== Introduction ==

Inevitably, with the sheer volume and variety of mods from the talented and creative modding community, mods will and do conflict.

Or at least, that's how it appears.

Contrary to the bright red coloring of conflicts in OBMM's conflict reports, not all conflicts are a bad thing. In fact, in many cases, they are very good thing indeed. This is your guide to understanding and interpreting the invaluable Conflict Report so that you can get the very best out of your Oblivion experience.


== [Step One] There is no spoon: Conflicts are not conflicts

I know, crazy! No this isn't reverse pyschology but rather recognising that, even though it's covered in OBMM's readme, the purpose of the conflict reports are still largely misunderstood.


While OBMM looks for and detects two or more mods that alter the same record, what it can't do is determine if this is a conflict of interest or not. In some cases, a conflict actually shows that two mods are working as they should.

A great example is, and to draw on my own work, the Cats & Rats mod. In order to prevent guards attacking cats, a short piece of code is added to the guards. Because mods like OOO, Francescos and others alter guards as well, guards from these mods were imported into Cats & Rats. If you were to run a conflict report, it would be filled with potential red conflicts over the NPC entries for guards -- but these are not actual conflicts. In fact, if the conflicts didn't exist, Cats & Rats would not work properly and you'd have cities full of poor dead kittens :/

Another example is Mighty Magic and, well, just about any mod that alters creatures and spells (OOO, Francescos, MMM etc). Does seeing a long list of red conflicts mean your game will break or you can't use the mods together? Not at all. Why? Because, again, the conflicts are not actual conflicts -- there is no spoon -- they are potential conflicts. That Mighty Magick alters some settings on top of those you might find in OOO or Francescos is entirely the point -- that's why you're loading the mod!

If you decided not to use a mod because you saw red conflicts, you would be missing out on a better Oblivion experience, and all for nothing.

These are just two examples of many many mods out there -- as stated earlier, the sheer volume and creativity of the modding community means mods frequently, regularly, and like clockwork will show up conflicting in the conflict report -- even when they actually don't.

--
DragoonWraith -- "I think the best term to refer to "conflicts" would be "overlaps" as this is by far the best succinct description of what's going on between the mods." Spot on!
--

So how do you know if a conflict will prevent two mods working together, or enable them to do so?


== [Step Two] Interpreting conflicts: It's up to you

OBMM is a tool that works in black and white -- it can tell you when two or more mods alter the same record, but it can't tell you what this means. Without intepretation, the conflict report is just a bunch of colored lines.

So how do you work out what the conflicts mean? There's two ways of finding out -- the easy way, and the fun way!

1] The easy way: Ask for help

Not everyone likes to play with the CS, so it's perfectly ok if you just want to be sure everything will work fine without delving into it all. Pop into the official thread and ask about the conflicts you've seen -- and don't paste the entire conflict report.

Other users, and especially the mod author, will be more than willing to clarify what you're seeing and either put your mind to rest, or offer advice on what, if anything, you can do.

2] The fun way: Work it out for yourself!

If you want to learn more about how mods work, or if you're always been curious but haven't had the chance to explore, read on. Working it out can be broken down as follows:

* First, if you're not familiar with the mods in question, read their READMEs. You cannot interpret a conflict report without knowing what the mods are supposed to do. If don't like reading READMEs, this path isn't for you

* Once you know what the mods do, look at the report -- you can completely ignore green and yellow conflicts, just focus on the red. Take a look at the records being altered and, from what you understand the mod is trying to do, decide wether the conflicting records will cause a problem, or in fact are intentional. You can work out, based on the purpose of the mod, the type of changes its trying to make to the record entries. But what do all those abreviations mean?

