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The Elder Scrolls Oblivion Tools, Utilities, and Tutorials

Page updated 3rd April, 2006

Dave Foster's Oblivion Tutorials.

The House Mod Tutorial is now completed. This tutorial explains how to set-up a house in the Oblivion Construction Set. The mod places a large, detached residence on the west road leading out of the Imperial City, just up from the Wawnet Inn. The Tutorial takes the beginner through the basics of the editor, the controls, the placement of external objects, the creation and setup of interiors, and more. More importantly, it describes in detail how to connect the external locations to the interior locations, something novices have a lot of trouble with normally. This mod can be downloaded from the mods page. Just click on the link at the top of the page.

Oblivion House Mod Tutorial

This is my Oblivion tutorial for developing a quest in the TES IV Construction Set. It covers all the areas of creating a quest from scratch, including : initialising the quest data, creating the quest stages, setting up the quest targets and writing the quest topics and dialogue. It is somewhat different from the way the Morrowind CS works, but it's not too hard to figure out.

Oblivion Quest Tutorial

This tutorial explains how the Oblivion construction set auto-generates the lush and beautiful scenery for the game. Now, just to clarify a point before we move on - when you play the game, the scenery is not being auto-generated in real-time. As I said, the construction set generates the scenery at the request of the modder, and according to the parameters set for the various elements required by the mod e.g. trees, bushes, rocks, creatures and grass. Thus, the scenery elements become static, embedded objects within the plugin file. It's a very clever scheme, that results in fabulously lush and vibrant scenery in-game, but not at the expense of rendering speed within the Costruction Set ( Morrowind's CS rendering can be painfully slow at times ).

So, how does it work? Well, initially, it's a little confusing, but after a short time it begins to fall into place and rewards patience. I should point out that the generation of scenery to user-requirements is time consuming, depending on how many objects are being requested in total. The more cells and objects included in the request, the more time it takes to compute the results. But, as I state within the tutorial, as long as you are careful in choosing the correct parameters ( I supply a formula, so don't worry ) generation can be fairly quick for moderate numbers of objects. Try it out, it's well worth it; do one cell at a time, then load it into Oblivion and take a walk around your new cell of trees, flowers and wild creatures.

Oblivion Scenery Tutorial

The Elder Scrolls Oblivion Tools

Taken directly from the readme file.

Index:
1. General Issues
2. System Requirements

*****************************************************************

1. General Issues

*****************************************************************

The Elder Scrolls Construction Set allows you to edit and create content
for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is required to create and play content created with
The Elder Scrolls Construction Set. However, the Construction Set will install
and work without the game.

It is strongly recommended that you have at least 2 GB of RAM to use
the Heightmap Editing, and at least 1 GB of RAM for any world and level
building.

Limited user accounts will not be able to use The Construction Set. You must
have administrative rights.

The Construction Set will occasionally appear to hang or lock up while
attempting to exit. Wait 5 minutes. If it still hasn't closed, press
CTRL-ALT-DEL and manually END TASK on the application.

Visit http://cs.bethsoft.com for documentation, tutorials, plugins to
download and more.

*****************************************************************

2. System Requirements

*****************************************************************

-Minimum System Requirements:
* Windows XP
* 512MB System RAM
* 2 Ghz Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent processor
* 8x DVD-ROM Drive
* 4.6 GB free hard disk space
* DirectX 9.0c (included)
* 128MB Direct3D Compatible Video card and DirectX 9.0 compatible driver
* DirectX 8.1 Compatible Sound Card
* Keyboard, Mouse

-Recommended System Requirements:
* 3.0 Ghz Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent processor
* 1 GB System RAM (2 GB of System RAM to use Heightmap Editing)
* ATI X800 series, Nvidia GeForce 6800 series, or higher video card

-Supported Video Card Chipsets:
ATI X1900 series
ATI X1800 series
ATI X1600 series
ATI X1300 series
ATI X850 series
ATI x800 series
ATI x700 series
ATI x600 series
ATI Radeon 9800 series
ATI Radeon 9700 series
ATI Radeon 9600 series
ATI Radeon 9500 series
NVIDIA Geforce 7800 series
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 series
NVIDIA GeForce 6600 series
NVIDIA GeForce 6200 series
NVIDIA GeForce FX series

VIDEO
-Regardless of your video card, make sure to download the latest drivers from your manufacturer.

Oblivion Construction Set

Taken directly from the readme file.

TES4BSA by ghostwheel
March 22, 2006

The Elder Scrolls 4 (Oblivion) BSA file unpacker.

PLEASE, READ THIS FILE ENTIRELY!

This is preliminary version of the TES4 (Oblivion) BSA utility. At this point
it has only command line interface and supports only list and unpack operations.

Full version (once released) will allow creation of BSA files and will have
more user-friendly interface.

This utility performs 2 functions:
1) List content of the BSA file
2) Unpack BSA file into the current directory

This is the very first version of this utility and as such, it lacks many bells
and whistles. More precisely, it has VERY limited functionality and not user-friendly
interface. If you not familiar with command line utilities you better not use it.

Usage:
This is a windows console application, thus, all commands are specified through command line.

1) List files in the BSA archive:
--------------------------------
tes4bsa list
This function will list file names in the archive together with some internal information.

Example:
tes4bsa list "Oblivion - Misc.bsa"

2) Unpack files from BSA archive into the current directory.
-----------------------------------------------------------
tes4bsa unpack

This function will unpack ALL files from the provided BSA archive into the current directory, creating appropriate subdirectories for each file. At this time it is not possible to unpack only certain files - all files will be unpacked always. So, PLEASE MAKE SURE that current directory IS EMPTY before starting unpacking - NEVER do that directly in Oblivion's "Data Files" directory.

Example:
(create Temp directory on the D: drive and copy "Oblivion - Misc.bsa" and tes4bsa.exe into it) (run command prompt)
D:
cd \Temp
tes4bsa unpack "Oblivion - Misc.bsa"

IMPORTANT NOTES

1) Oblivion BSA archives contain spaces in their names - USE QUOTES around such filenames (as shown in examples above)
2) I repeat again - for unpack function it is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED to copy BSA file and utility into the new empty folder and run it there, as described above. That way you will not interfere with your Oblivion installation
3) Some standard BSA archives (e.g. Textures and Meshes) use compression while others (Sounds, Voices, Misc) do not. Please ensure that you have a couple of gigabytes of free space available before unpacking. Unpacking all 6 original OBlivion BSA files will take slightly less than 6 GB.
4) This version of TES4BSA is implented as simple C++ console application with no DLL dependencies (all code, including ZLIB library is statically linked). 5) Program is provided AS IS - so use at your own risk.

TESIV Oblivion BSA Unpacker

A good set of useful Links.

This link points to a new Oblivion site that has only been up a short time. Check it out.

Elder Scrolls Oblivion Site