Oblivion.ini grass range modification by me

Basically, I hated the fact that the ground level foliage (grass/small bushes/plants) were drawn so close to the player - to me it looked stupid with such blatantly noticeable pop-up.

Oblivion recreates its 'Oblivion.ini' file in your 'My Documents/My Games/Oblivion/' folder. Which is why previous attempts to edit the ini file in the Oblivion game directory where failing.

Right, off you go - open the Oblivion.ini file (the one in my documents - feel free to back it up) and find:

fGrassEndDistance=3000.0000
fGrassStartFadeDistance=2000.0000

Don't jump them too high - try 6000.0000 and 5000.0000.

Behold, the lush vedgetation that spreads from your viewpoint. I think it makes Oblivion look more lush.

I am currently using 8000 and 7000.


I am going to have a good nose around at the .ini file - remember it is the one in 'My Documents' that you need to play with.

ARRGH!!!
They put their Ini file in My Documents?
Do they not realize that those are MY documents, and there is a good chance of the stupid thing being deleted when I purge them of junk? (Which I just did to BF2's settings, which somehow appear to have dumped themselves into my Blaxxun Contact folder which for some reason was installed into My Documents).

Surprise, Bethesda!: The folder path to My Documents says "Documents and Settings\me\My Documents". Hm... what does this mean? Perhaps it means that files, which are being written by Oblivion (I'm sure we all agree they are SETTINGS), are actually meant to go somewhere else in "Documents and Settings\me" that isn't called documents.
Hmm... "Application Data", perhaps?

Idiots...

*Sigh*... everyone does this... it's so depressing.




Thanks for the tip :)

Ooooh, more eye-candy.

This time it is the water:

bUseWaterReflectionsMisc=0
bUseWaterReflectionsStatics=0
bUseWaterReflectionsTrees=0
bUseWaterReflectionsActors=0
bUseWaterReflections=1
bUseWaterHiRes=0

CHANGE THE '0s' TO '1s'

Best to save a game where you are near water for this one to test the effect - make sure there is at least one tree near the water though.

EDIT:
I didn't notice any visual difference after setting 'bUseWaterHiRes' to 1 - so if you don't notice much difference probably best to leave that at 0.

Hmm... can't adjust underwater fog through there, unfortunately. (I'm too lazy to find the mod again, and I wouldn't be able to control it enough).
Oh well.

Funny that the only gravity setting is fHorseRunGravity=3.0000


Yay! Water reflects everything now when I set it to work at 10FPS and I run at 640x480 screen resolution :)

Now I've seen how nice draw distant lands can be, and can't possibly turn back to save the screen res.
It is time for a new video card.



Hm... I wonder what bAllowHavokGrabTheLiving does...

Its actually in my documents/my games/oblivion

adding tree shadows and making the water more transparent makes it look much nicer too. Tree shadows are expensive though :)

under [water]

uDepthRange=175

makes the water look much nicer from the external view.

OH MY GOD!!!

I made myself look stupid - in the Oblivion Grahpics Options settings, I didn't know you could scroll down the screen for more graphics options.

I just found loads more slider bars to play with.

The one I did was change

to

Ah, no more jamming space-bar whenever I load up the game now.

I tend not to use mods and what not until I've at least completed the game once, so I've played it the way it was meant to be done, then screw around....though I've yet to see any graphical tweaks you can make that make much a difference without a visual impact besides setting the grass density lower.

Although the second I do beat the game I'm grabbin me that adjusted-water mod.

Well, I just wacked everything to full settings and it runs just as nice as what it did prior to me finding the other 2 thirds of the graphic settings.

No need to buy a new PC yet.

Just found this though:

http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/article.asp?SCID=27&CIID=36222&p=2

this is why I am blowing away my machine today and dropping that 4800X2 and dual 7800GTXs into it. So I can turn EVERYTHING on at 1920x1200. :)

Another great link, puki!

I've found lots of little modifications that won't hurt the gameplay, now...
Had to revert to the original menu, though, because the inventory menu mod forgot to take into account item names that take up more than 1 line.

I now have much more pretty backgrounds, and the water isn't all murky and horrible anymore.
Also, that fancy blood on weapons effect which is nearly invisible because of how quickly the tiny number of blood decals is told to disappear has been made better (they now last 1000 seconds and I have 1000 of them). This makes fight scenes with humanoids rather interesting...