NPC_ - NPC entry
CONT - Container
GMST - Global setting
DIAL - Dialogue
INGR - Ingredient
CREA - Creature
CSTY - Combat Style
CELL - Interior cell
WEAP - Weapon
ARMO - Armor
AMMO - Ammo
CLOT - Clothes
SCPT - Script
SGST - Sigil stone
WRLD - World space
MISC - Misc items
SPEL - Spell
LVLI - Item level list
LVLC - Creature level list
BOOK - Please

These are a sample, there are quite a few more, but you get the idea

Now, it won't always be clear the type of change a mod makes unless you open it up in the CS and look at the entry, which of course you can do. But again, you don't have to -- the author of the mod knows better than anyone else the records the mod changes and why, and will be able to answer if a given conflict is actual or not.


== [Step Three] Resolving actual conflicts: It's in the load order

When you have two mods that alter the same record, and it's not a case of intentional overlap, then only one mod or the other will have its changes show up in the game. This is not necessarily bad thing, it just means you have to decide what you want in your game. There are two options here:

1] Use one or the other mod: Sometimes, that's just the way it's gotta be. Check with the mod author to be sure the two are mutually incompatible.

2] Adjust the load order: There's about a thousand examples of this, but lets use Mighty Magick again -- Mighty Magick alters the summonable creatures to the authors view of what they should be. It obviously will conflict with most mods that also alter summonable creatures, like OOO.

Is this a game-breaking conflict? Not at all -- loaded after OOO, the creatures Mighty Magick changes take priority over those in OOO, but the creatures Mighty Magick doesn't change show through from OOO before it. This doesn't mean it's a match made in heaven though -- if the differences between the two mods are, say, the strength of the creature then you simply get MM's balance on what this should be. If the differences are what the creature carries in its inventory, then you'll be getting what MM puts in there instead of OOO. However the differences are contained, and nothing stops the rest of the two mods working together beautifully. This is why it helps to understand what a mod does and what conflicts mean -- so you can decide for yourself which ones you want to take priority.

The bottom line is, for the majority of cases, two mods that alter similar properities in the game can and usually do work together, so you can have (most of) your cake and eat it too. Oh, there is one other option -- mod merging. Rather than overlapping mods you can merge two or more together and, for the most part, the records from both are combined -- in the Mighty Magick example, this might mean getting the inventory of OOO in appearing in MM's creatures, for eg. Merging, however, is beyond the scope of this piece (though I could easily write a guide here too).


== Conclusion ==

If you love your mods enough to download and install them, love them enough to understand what they do, and you will never have a problem with conflicts. In summary:

* OBMM reports possible conflicts not actual conflicts
* Conflicts mean nothing without interpretation
* Understand what the mods do, and the nature of the conflict
* Ask for help in official threads if you're unsure about a conflict

And, when you ask for help in threads, for the love of the nines don't post the entire damn report, just one example of each type of conflict is more than enough.

Finally, this piece is by and for the community -- additions, updates, fixes, and omissions welcome. Oh yes, and the CMG is just a bit of fun

Bravo sir, bravo.

Now there is an easy URL to point all those threads to that arise about this subject daily.

By the way, I think the best term to refer to "conflicts" would be "overlaps" as this is by far the best succinct description of what's going on between the mods. Even better than "potential conflicts", in my opinion, because that might imply that OBMM is going to report all potential conflicts - which it's not going to do.

Well said.

Tex

Wow, that is a very nice summary that is going to be VERY useful to refer people to. Kudos!

Also I agree with DragoonWraith about calling them "overlaps" - it's what they really are (generally), and the term raises far fewer alarm bells.

Good point! I agree, will update the OP.

Kudos to you for this. Will be useful for me.

This had to be done - enough "this be OOO compatible?" posts.
Thanks!

i agree with xanias. i also request this to be pinned. many people use the OBMM and their "OBMM Help" kind of threads get annoying over time.

I don't think mods are in the habit of pinning threads, no matter how valuable they are.

At least it's here to be linked. Might be worth putting in a sig...

This is awesome, Martigen.

Are you planning to post this in a more permanent spot? Like maybe the CS Wiki? Maybe you already have?

