Elderscrolls: OBLIVION ... my new addiction

[Egeides]

Could someone explain how stealing things is implemented in the game? Any fun, and any real use? Games (except Thief) up to now did not seam to make so much of it.

I wont put my teeth in the game any time soon, but maybe some day I'd try a mage... and maybe steal a thing or two ;)

[gunner154]

My goodness, the graphics.... AMAZING!

I seriously need an upgrade. Damn.

[Cyborg]

Gunwounds, take a look at your screenshot #4...

As you can see, the distant land looks very ugly. And the "distant" land isn't very distant, even...

Open your ini file, find and update the following variables to the specified numbers:

uGridsToLoad=9

uExterior Cell Buffer=100

Both values are somewhat lower by default. This will make your game draw detailed textures in a much farther radius from you, to your delight.

The ini file is located in this folder:

C:Documents and Settings(YOUR WINDOWS USRENAME)My DocumentsMy GamesOblivion

[Danuary]

NEW Screenshot with  my black horse... its the best horse in the game...

Here is Magnus on his horse doing some show jumping

http://img140.imageshack.us/img140/3971/oblivion92qj.jpg

;D

Guns

I would hope that those cheats to kill NPCs and increase your blade skill were just used to enhance the screenshot gunwounds.  ;)

BTW has anyone else found the skeleton key?

[Mihail]

I would hope that those cheats to kill NPCs and increase your blade skill were just used to enhance the screenshot gunwounds.  ;)

BTW has anyone else found the skeleton key?

Hee! :D By the way, I think the skeleton key is something you can obtain only by typing in a console code, since being able to get it in the game would make all the dungeons, thieves guild quests much too easy.

[Danuary]

Hee! :D By the way, I think the skeleton key is something you can obtain only by typing in a console code, since being able to get it in the game would make all the dungeons, thieves guild quests much too easy.

Oh but it does, it can unlock anything that doesn't require a key and I didn't get it by cheating.

You could probably get it as a cheat too if you wanted, but you would have to ask gunwounds, he's the expert on that. ;)

I'll post pics of it later along with some other things I picked up in my travels.

[GUNWOUNDS]

Gunwounds, take a look at your screenshot #4...

As you can see, the distant land looks very ugly. And the "distant" land isn't very distant, even...

Open your ini file, find and update the following variables to the specified numbers:

uGridsToLoad=9

uExterior Cell Buffer=100

Both values are somewhat lower by default. This will make your game draw detailed textures in a much farther radius from you, to your delight.

The ini file is located in this folder:

C:Documents and Settings(YOUR WINDOWS USRENAME)My DocumentsMy GamesOblivion

thanks for the tip !

[GUNWOUNDS]

I would hope that those cheats to kill NPCs and increase your blade skill were just used to enhance the screenshot gunwounds.  ;)

BTW has anyone else found the skeleton key?

There is a reasonable explaination for those commands.... you see i had played for like an hour and raised my blade by 3 and killed two minotaur lords but forgot to SAVE.... and then i died !!! ... well i didnt feel like doing it all over again.. so i used console commands to kill the creatures i had just killed and raised my blade skill back up to the 3 points i had earned.  I am not cheating in this game at all i want a pure experience... this game is just freaking amazing.  The skeleton key is unecessary for me as i have pretty good security skill and can pick most hard locks now.  I am almost into the arcane university and will be making some magical unlock spells.  Its really more fun to do things naturally in this game.

Guns

[Dante]

The Skeleton key: [hide]

Can be found by doing a quest for the Daedra Lord Nocturnal. Whose shrine is near the yellow road North from Leyawiin; the one that doesn't pass Bravil. [/hide]

Though I prefer Alteration myself.

[Danuary]

There is a reasonable explanation for those commands.... you see i had played for like an hour and raised my blade by 3 and killed two minotaur lords but forgot to SAVE.... and then i died !!! ... well i didn't feel like doing it all over again.. so i used console commands to kill the creatures i had just killed and raised my blade skill back up to the 3 points i had earned.  I am not cheating in this game at all i want a pure experience... this game is just freaking amazing.  The skeleton key is unnecessary for me as i have pretty good security skill and can pick most hard locks now.  I am almost into the arcane university and will be making some magical unlock spells.  Its really more fun to do things naturally in this game.

Guns

Personally I prefer the skeleton key because after you learn how to pick locks there's no challenge and then it becomes mostly a waiting game.

@Dante do you have the skeleton key yourself? I'm fairly mystified as to why anyone who has ever tried to pick a lock would find high level spells more convenient. If you don't you should try it, it certainly beats having to go into your inventory every time you want to open a chest.