All this with the expense of about 5 FPS when I'm outside, rendering it almost unplayable at 640x480 screen resolution :/ (Yes, I've gone to the edge of sanity to get this game looking nice... my monitor blurring everything at that resolution almost acts as a nice AA filter when I ignore the lost sharpness everywhere else).
I'll see what Medium textures does for it.

I use Better Water - http://www.tessource.net/files/file.php?id=1830


With regard to UI mod, I use 'Larger Inventory v1.8' - not had any problems with it - http://www.tessource.net/files/file.php?id=1883

what did you do to revert back to the old menues pickles? I assume you got the one that came in an exe

I just deleted the Data\menus folder; it wasn't actually there originally. (Defaults must be written somewhere else).
You should back it up, though. Just click and drag onto your desktop first.

Amazing how you missed me telling you bout those.... :P

Be a bit careful, I just quit Oblivion. It gave me an error (like usual) then I got the blue screen of death a few seconds later.

I kept getting "Detecting IDE device..." after I restarted, wouldn't do anything past that until I did a hard boot (switched power off the back)

But my comp is fine now ;)

Im messing around with my own little "mods"

I made this Daedric wanna be and he was really aggressive, started a war in Skingrad :p

Oblivion is all well and good, but crippling my framerate just to display grass? No thanks. I've turned it off and now it's playable.

Dude, you do realize that My Documents is the ONLY safe place to put the file, right? Not everyone is running on the PC as an administrator and can be manipulating data files in the install directory! Plus, you could have multiple user accounts on the machine, and want each of them to have their own INI file!

The stupidest thing a person can do is use an admin account as the everyday user account on their machine. You shouldn't be playing a game, or doing anything but installing software and updates, as an admin. Yeah, I know that it is very common to run as root on Windows machines, which is why Windows machines are always getting screwed.

I hate it, absolutely hate it when some idiot software company desides that they are going to store saved games, or game settings that change, or anything else, in the Program Files directory. This isn't the days of Windows 95, and you shouldn't have to be logged on as root to play a game. Cudos to the guys at Bethesda for actually knowing how a modern operating system is supposed to work.

I'm happy the saves arnt shared between users.

I could so easily accidently overwrite my brothers quicksave or something like that.

As a matter of fact, dumping data in My Documents in the Documents and Settings folder is not how Windows is supposed to be used.
I'm not saying that they should dump it in the game data directory, since having user-owned saves is quite nice a lot of the time. However, the My Documents folder is not the only user-specific folder. There is a much better user-specific directory that is tailored towards software, which is "C:\Documents and Settings\Me\Application Data".

Take a look at it. (Note: It's a hidden folder). You'll notice loads of software using it, and you can be glad that they don't all put their junk in the same place that Oblivion, just about anything published by EA, and Adobe's stuff does. (Which is, for some reason (perhaps the fact that it has been like this for all eternity), the place where my Documents like notes and some personal projects are stored).
If you still need proof that this is the right place, note Microsoft's enormous folder full of lots of stuff.
Other notable things stored here on my end:
-Firefox profiles
-My Games\Civ 4 (wow, 1 single developer did it right... a darn good one, too). Who do I believe?
-Google Earth stuff
-Quicktime stuff
-Macromedia stuff
-The list goes on!

Another place, if Application Data feels unwelcoming, is the folder behind there which is also totally accessible and acceptable to store data in. igLoader, for example, puts files there. As does some Java IDE that I once used, MidnightMarsBrowser, and an installer program.

That is how a modern operating system is organized.
Did software put its junk in My Documents in 95? No.
It sure does it now, though.


If that response was retaliation for me being negative towards Bethesda/Oblivion, I actually really like the game. They just need to explore their Windows directory structure a bit more closely and realize that half of their "My Documents" folder isn't actually theirs.
This isn't just Bethesda, anyway; it's almost every game developer that ever walked the earth. (Developers of other types of applications don't seem quite as bad... except Adobe).



Maybe I should just patent the action of using My Documents to store application data to stop this from happening :P

I like my saves being in the my games folder in my documents. Rather have it there where they are easy to find, so if I uninstall the game or want to back stuff up I don't have to go hunting for them.

oblivion doesn't store everything in my documents - it keeps a list of active plugins in 'local settings/application data', along with a list of your paid for downloaded offical plugins, presumably so that every user of your computer has to pay for them seperately.