I'd love to add a link to this article from within the Oblivion Mods FAQ, but I'm always hesitant to add links that will expire at some point.

Thanks!


You might also want to add some of the additional details from motub's recent post on this same subject.

this is not a mod, is a kind of FAQ

If this isn't stickied, maybe it could be added to the FAQ?

not a bad idea... not at all... it should be added to the FAQ as many people ask "will this conflict with xyz?" and make new threads about it.
i'll add it to my sig

Thank you for this post! I sincerely hope that everyone who needs to read this, does so. I got very tired seeing all of the overreactions to conflict reports in this forum. Too many people reacted to conflicts the same way that otherwise normal people react to viruses. If you believed some of the people here, you'd think that having a conflict was equivalent to catching malaria, or the bubonic plague.

Will update with Motub notes tomorrow, looks like a lot of good info there.

For the wiki, I didn't know I could add to that! Happy for someone to do that, might be worth waiting until more people have given input (like Motub's) so we can get a definitive guide that covers all bases.

sigged.

damn, someone fired some Bullets Unto My Prizehog, to make this thread go UP so that everyone would read it (discrete, wasnt it? )

In my opinion, this should be added to the Oblivion Mods pinned FAQ! Great work!

Okay, here's the first draft: Understanding Mod Conflict Reports

Just log right in and tweak it to your heart's content.

I also added a link to that version of the article from the Checking_Conflicts section of the Oblivion Mods FAQ. For now I only did this in the CS Wiki version of the FAQ, but I'll add it to the other versions as well once you're happy with it.

Thanks Martigen for doing so much research and putting so much time so we can enjoy Mods even more then we already are.

Well, thanks guys (and thanks, dev_akm for noticing and linking to my post-- I kinda wanted to show up here earlier and bump, since this should really stay accessible, but I couldn't figure out how to say "Five minutes after I wrote all that, and you post this thread???!! Why couldn't you have been 10 minutes faster, blast it??!!!" without sounding either vain, snarky, or both , which would not have been my intention ).

Putting it on the wiki is of course a great idea, though naturally there's plenty of new users (and probably some long-term ones as well) who don't even notice the stickies at the top of the forums, much less know about the wiki-- but we can only do what we can do.

So thanks, Martigen for going that extra mile.

EDIT: I think I'll practice my Wiki skills by adding an edited version of the post at the end, as an addendum for those who want to know why this all happens. Reading my post as compared to yours, Martigen, mine is much more 'geeky' in many respects-- which is not necessarily a bad thing, especially for those who retain information better in context than when simply 'following instructions', but on the other hand, the 'jargon' has been known to freak people out simply by the fact of its existence, so I think an addendum is best; read it if you want, skip it if you want.

Sound OK?

No that sounds fine Motub.

I haven't had a chance to go over this today, work and MMM interrupted, but I'll take a look at the wiki before the weekend and update where necessary. If it's easier to keep the two posts seperate, that's fine, whatever will help people best.

Sweet! It looks very good, and I think it works fine as an addendum to Martigen's piece. I did tweak a few things (added some subsection headers), but feel free to continue tweaking it however you like.

Excellent stuff here guys.
Hopefuly this will reduce reduce the number of "is it compatible" threads.

Thanks, dev_akm-- the subsection headings help a lot with clarity. I couldn't figure out a good way to break it up myself; thanks for doing it for me.

Okay, I will go ahead and start adding the links into all versions of the Oblivion Mods FAQ.

Just gave the wiki a read, that's perfect dev_akm, and motub's addition is excellent.

I have nothing else to add, and unless others want to provide comment we can update the wiki with, I'd say it's a pretty comprehenive resource on the topic.

Have a bump for a thread thats useful to modders and mod users alike!

Awesome! Then I will start adding that link to other versions of the FAQ as well. Thanks, man!