If anyone cares I found a great tweak guide for oblivion here that has alot of info on ini modification and increasing GFX past maximum. I'd recommend all Nvidia users take a look at the coolbits section, its a pretty handy tool and it almost doubled my framerate.

[GUNWOUNDS]

hey cyborg not only did your tip make grass etc, show up farther out.. but it also shows the enemies farther out !.... I sniped a deer with my bow like 200 yards out!  Hehe.  Took me like 12 tries tho to get my bearings, due to the gravity pulling the arrow down... had to find the right angle.  Thanks again.

Personally I prefer the skeleton key because after you learn how to pick locks there's no challenge and then it becomes mostly a waiting game.

@Dante do you have the skeleton key yourself? I'm fairly mystified as to why anyone who has ever tried to pick a lock would find high level spells more convenient. If you don't you should try it, it certainly beats having to go into your inventory every time you want to open a chest.

If anyone cares I found a great tweak guide for oblivion here that has alot of info on ini modification and increasing GFX past maximum. I'd recommend all Nvidia users take a look at the coolbits section, its a pretty handy tool and it almost doubled my framerate.

thanks for the link... oh and about the skeleton key... well the thing is you never know if you might run out of lockpicks due to the fact that they break. Unless you buy like 100 of them, but its still fun to interact with the locks .. if atleast to just role play.. and this is a roleplaying game.  You could argue that killing stuff is a waiting game too so do you want a skeleton sword?  (hehe) :P

Guns

[Cyborg]

Hey, I got some more kick ass ini thingies for you:

The following will fix the blood in the game. Personally, I'm tired of seeing the blood just fade away from plain sight. This little tweak will keep up to 500 blood stains for 20 minutes. I mean, hehe, now we're talking fights.

fDecalLifetime=1200.0000

iMaxDecalsPerFrame=500

Oh, and I guess you, like me, have 2 gigs of RAM? Oblivion isn't very smart, and doesn't take advantage of it unless you explicitly tell it to:

iPreloadSizeLimit = 104857600

That line tells the game to make use of up to a gig of RAM. Normally, it would only use 256 MB...

Ok, the tweaks I have given to you so far are stolen from this site. However, they are the only interesting tweaks. The other tweaks improve frame rate at the cost of visual orgasm.

Btw, if you're looking into ini tweaking, please don't download pre-tweaked ini files. Always tweak your ini file step by step. There are too many ini files out there that crash your game. I had my computer crash completely every third time I went outside from a house. Not fun...

The tweaks I gave you are completely safe. However, I don't know if you've noticed, but the water may sometimes look warped near shore. At least that has happened on my computer before. But it's nothing to talk about.

[Danuary]

thanks for the link... oh and about the skeleton key... well the thing is you never know if you might run out of lockpicks due to the fact that they break. Unless you buy like 100 of them, but its still fun to interact with the locks .. if atleast to just role play.. and this is a roleplaying game.  You could argue that killing stuff is a waiting game too so do you want a skeleton sword?  (hehe) :P

Guns

No thanks, I'll just stick with my Umbra thank you. ;)

But in seriousness, I would take lockpicks over a skeleton key if the act of lockpicking had a stealth element, there were multiple types of lockpicks, there were different kinds of locks with each requiring different strategies, lockpicking had a range element, increased lock difficulty made a difference, you needed a map just to find your way back out, each lock was new and different, lockpicking wasn't so easy, very hard locks did not guard fake weapons or flour, etc.

[Cyborg]

That last thing there is very funny. :P

Sometimes people guard their wheat with the most bad ass locks available.

And another thing which is funny...

Have you noticed, say, a warehouse with lots and lots of crates? And when you look in them, each one contain, like, an apple or a carrot. All that space for nothing.

It's just weird.

[Danuary]

Its segregation obviously, just another way to keep the mandrake roots down! veggies have been oppressed for too long just think, if the leeks could conspire with the tongs, it would be like the 30-year siege of Oscawhatever all over again!

On a slightly more serious note, does anyone else think its funny that one of the hardest enemies in the game is in a place called Vindasel? Or that a land you cannot go to is called Elsweyr?

[GUNWOUNDS]

OMG !.... check this out... i downloaded this texture mod ... its a zip file that contains a texture folder that you insert in your data folder in oblivion... and it replaces the distant land texture with higher res textures... so it it becomes unnecessary to increase the "loadgrid" value in the ini file.  These modders are genius!

check out the screenshots....

