Oblivion how you DON'T remember it! (...and yet was always capable of being...) For today's ADG filler video, Gemini's taking an unusual look at back at The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, released by Bethesda in 2006, often considered to be one of the best looking games of its time owing to advanced graphical effects... and yet... some people weren't able to play it that way when it first came out due to being stuck on outdated or just plain bad graphics hardware, not to mention quickly discussing how to get this game working on Windows 98 since it normally will not for really, really, REALLY stupid reasons... ------------------------------------------ Additional Information and Corrections: * Here's a quick link if you want to check out KernelEx, though chances are high you would have no reason to nowadays: https://kernelex.sourceforge.net/ * A surprisingly low amount of content in this game is graphically violent by default, as 95% of it all is handled by "blood decals" which are applied to surfaces then fade over time. If you turn that setting off the only graphic violence anywhere is with pre-positioned corpses which there aren't that many of, thus I was able to avoid having to age gate this video! :D * "Specular Blobs" are the bright dots and streaks you see on a shiny surface as you move around it. DirectX 9.0c was able to emulate specular highlights at a basic level without having to use shaders and the engine used in Oblivion clearly decided to go that route for translucent objects, while instead going with shader-based specular highlights for opaque objects. There's likely an optimization reason for this, especially given that making things even just slightly translucent changes all kinds of factors. * When showing the low-framerate, this was emulated in editing to look and feel how it was when I first got the game working in Windows 98. When menus are opened the game snapshots the current view, casts a colour over it, then holds that in the background, thus no actual major 3D rendering is taking place, thus why the framerate would shoot back up to 60 while menus were open and die back down to 2 after closing those menus. :P * One other thing: If you decide to play this one some more on modern Windows in full screen... don't alt-tab. This pretty much crashes the game very single time, at least for me. :/ ------------------------------------------ Pixelmusement Website: http://www.pixelships.com ADG on Pixelmusement: http://www.pixelships.com/adg Alphabetical Index of ADG Episodes: http://www.pixelships.com/adg/index2.html Kris' Patreon Page: https://www.patreon.com/kasick @Pixelmusement on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Pixelmusement