Thankyou for putting our work up there and making it look all sexy like

Hey guys, i suggest adding this to the FAQ and i also BUMP this because it's really necessary. I even sigged it

Heck yeah.

BTW, if you have any suggested revisions for the Checking Conflicts section of the FAQ (where your link lives), by all means let me know.

Nope, no suggested changes, looks good

And yes, I'm bumping this, as topics are again appearing about conflicts and how to handle them.

Bump for great justice (dunno what that means, but I think it sounds just sooo cool )-- and because you just never know whether someone's around who might need to see it.

What she said

Keep alive because it keeps on cropping up.

Not to pick on HTF, which I am definately not because I was gonna post this anyways - just quoting him gives me a nice introduction..

With all these heavy hitter modders chiming in.. I certainly hate to be the single cloud in this otherwise perfect day.. but... well I will be..

While everything that you say is true - and perfectly aimed towards the portion of the community that hasn't considered opening up CS but is concerned with conflicts - I feel as though there should be a portion which is dedicated to us aspiring modders (I know I know there are lots of modders etiquette threads, but who actually reads them until they feel comfortable modding, and by then it is mostly too late)... Something regarding how it is better for modders to try to not make these red entries because it leads to their mod being in danger of being "over-written" by another mod.. and that if the mod must make red entries that they should be explained - i.e. like how MMM tells its users that the creatures are modified. Might seem obvious - but it is easy to change game settings and not warn people of them.. Just my input.

^^^ to help save aberneth's sanity

thanks martigen, i will definatly point a few people here. one of the ideas that alot of people miss comes from the "conflict detector" being a slight bit misleading......renaming it "shared resource detector" is a bit longer but much more descriptive to its actual use.

with the 4000+ mods floating around out there we definatly have reason to try and resolve issues between the multitude of mods we all use.

I'm just getting ready to play Oblivion for the first time (heavily modded of course), and I'm running into seemingly major OBMM conflict detection issues. I've loaded only a few mods that I know don't conflict, and already the entire screen is filled with red conflict reports. Even when I only loaded the official plugins and the Unofficial Patch, I had a lot of red lines (ridiculous). I only add OOO on top of that and I get a whole bunch of additional red lines. I know there aren't any actual conflicts except one that is fixed by the Unofficial Patch's fix (yes, the horse armor one). I only installed the official plugins + Unofficial Patch + OOO 1.31 so far. I have dozens more to go, and I'm afraid to proceed. If I'm seeing so many red lines already with so few mods loaded and no actual conflicts, then when there actually is a real conflict, there will be no way for me to find it in that mess of red lines - a veritable needle in a haystack. I already have maybe 32 (!!) pages of red lines to look through from these alone. The conflict detector is effectively USELESS. Is this normal? Do I have something set up incorrectly?

Note, there is only one green line in my entire 32 page mess and no yellows. I am not talking about blue or green or yellow lines here (those make up maybe only about 4 lines or so). I'm talking about 32 pages of RED lines. I know there are no conflicts here. I just have no idea how I'm supposed to spot a REAL conflict out of possibly 1000 pages of false conflict reports after I'm done adding maybe a hundred mods. The tool seems completely useless to me, unless I'm missing something. What's funny is how OBMM reports conflicts between OOO Lite's own modules.

Here is a sample entry (all red lines except the first black line):

