all the various and sundry other DLCs.

Bleah. Moore mentioned that too. I'm still using my old-fashioned KotN disc and didn't know, but thought sure I'd been told that the DLC stuff was on there. My bad.

We did put a "Don't install the game in a Program Files directory" warning for Vista users in the new docs, though.

[0racle]

I just got this installed and I love how this looks. Great job on all your hard work. There is one mod, I'm not sure if you've heard of it or not, but it's great for immersion. Alternate start by Robert Evrae.

It starts you out on a ship arriving in either Imperial City docks or in Anvil. Basically same as your tutorial skip, but you don't have to start in the dungeon at all. So you never were in prison. Solves the story line problem by saying you had a dream about the emporer being assassinated in the sewers and a rat running off with the amulet. You then can go to the sewer, kill the rat and get the amulet.

It also does a few extra things for immersion. It lets you pick a sorts of occupation and based on some answers you give when you fill out your "papers" you will start out with equipment, money, and items per whatever type person you end up being. For instance, you can be a rich snob who comes in with fine clothes and lots of money, a traveling merchant with some wares to sell, a poor beggar, a farmer, a fletcher, and many other options. It's pretty cool.

[rrmorton]

That does sound pretty cool. Our hope at Team Poop is that by the time you're done installing all the mods and utilities we picked, you'll be conversant enough in the process that you'd be able to download and install any mod that sounds intriguing. That way you can custom-tailor it even further to your play-style and mood.

[Sam Jones]

I had a pleasant afternoon pooping myself. I'm only 2/3's done (just installed Francesco's and mulling the player levelling options), but it's been a lot of fun just seeing how the game changes along the way. I have a test save just outside the sewer exit, with which I've been measuring the FPS implications of each major mod, or batch of mods applied. I couldn't use the full AEVWD distance mod - it had a crushing framerate penalty, but the lesser VWD mod looks almost as good, with a much lesser hit.

Looking forward to finishing up tomorrow.