That sounds stupid, even to me. I don’t want to fall in love with ATI and not have the motherboard for dual. Guess I need to take my chances with the 7900GTX too.
Please keep the mod recommendations coming. I’m loving the interface once mentioned above. It’s nice to have more than 5 items on your inventory screen at a time!
Agreed. Even nicer…can you link to them? I don’t know if I glossed over it while searching, but I couldn’t find the inventory one (found the others).
If you don’t mind me asking, Athena, what did that horse of a rig set you back?
$3858, and that’s without a monitor, mouse, or keyboard. I’m using my existing mouse/keyboard, and a co-worker is selling me his 24" widescreen monitor.
Direct download link – this one has them all in one installation. More screen real estate on the local & world map view is helpful as well.
Most of the mods are being duplicated simultaneously on both www.tessource.net and http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com. BTmod is the new name of the UI one and is at the moment the definitive one.
Today I installed but haven’t tried The Wilderness Creature List mod (http://www.elderscrolls.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=311838) that should make the wilderness a bit more challenging with the chance of wandering monsters tougher than you. I’m trying to decide if I want the realistic steel weapons/armor (http://www.elderscrolls.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=257679), too. I need to read that entire thread first and see if it’s for me. I think the definitive item leveling mod will likely be PlasticFoamMan’s when he gets it done.
Thanks! I know there’s a whole mod forum over at elderscolls.com, but in addition to the signal to noise ratio issue, I just plain trust my fellow Dopers more. 
I suspect there will be just hundreds of mods coming out over the next few weeks/months, where people fix all the little nitpicky things they dislike about the retail game (the PC’s UI being a great example). It’d be great to know which ones actually work well in practice. The steel one sounds interesting.
DOH! moment:
I’ve been selling off all my magical weapons after they’ve used up their charge figuring they’re useless. I just figured out yesteday that there are dude in the Mage Guilds what will recharge your items for you! Of course I also figured out that it’ll cost like 1000gold. I assume this goes down with mercantile or disposition? Still prohibitively expensive?
A somewhat related question:
What’s the deal with enchantment? Can I take my regular fine steel longsword and give it fire damage and drain health etc.? Exactly how would I go about doing this? Sorry if this was covered in the manual, I must have missed it. As mentioned above, this is my 1st TES game.
I took a look at the UI mod a couple days ago, and the instructions were so long and complicated that I didn’t want to use it. I think the mod needs a UI interface too. :rolleyes:
The direct download link I posted above is an .exe installer. All I did was double click, install, then start the game and it was in there. No further action needed.
I picked up a weird stone in the tutorial dungeon, a soul stone or something. I read that you can use them to recharge magic weapons. I just got the guide yesterday, so it’ll be my main reading until I get my new computer.
Again, assuming it’s pretty much like Morrowind was (the Guide isn’t handy and I haven’t got very far in the game yet):
Soul gems can trap souls of things you slay (monsters, Daedra, animals, etc., but not named NPCs). You cast a spell, and the first thing you slay during the short spell duration is trapped in the gem (provided it fits). The various gems increase in capacity, and the harder monsters require larger gems to be trapped with.
A filled soul gem can be used to enchant weapons, armor, jewelry, and clothing. The available enchantments have varying costs depending on their usefulness and power; and the quality of the item determines how much you can fit into it.
That is, you can’t fit much of a magic bonus into a rusted iron axe, but a Daedric super axe can hold a lot more.
I believe the soul-trapping and enchantment process was a Mysticism skill.
I’m trying to give mods a little time to reach maturity, so I’m only using the simple tweak ones, rather than ones that experimentally rewrite loot tables, etc.
With that said, the “better water” mod on tessource.net is very nice. Less murky, and looks much nicer - reflects things more attractively. Looks more like hl2 water, which is the best water in video games.
tessource.net is being stupid for me, anyway. When I click download a file, it takes me to the login.html page, only to tell me that I’m already logged in. So then I go back, click download, and it does the same thing. I can’t actually download a file - I was able to a few days ago.
Soul trapping is mysticism, but enchanting is now a privilege of the mages guild, like spell making.
You can, however, recharge enchanted items you find by clicking on soul gems when they’re full.
Sorry for the triple post. I thought of something else I wanted to mention right after I’d click post… twice.
Anyway - mods are easy. You get a .esm file… put that in your oblivion\data directory. Then on the game launcher, click “data files” - and you can check and uncheck which mods you want to run.
There is someone working on a Mod Manager, which spots potential conflicts between mods, sorts, etc. Another one in progress (if it hasn’t been abandoned) is a Save Game Manager, which keeps character saves separate, to prevent overwriting a save for the wrong character. Presently I’m managing this using WindowsXP user accounts, one for each family member. That won’t help once we make multiple characters each.
I’m off to read the guide for the first time. It’ll give me courage to press that BUY button on the computer config screen…
Athena, you’re smart to buy the system from Falcon without the peripherals. It’s the speakers, monitors, etc. that are incredibly expensive at that site.
One correction, they’re .esp files (at least they all are at the moment). The .esm are master files.
I think tessource is getting hammered. Even the official boards can’t seem to handle all the traffic.
Here is an excellent article on Optimizing Oblivion. I haven’t tried it yet, but many have.
I’ve read rumors that Bethesda may have hired at least one of the more innovative Morrowind modders as a result of his work on the previous title. True or not, I bet the thought of getting hired onto the next TES title brings out some extra good mods.
I’m loving this game but the Imperial City needs serious expansion. This is an empire that stretches across an entire continent, for pity’s sake. I feel like the whole thing could fit into just a couple of Vivec’s cantons.