A comparison of the two latest Oblivion Reloaded forks/adaptions,
Oblivion Reloaded E3 (ORE3) and the very recently released
Oblivion Reloaded Combined (ORC)
To start off, it probably helps to explain what Oblivion Reloaded (OR) is and what both versions here have in common. The official website states that "Oblivion Reloaded is an OBSE plugin that mainly modifies the rendering pipeline, adding new features and providing screen effects not supported in vanilla Oblivion" which is a pretty good starting point. It grew out of the Oblivion Graphics Extender (OBGE) and in addition to graphics options, it also allows for better memory utilization and purging of RAM/VRAM, meaning that users can enjoy high-resolution texture packs without crashing every 15 minutes. Unfortunately, OR has been severely feature-crept during its development and each update seems to break something. Common complaints are basically down to everything non-graphical related, with mounted combat (that doesn't work), dual wielding (which doesn't work) and an Equipment Mode which allows you to wear shields on your back (this crashed your game until about a year ago) being example of what OR doesn't need to be doing, since they're either unnecessary additions or are better left as individual plugins. Alenet is an autistic Ukrainian, so of course he chimps out whenever people complain about this sort of thing and he threw a tantrum and left Nexus a while ago due to people asking him too many questions about his borderline-essential tool which also lacks proper documentation.
So "vanilla" OR is a bit of a mess as it continues being updated, and each update seems to break something whenever it introduces a new feature or improves an old on. This leads to the development of forks/adaptions, usually built off an older, more stable version of OR. The feature sets for each version is a little bit different, with ORE3 being pretty much entirely focused on maximum visual quality with zero superfluous features, and ORC following in the broader tradition of Oblivion Reloaded being more than just a graphics extender. Both come with improvements to stability and memory management. ORE3 has pretty much all of OR's non-graphics features disabled by default, while ORC has a few of them enabled and also comes with some new stuff that means you don't need to install extra OBSE plugins. In this way, you could consider ORE3 to be the purest extension of the original Oblivion Graphics Extender, while ORC is a continuation of GBRPluss' previous Oblivion Reloaded Lite (ORL), cutting some of the more intensive graphics features in exchange for better performance and focusing more on OR's ability to provide better stability for heavily modded setups. The big differentiating factors (i.e stuff that one version does which the other doesn't offer) are as follows:
Oblivion Reloaded E3
- Exterior Point Light Shadows - Light sources other than the sun are now able to cast shadows in exterior cells when Shadow Mode is enabled.
- 12 points for shadow rendering (up from 4) - This is a huge improvement on OR's basic shadows, especially in interiors where you often have more than four light sources active at once. This means that your modded Oblivion can have three times as many active light sources creating shadows as even a modded Skyrim SE in 2022. Performance heavy, but super nifty, especially when combined with something like Real Lights for flickering stencil shadows. Basically every gamer's wet dream circa 2005.
- Moon-based directional lighting - I'll be honest, the effect of this is pretty subtle because I haven't really noticed it too much.
- Day/Night dynamic interior & window lighting - Adds lights to and from windows depending on time of day, seems to also darken them a bit at nighttime, which is nice given how most of Oblivion's window textures are nuclear-bright cyan. Almost supersedes All Natural, unless you really want to use Immersive Interiors or hear raindrops when it's storming outside.
Oblivion Reloaded Combined
- Interior Shadows, SMAA, Parallax Occlusion Mapping disabled - Some of the most performance-intensive but also graphically pleasing shaders. POM is required for exterior shadows to work on objects that have parallax enabled with ORE3, which it should be said is not the case with ORC.
- Purge cleaning logic is optimized - basically better performance.
- DXVK Patch - Linux users can now use OR. In theory should allow Windows users to also use Vulkan without experiencing crashes or graphical glitches with OR, as they used to, which should improve performance.
- HeapMode - maybe possibly improves performance.
- AnimationHook and PlayidleHook - you can sit down without being forced into third person and enjoy idle animations while in first person.
- Random Difficulty - randomizes the difficulty every few seconds. What?
- Diagonal movement and Shield on Back built in - You don't need to download WalkBlessed and the Equipment Mode here is genuinely an upgrade over similar mods which utilized vanilla meshes, so requires you to go in and edit things if you want modded shields to appear on your back.
- Camera Mode - lets you view your body in first person, but it's tied to the player model so it bobs and follows the idle animations etc. and looks and feels disgusting.
Basically, ORC is for Linux users or people using
heavily modded setups that include performance killers like Better Cities. I'd recommend ORE3 unless you're using mods that add dozens of NPC and clutter objects to cities. ORC is supposed to be "lite", but it still includes all of the superfluous shit like the Equip Mode, Camera Mode, animation additions and a dodge function which the community has had solved for nearly five years in more satisfactory ways. It also adds replacements for the main menu video for some reason, which I can only imagine are there to tell you that you're definitely playing with OR installed. Why the "lite" version keeps there, I have no idea. I think the endgame for OR is for it to basically be a one-stop shop for "fixing" Oblivion after installing the UOP, but they'll never get there because of feature creep and Alenet's autism. In addition, installing ORC (through Mod Organiser 2) and later uninstalling it to go back to ORE3 broke my main menu despite the fact that everything is installed in virtual folder. This is a great example of what makes the main fork of OR so frustrating to use, as it gets its grubby, little, piss-stained hands all over the game and it feels impossible to remove all traces of it beyond uninstalling the game itself. It borders on malware.
Edit: so OR does something funky to your oblivion_default.ini which is what causes the problem with the main menu. Deleting the default_ini and validating game data through Steam fixes the issue. A piece of advice for OR, though, make sure to set SaveSetting to =1 in the OR.ini, otherwise changes to game settings (controls, video etc.) will not carry over when you next boot up. idk why this is set to =0 by default, probably to prevent crashes from people messing around with shadows.
