Putting Pc Mods In Xbox360 Version Of Oblivion, now that we have access filestructure, how can we mod it? Options

[enixn]

alright so...now taht we have access to the content, we can edit files on the disc, and possibly get mods up and running on the 360. Ive already seen on x-h some guys edited the oblivion.ini file and getting it to work. They had some trouble with offsetting the data in the image, but they just had to keep the content they modified the same number of bytes.
Now, Ive been trying today to accomplish something, so Ive started big (i know i know.....) trying to see if i can get the Natural Environments mod working on the 360. natural environments

this is starting (relatively) small with some mesh files, textures, and sounds. Ive unpacked all the .bsa's from the 360 oblivion content, and added all that from the natural environments mod. And this is where I come across the first roadbump. The ESP files for controlling the mod...I dunno quite what to do with them. Over on the official oblivion forums someone suggested merging the esp's into the main Oblivion.esm file, but I think some paths might need to be edited in the esp's as the content is now located inside a bsa archive.

some things I am not able to figure out myself, but I think need to be understood for anything to work are:

1. how the PC oblivion stores information regarding how it knows to load the ESP's

2. how the content in the .bsa archives on the xbox360 are read. they are cached onto the hdd (or so it seems from reading the .ini) but are the files in the archives decompressed on the fly, or are the files unzipped in the hdd's cache? Are they mounted and read like VFS...

Also, I dont have oblivion for the pc, and i realize that it would probably having it and knowing a little about modding it on the pc would help the cause, which is why I ask for anyone that has any input at all to post anything that you think might help. Thanks

edit here is a post from oblivion forums:

http://www.elderscrolls.com/forums/index.p...howtopic=494100

This post has been edited by enixn: Jul 1 2006, 03:13 AM

[Dekedence]

Understood, but I don't do any type of modding so I can't actually help you.

And I think you are probably the most technical person on these Oblivion threads; alot of people just come on here to find out how to recharge weapons or get past parts of the quest.

[MaTiAz]

What, have they got mods working? I thought all content was in PIRS archives, unless we're talking about editing the Oblivion disk?

[DeadBeets]

Well the downloadable content sits on your hard drive, why not usermade mods? And no, I apollogize, I have no idea how to do this either.

[geeksunny]

I know this is a really old thread, but has any progress been made on this? Now that we have write access to the hard drive, maybe we could drop the mods in alongside where the premium DLC goes?

[Bullet Pulse]

No 360 games have really been modded yet. So well have to wait till TES:V I guess.

[djdeacon]

this thread should be stickied.

[DrPepperFan15]

Well..... honestly I for one am not going out of my way to do a firmware update and then buy a TON of Dual-Layer DVD's just so I can change minor things in Oblivion which most likely wont work the first 50 times you try.... :/

So I'm just gonna wait until Xecuter or some other group comes out with the 360 chip or a softmod of some sort without the need of burning discs and then I will start to mod this game! Sorry if I sounded harsh... just saying that right now it's waaay too much of a hassle to try and mod this game... or any game on the 360

[hammy_69]

Isn't adding files to a disc still impossible?

Anyways, you should PROBABLY take a step back and think about just trying to get a simple .esp working, not a mod with textures, dialog, and meshes involved.

If you remember the Morrowind days, dialog's tended to be broken( i think this was resolved later on?) and textures could be tricky. So, start small my friend, start small.

[kl0wn]

Merging would be good, however there is a problem with the Oblivion.esm. It differs from the PC version, official/unofficial tools are unable to open the Xbox 360 version of the Oblivion.esm. I haven't looked enough to see what the problem is...I'll look more to see. There is about a 300-400kb difference between Xbox 360s and Pc's.

The tools I used can be found here: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Tes4Mod:Modding

"TES4 Gecko" would be the best if we can get this working, hopefully there are no signature checks that involve the default.xex since we can not modify this without breaking the signature.

[kl0wn]

Ooops,
there are a few differences in the header. Changing them to match the PC version still doesn,t allow any editing or merging yet, though.

[kl0wn]

Someone needs to try modify a string (any in game text string) in Oblivion.esm to see if we can still run the game.

[kl0wn]

Also, the 360 version of oblivion.esm is able to run on PC (with a new save).

[Lesaras]

Isn't adding files to a disc still impossible?

Anyways, you should PROBABLY take a step back and think about just trying to get a simple .esp working, not a mod with textures, dialog, and meshes involved.

If you remember the Morrowind days, dialog's tended to be broken( i think this was resolved later on?) and textures could be tricky. So, start small my friend, start small.

Nope, we're still working on dialogue. Although, I discovered the problem, and a good theory on how to fix it.

As for now, good luck getting anything other than a few byte swaps working with only a disc. Its not worth your time. Until the 360 has a running homebrew dashboard, I'd say extract the Oblivion files, hex em, and develop apps to work with them easily for when the time comes.

Hey, BTW does Oblivion have a Oblivion.esm.map file? And if so, only on the Xbox360 version or on the PC too? Because I could get to cracking that now like Morrowind.

Oh, and whoever mentioned the DLC. This is the perfect way to add content. Morrowind's system wasn't perfect for adding on content, hence the GOTY, but Oblivion has perfected it. The project should be to crack the encryption on the DLC.

[webMASTER P]

i came to the board hoping to find just this thread

i started playing Oblivion a few days ago on the 360. The one mod that i really want is the Harvester mod, where when you pick up a mushroom, it actually disappears. I have no idea why that's not in the game. I am hoping that someday, someone will figure out how to mod oblivion. I would do the firmware hack just for that.