[OOO-Potions.esp] (unparented) - Active
EDID 'ChestVendorAlchemyPotionsHighG01' of record type CONT conflicts with 1 other plugin.
Oscuro's_Oblivion_Overhaul.esp (Record type: CONT) (Unparented) (Active)
EDID 'ChestVendorAlchemyPotionsHighI01' of record type CONT conflicts with 1 other plugin.
Oscuro's_Oblivion_Overhaul.esp (Record type: CONT) (Unparented) (Active)
EDID 'ChestVendorAlchemyPotionsLowG01' of record type CONT conflicts with 1 other plugin.
Oscuro's_Oblivion_Overhaul.esp (Record type: CONT) (Unparented) (Active)
EDID 'ChestVendorAlchemyPotionsLowI01' of record type CONT conflicts with 1 other plugin.
Oscuro's_Oblivion_Overhaul.esp (Record type: CONT) (Unparented) (Active)
EDID 'ChestVendorAlchemyPotionsMedG01' of record type CONT conflicts with 1 other plugin.
Oscuro's_Oblivion_Overhaul.esp (Record type: CONT) (Unparented) (Active)
EDID 'ChestVendorAlchemyPotionsMedI01' of record type CONT conflicts with 1 other plugin.
Oscuro's_Oblivion_Overhaul.esp (Record type: CONT) (Unparented) (Active)
EDID 'DarkSellChest' of record type CONT conflicts with 1 other plugin.
Oscuro's_Oblivion_Overhaul.esp (Record type: CONT) (Unparented) (Active)
EDID 'DarkSellChestUnderling' of record type CONT conflicts with 1 other plugin.
Oscuro's_Oblivion_Overhaul.esp (Record type: CONT) (Unparented) (Active)
EDID 'PotionRestoreFatigue' of record type ALCH conflicts with 1 other plugin.
Oscuro's_Oblivion_Overhaul.esp (Record type: ALCH) (Unparented) (Active)
EDID 'PotionRestoreFatigueS' of record type ALCH conflicts with 1 other plugin.
Oscuro's_Oblivion_Overhaul.esp (Record type: ALCH) (Unparented) (Active)
EDID 'PotionRestoreFatigueW' of record type ALCH conflicts with 1 other plugin.
Oscuro's_Oblivion_Overhaul.esp (Record type: ALCH) (Unparented) (Active)
EDID 'PotionRestoreHealth' of record type ALCH conflicts with 1 other plugin.
Oscuro's_Oblivion_Overhaul.esp (Record type: ALCH) (Unparented) (Active)
EDID 'PotionRestoreHealthS' of record type ALCH conflicts with 1 other plugin.
Oscuro's_Oblivion_Overhaul.esp (Record type: ALCH) (Unparented) (Active)
EDID 'PotionRestoreMagicka' of record type ALCH conflicts with 1 other plugin.
Oscuro's_Oblivion_Overhaul.esp (Record type: ALCH) (Unparented) (Active)
EDID 'PotionRestoreMagickaS' of record type ALCH conflicts with 1 other plugin.
Oscuro's_Oblivion_Overhaul.esp (Record type: ALCH) (Unparented) (Active)
EDID 'PotionRestoreMagickaW' of record type ALCH conflicts with 1 other plugin.
Oscuro's_Oblivion_Overhaul.esp (Record type: ALCH) (Unparented) (Active)

Actually, if you read the Wiki page, and thought about the UOP and what it does, you would see that it's not ridiculous at all-- in fact it's both expected and normal.

The UOP fixes stuff that's broken in the regular game, and at least one of the Official Plugins (Horse Armor), and possibly more of them (I think there were some ... issues.... with Frostcrag as well).

Since every change to Oblivion.esm registers as a conflict in OB terms (mods may use the resources it represents, not change them-- who do these smart-aleck plugin files think they are, treating the master this way?), I'm sure that even the official plugins show a lot of red conflicts, and certainly the UOP, which is designed to fix stuff (which of course means changing stuff) will.

It's supposed to.

Frankly, I think the whole mod encapsulation thing has backfired to some extent (a rather large extent, actually)-- not because it doesn't work (it does, kinda, in a certain respect), but in the sense that because red conflicts are more often meaningless than not (the UOP shows that it's working properly by producing a lot of major conflicts, which is completely counterintuitive), the fact that mod encapsulation produces them anyway makes it harder to stabilize your game in the event of a real conflict (because you can't find the real conflict among the false positives), at which point one has to start wondering whether this functionality is really any use at all (given that whatever limitations Beth may have thought that encapsulation would put on modder's creativity, which would have enabled m.e. to work in some practically useful way for the 'average user'... well, that didn't work out at all. Modders are never going to color inside the lines ).

