Old blog posts from September 2006

24th of September

obmm 0.9 is out at last. Sorry ‘bout the delay. I still have the same old excuse that work was getting in the way. I only have 1 week left before uni restarts, after which I’m officially only allowed to work 15 hours a week anyway, so I’ll probably end up with more free time. :)

0.9 features a new conflict detector based on FormIDs instead of EDIDs. This means it now takes things like mod isolation into account. It can also tell you which plugin an entry was originally defined in, and which one currently overrides it. I’ve also added a background process killer. If you want to use it, make sure you read all dialogs very carefully. I added a bit of anti-n00b* protection to it, and was feeling a bit sadistic at the time. I’ve also added a similar warning to the launch oblivion button.**

A new release for you all:^ I’ve written an sdp editor. If anyone wants to play around with oblivion’s shaders, you can grab it from the bar on the left. I intend to add edit shader scripting functions to obmm, which will work in the same way as it’s existing EditINI function, and will update the shader editor to support them.

Speaking of obmm script, Conan_Lon’s tutorial site now has a useful list of which functions require which obmm version, and a notepad++ definitions file for those who want some syntax highlighting.

And in the latest news-from-work news, it has now turned out that rhythmyx doesn’t allow the navigation bar to link to specific pages - only folders. That sucks, because now we have to move every single page into its own sub folder. It’s also turned out that the ephox editor^^ has been eating some rather important code, meaning that a few weeks worth of work needs to be redone from scratch. Once again, a lot of this isn’t actually rhythmyx’s/ephoxes fault, but rather the result of Cardiff University’s customizations and a ridiculously rushed schedule which means that we’re trying to build the website while rhythmyx is in the middle of being modified. No-one will actually admit to it, but it also seems that we didn’t actually ask for navigation to link to pages. It certainly isn’t in the statement of work.

I’ve decided I quite like the world of enterprise software - it makes even MGE’s graphics card/driver dependent glitchiness look positively tame by comparison.

*n00b in this case being defined as anyone who doesn’t know that killing the themes service will cause windows xp to revert back to the classic interface.

**I attempted to rename it from ‘launch oblivion’ to ‘you do NOT have to use this button to launch oblivion. If you launch oblivion normally or via obse, obmm will not break, loose your save order, spay your cat or any of the other horrible things that people seem to think it does’ but it didn’t all fit, so I had to settle for a messagebox. :(

^Or more accurately, the subset of ‘you all’ who can stare at a few dozen lines of uncommented assembly while keeping a straight face.

^^A wysiwyg html editor integrated into rhythmyx. Well, I say integrated, but it’s more a case of stick it in the page somewhere and expect it to work. For the most part, it doesn’t.

13th of September

obmm is still officially at 0.8.18, but unofficially I’ve been sneaking a couple of 0.9 betas in via the autoupdater. The latest, 0.8.100, has a fully functional BSA creator at last.* It also has a BSA uncorrupter, for those nasty incidents when the BSA patcher goes out of control and eats your BSAs.

*I’ve been promising one of them since before 0.7.x came out.

9th of September

obmm is up to 0.8.18, and the next release will be 0.9. According to a recent poll on the official TES forums, over 80% of mod users now use obmm.* This probably makes it the most popular oblivion utility available. Heck - it’s possibly in the top ten of all 3rd party oblivion downloads, and if not, it’s pretty darn close.

I’ve also noticed that Conan_Lon has set up an obmm tutorial page. It’s still a little rough around the edges, but once finished it should go nicely with Beurban's and motub's advanced omod creation guide.**

*Or more accurately, 80% of the mod users who also regularly read the morrowind mods section of official forums now use obmm. Considering that obmm has received less than 100,000 downloads, compared to over 200,000 for the most popular mod I could find, it’s safe to assume that these are not the same thing. I’d guess the actual usage rate is more like 20% - 30%.

**The scripting section of which would probably have been finished by now, if I ever managed to leave obmm’s script interpreter alone for two minutes. 0.9 now has variables, loops and the rather powerful but also rather easy to screw up ExecLines function. Somehow I doubt that anyone will use them, but at least no one will ever be able to complain that obmm isn’t flexible enough to handle even the most convoluted mod install.