1.) new distant grass with mod (absolutely no blurry grass)-->  http://img339.imageshack.us/img339/5143/oblivion139zk.jpg 

2.) without mod (notice the blurry grass to the left of my shield)--> http://img126.imageshack.us/img126/4349/oblivion40qo.jpg

basically what the mod does is simple.. it replaces the 1024 res distant grass texture with 2048 res textures.  Installation instructions are simple.... inside the zip file is a folder named "Textures" ... simply place that texture folder in your Oblivion "Data" folder... thats it !!

And there is no performance hit !!! (if you have a fast computer)

the mod is linked here http://www.tessource.net/files/download.php?id=2182

with this mod the game is basically FLAWLESS NOW!

*does happy dance*

Guns

[Egeides]

Could someone answer me about how stealing works?

For added modesty, here's a quote of myself:

Could someone explain how stealing things is implemented in the game? Any fun, and any real use? Games (except Thief) up to now did not seam to make so much of it.

I wont put my teeth in the game any time soon, but maybe some day I'd try a mage... and maybe steal a thing or two ;)

[Cyborg]

Here's how stealing works:

You walk up to an item, and take it. Congratulations... You've stolen it.

However, to avoid problems with the authorities, you might not want to get caught. So it's a good thing to be good at sneaking, and to know when to steal.

Like, if I want to steal( or literally "clean" ) a shop, I do it at night, because the owner is sleeping, the guards are elsewhere, etc.

[Cyborg]

Oh, and Gun, try this mod:

http://www.tessource.net/files/file.php?id=2415

[Timenn]

Gunwounds, just one thing.

It's a shame about those great screenshots that you export them to jpg format. The screenshots get too blurry. Try to export them to a format like .png, you'll see it really improves the quality.

[GUNWOUNDS]

Here's how stealing works:

You walk up to an item, and take it. Congratulations... You've stolen it.

However, to avoid problems with the authorities, you might not want to get caught. So it's a good thing to be good at sneaking, and to know when to steal.

Like, if I want to steal( or literally "clean" ) a shop, I do it at night, because the owner is sleeping, the guards are elsewhere, etc.

you can steal something during the day with the shop owner in the shop... you just have to hide in the shadows and sneak around the store....but this requires super high sneak skill.

Gunwounds, just one thing.

It's a shame about those great screenshots that you export them to jpg format. The screenshots get too blurry. Try to export them to a format like .png, you'll see it really improves the quality.

yea i know.. but imageshack has a filesize limit on hosting...  PNG's are like BMP's .. just waaaay to big to host.  But hopefully enough detail got thru the JPEG for people to see how amazing the game is.

guns

[GUNWOUNDS]

ok... here are some more screenshots.. this time they are sorta in the shadows with light reflections.... some of these screeshots have the right shadows and conditions for stealing (as was asked about earlier)

Some of the screenshots have a bow & arrow in it... the very last screenshot has my fingers just letting go of the arrow and the arrow is sliding past the bow.  Very cool.

enjoy.....

1.) http://img137.imageshack.us/img137/677/oblivion236zo.jpg

2.) http://img137.imageshack.us/img137/7084/oblivion241yr.jpg

3.) http://img137.imageshack.us/img137/9832/oblivion288wl.jpg

4.) http://img137.imageshack.us/img137/5806/oblivion394mi.jpg

5.) http://img151.imageshack.us/img151/6213/oblivion512rp.jpg

oh and here are some more....

6.) http://img329.imageshack.us/img329/9152/oblivion657ot.jpg

7.) http://img329.imageshack.us/img329/7465/oblivion660aq.jpg

8.) http://img429.imageshack.us/img429/1251/oblivion691zy.jpg

Guns

[GUNWOUNDS]

This is what happens when somebody bumps into me and makes me spill my coffee.

http://img415.imageshack.us/img415/8025/oblivion721tf.jpg

[Mihail]

Gunwounds, what level are you, and what armor do you have? I just started a new game, but before that(In my old save which I still have) I was a level 15 Imperial Bard. :) And I had tons of weapons, armor, books, tons! Shame, though, some of my best stuff dissapeared when I threw it down onto the floor in one of my houses. :- What armor do you have on now? I know you can get the Dremora shield, but where is the armor from? And what sword is that? With my Shortsword of the Inferno, I was doing 18 damage. 8)

Oh, have any of you finished the game yet? I'll tell you this, if you see the end battle like I saw it, but only 10 times graphically better, you will be amazed! Really. :)

[exatreide]

Wow maybe Ishould get a new PC for this game..Maybe.