So it's really not the conflict detector's fault; it does the best it can, and at least somewhere in that 32 pages, you will be able to find the information you need, if you find you have an actual problem.

But the conflict detector is, because of the way Beth has structured conflicts between mods in the first place, not the first line of defense as you would normally think. It's not even the second line (the fallback position). It's more like what you use when you find something wonky happening in the game and you cannot for the life of you figure out which mod or mods are causing it, or why. In fact, your first line of defense is reading your readmes and predicting based on that where the mods you're using are likely to collide, and the fallback position is playing the game and looking for wonky things that fall outside your predictions. At this point, the conflict detector becomes about as useful as can be hoped-- at the moment when you need to know which mods you have loaded change GREETINGS, because a mod-added NPC doesn't have any topics in conversation, which you know means that you've hit the GREETINGS/Add Topics bug, but don't know which mod or mods might be so plagued. So it's pretty easy to identify which 5 mods out of your loaded 150 change GREET, using the conflict detector, and then you've cut your workload down by quite a bit.

So it can be useful. But make no mistake, the fact that you will get red conflicts because one mod you loaded adds Argonian hairstyles and another one you've loaded adds Khajiit eyes is not the fault of the conflict detector, and it's not a bad thing that the conflict detector tells you about this, even though it's meaningless (false positive). It's way better that you should have these vast swaths of information to sift through if you need to, than that you need to, and you don't have it.

The fact that you'd better be wearing your waders before diving in is an unfortunate side-effect of Beth's design decisions as to how Oblivion would 'relate' to third-party plugins... and yet, we have them anyway, and we're doing all right, actually. Most red conflicts are meaningless. Most plugins work in concert with each other quite well, despite what the conflict detector would suggest.

So relax. Think of it like a head wound-- bleeds a lot, but quite often not nearly as dangerous as you'd think, with all that blood!!

Hope this helps to reassure you to some degree.

[Cross-posted in the [relz] Oblivion Mod Manager, Thread 10 thread.]

[From the same OBMM thread as Motub]


Whoa whoa whoa, what now? No, that's not how it works at all. You can change data from an .esm in your .esp all you want. That's actually what they're designed for. No, a conflict is when two (or more) .esp's change the same thing from the .esm. Then Oblivion finds that it cannot apply both changes (this .esp says the iron sword should do 3 damage, and this one says 4? What do I do?), and so it just applies whichever was loaded later (so the conversation would be more like "OK, the esp says iron swords do 3 damage. doo-doo-doo OK, this esp says iron swords do 4 damage".

Of course, the real problem is, you can't change just the damage. Let's assume that the base stats for an item are like this:
Name: Short Sword ; Damage: 3 ; Reach: 0.8 ; Speed: 1.2 ; Value: 80 ; Weight: 10

And a mod wants to change the damage to four. The author goes into the item, and changes the 3 to a four. Then he clicks save, and when Oblivion reads it, it will see that the Short Sword should now be this:
Name: Short Sword ; Damage: 4 ; Reach: 0.8 ; Speed: 1.2 ; Value: 80 ; Weight: 10

If another mod wants to change its weight to 8, the author goes to the same object in the esm, and changes the 10 to an 8. He clicks save, and now Oblivion will see its stats as this:
Name: Short Sword ; Damage: 3 ; Reach: 0.8 ; Speed: 1.2 ; Value: 80 ; Weight: 8

Herein lies the problem. As you can see, even though each author only changed one stat, the esp saved all of the stats. If the second plugin is loaded second, the Short Sword would have a damage of 3 and a weight of 8, not a damage of 4 and a weight 10 like the first author intended, nor a damage of 4 and a weight of 8 like one might hope. That is a conflict.


