I don't think many of you will remember me... I've been silent on these boards for a few months now, just reading random threads now and then whenever Mr. Notifier tells me about new posts on some really oooold threads.
But I couldn't help but making myself
And this remark from Smivs touches the very heart of the matter of why I've been absent from the forum AND from Oolite gaming...Smivs wrote:The problem is scale...there are so many OXPs with so many features! And I don't suppose anybody knows in detail what each and every one does.
You see, a few months ago my wife got (from myself...
) a brand-new quadcore notebook, with a more-or-less capable GPU. Since then I've been borrowing it on a "few" 
occasions in order to play an ooold beast of a game, one that I hadn't ever had a chance to lay my hands on a piece of HW capable enough to make it dance... and that is Bethesda's Oblivion.While the modding capabilities of Oblivion were unknown to me when starting playing it, I got quickly engulfed in applying mods, and am now using around 60 of them.
The fun and awesome thing about Oblivion is its very long life span - it's about 6 years old now, but there's a loyal crowd of gamers and modders which, up to this late date, keep updating mods and unofficial patches. The latest version of the grandpa of these patches (this one) fixes now over 2,300 bugs
and has yet another update due later this month.But WHAT does all this have to do with Smivs' remark ? It's simple. One of the efforts of the Oblivion mod community is an utility called BOSS (here), which defines an ordering sequence for all known mods. In simple words, it rules which mod earns the right to override whichever other mod. It's meant to be applied over yet another mod compatibilization tool (I won't bother you guys with more links !!!
), and has a masterlist file which is updated weekly. My latest version is from 2 days ago and contains over 22,000 lines - one for each known mod.22,000 mods ???
You'll think I'm kidding, right ? OK, so head over to the home page of http://nexusmods.com/ and it's shown there squarely - there are close to 28,000 downloadable files for Oblivion alone. Skyrim follows it closely in 2nd place, and should overtake Oblivion any time now (since it's barely 1-year-old and it's already at the 23,000-mod mark).While it's not my intention to humiliate Oolite and it's
(I've had my share of fun with the game and its ), I've just been to the OXP_List page and counted 475 
And while we're here - the mandatory shameless plug for my single
Now, I must be sincere. Every single new mod that I apply to Oblivion requires a HUGE effort in reading READMEs and researching forum threads, in order to iron out the most common compatibility issues with whatever other mods I might have. And that's not even mentioning the occasions where some mod has to be manually repackaged in order to make it compatible with some other different mod-applying utility.
But actually, believe it or not - and call me a masochist if you will
- I draw more enjoyment in fitting together the pieces of that gigantic puzzle than in actually playing the game. And the time proportions allotted to actual gaming and to stitching mods together follow the same principle... BTW, should anyone's mouth be watering by now: I hear Steam is having a sale and you could grab a copy of a GOTY Oblivion edition for almost nothing.
But space simmers aren't usually fantasy RPG'ers... While on another front - which has also to do with the first sentence of this post - I'm following **THIS** very closely...
... stay tuned !!!So, have a great [end of] time y'all.
Cheers
sdrubble
EDIT: added the mandatory shameless plug for my single