Err... Mod encapsulation is a separate issue. In Morrowind, if mod A had a global variable X, and mod B had a global variable called X, in game both would be the same thing, and so scripts from both could change the same variable. That could be dangerous, of course, but it also allowed communication between the two scripts.

(this was also true of non-variables - B.esp could have a script that referenced A.esp's weapon or something, if you messed with the load orders right, but that isn't nearly as useful)

In Oblivion, all objects, including global variables, are actually called by their FormID - instead of X, Oblivion actually thinks of your variable as D100001AE or something. Since the first two characters are the mod's ID based on its load order, it is impossible for two mods to have access to the same variable. That is mod encapsulation, and yes, in my opinion, it backfired. But it has nothing to do with conflicts (other than the example of what was often in Morrowind an 'intentional conflict').


This is true. That's why I suggest only checking the conflict detector after you know you have a problem. It'll save you time, plus you'll know what to look for if you have to.


This is exactly what I'm talking about, I like your wording of this, Motub. Much clearer than I have been.


Aye.


Actually, at least some of this could be improved. For instance, some conflicts ought not appear, because they never mean anything (cannot mean anything), and so they should not appear as red conflicts.

On the other hand, the fact that an esp does not save individual stats, but whole items, is a problem in Beth's decision. I suspect, however, that there were memory and performance considerations here.


It did, I think...


But you also have some false information in there, so I think I will be too.

Timely bump!

There is a revolutionary new version of Wrye Bash out that has a leveled list merger program. He finally got it to work with Oblivion. He was the god for Morrowind and now he has finally brought his programming genius to Oblivion.

This should really change things. The only thing I wish is that he had his program work with NPC changes too so that we can use beauty mods with mods that modify NPC behavior

Thanks for this helpful piece! One question, though. Is there a way to change the color scheme of this board which I don't know? In almost all of your posts, and in some other people's too, you use this blue text for headlines that I can't read for the life of me over the green background.

The original color of the board was Tan until it got hacked. You can set it back to Tan in the drop down box in the bottom left corner of the site.

^ bumpage for timeless information ^

Ok, I have sort of a newbish question here, but I would like to ask it none the less. Are the top mods loaded first, or are they superimposed? - Meaning theyre loaded from the bottom of the list first.

In short: Top loads first.

In long: I assume when you write "the list" you mean a list of mods sorted by filedate, with older files on top and newer on bottom (like shown by OBMM). Windows Explorer can be used for this as well, just set to Detailed view and sort by date.

There is one exception to the rule: .esm files load before .esp files, no matter the date. So first the oldest esm is loaded (should be Oblivion.esm), then all other esms sorted by date, then the oldest esp etc. This gets important if one esm is newer than some esp, but is still loaded earlier regardless of the date.

Example:

ESM1 - April 2006
ESM2 - November 2006
ESP1 - June 2006
ESP2 - August 2006

Above is the order they are loaded. Note ESM2 is younger than ESP1 and ESP2, but loaded first.


The very good original post should be distributed together with OBMM and the ConflictDetector. All those unreflected "I have a conflict cuz ConflictDetector shows it read!" is getting annoying.

That's actually a really good idea, or at least some form of it (perhaps the wiki version with Motub's additions instead). I'll PM Timeslip and see what he thinks.

Bump because this still confuses people.

Why isn't this a sticky yet?

Question came up again.

Bumping again.

Question asked again, bumping again.

very informative

what you talkin bout willis?

Say WHAT?

Question raised again, bumping again.

Excellent Information Martigen!

One question; you commented in your OP that you *could* write a guide on mod-merging. I'm wondering if you ever have? I would love to read such a document. I find the CS to be a bit overwhelming so I haven't tried to figure out merging on my own.

Regards,
Chris

ive never seen this much interactivity, feedback and responses between the creators for any online/game community and its fans/users in my entire history of gaming, which started in the eaaarly 90's. ive always been a leecher, never been too involved, never contributed.... never really cared. if i spotted bugs or had a solution to something, id fix it for my selfish self, then think... "good luck! someone will help ya someday", even after reading the desperate cries from poor lost souls pleading for help because they just want something really cool to work for them too. Better them than me is what id say when civilization wasnt listening. (still do..... but shhhhh....).

i've got to admit, not only do these individuals respond to suggestions, criticisms and requests, but they are extremely humble and polite about it. that shows a lot of class.


dev_ak47withanextenedclip's website... pretty much explained to me... as you would to a two year old child... in very simple language with step by step intsructions... how this game engine works, how it runs mods, and how to get them running properly. as if that wasnt a nice enough thing to do, he/she/it is extremely active on these forums (along with mart and countless other drug dealers, i mean mod makers) and provides countless tips and answers even to the most unpleasant people that many would see as a waste of board space (or flesh), just so we can get further more addicted to our gaming paradise.


the websites along with the involvement all the creators is really essential to this series, especially considering how crappy the retail game is (no offense bethesd..d--d-d-d-!%&$). Honestly, could any of us seriously picture playing t 1ce2 his ....sandbox.... after being exposed to the mods created for it? Hahah, that actually made me laugh. Damn. Thanks to modders, i can barely remember what a huge slow paced world this sandbox used to be...the emotional depressing elevator soundtrack even Kenny G frowned at, the disgustingly empty roads for miles on end with nothing more than a mudcrab or two to bully as you take a G-Rated stroll through the real oblivion, Tamriel. It was a an empty MMRPG (which ive never tried) for single player, at least in the eyes of this FPShooter it was. Not inside this PC, I'll pass. I havent even played an FPS for over 4 months now...... Blasphemy!


not only are you guys saviors, but you also gets tons and tons of PC newcomergamers ..... and veterans alike to expand their knowledge and customizability options/solutions further than many people may think they are capable of. and of course bethes.,..beth... b...b...bethffphtdta softworks gains even more clientele ....the shows keeps moving along, and we all get to have fun instead of a disappointing meaningless experience that leaves the addict, i mean user craving for more. another "it coulda been cool" game brushed through in 8-12 hours......and i called in sick at work for THIS? if anything, the number of options is sometimes overwhelming now, thank god for that. i wish i had money to pay you.

i find it impressive.

all i'm trying to say is........... thanks. Patience is hard-coded into your genes.


so theres my contribution, a BIG FAT THANK YOU.


Now if you dont mind, its time for me to binge on Oblivion a bit more. Please remind me to feed the dog sometime this week. I hate getting up from my chair to feed it, what an annoyance.

The thankyous are appreciated by all involved

I would like to put in a plug for TES4View. This utility helped me immensely in understanding mod conflicts in the mods I use. OBMM is nice but when you see hundreds of conflicts it is too overwhelming for most of us to cope with or even begin to understand what we are looking at. With TES4View you can see exactly the conflicts and what they are doing and exactly what is being overwritten. For example, I had no idea that TNR Bashed patch was reverting NPCs that Fran's had tweaked, like the Arena for example, back to vanilla. Having no clue as to how mods are structured I assumed that all TNR did was change the faces. Now I know different and thanks to TES4View I have some understanding of mod structure and all it took was five minutes.

Yep that's good advice -- any tool that helps you *understand* what records are replacing others will help you understand wether this intended (some are supposed to be there) or not, and if the latter help you prioritise your mod load order.

As an aside, Bash has a feature that should merge TNR's faces without changing other statistics.

Thank you Martigen for the hint, leveled NPCs, checked with TES4View and everything is right. Took about two minutes, and I was thinking I had to go to all the trouble of editing TNR in CS.

Bump...to save... from the dreaded ...

Wow, never saw this thread before, thx

alot of Martigen old thread can no longer be found, this is one of the few that I could find, very useful information...you are welcome...