Here’s Christmas holidays come early. To make you even more confused while choosing fort/castle ruins retexture, I’ve made another one for you. Of course anyone can use it, but I made it with economy class (ruined laptops and ancient PCs) in mind. Most textures come in 1024×1024 resolution, and normal maps are the same size. Now the size is one step larger, but performance is about the same as before (give or take) (Let me know if you need smaller ones.) FPS impact is minimal, but if you run a really junky laptop like me, and yet you stuff your Oblivion with hi-res textures and scripts, you may even notice some minimal drop in FPS. It's hard to tell really, because it all depends on individual setup. My 512MB, 8GB laptop manages to run them in 1366×768 resolution for screenshots and in lower resolution for gameplay, but it stutters because it’s a typewriter, really, not a gaming computer. However, most of you don't have to worry at all.

To INSTALL, you can just drop the Textures folder to your Oblivion/Data directory (remember to back up files of the same name as the ones included in this mod). But I recommend using Wrye Bash because (apart from other awesome things) it takes care of backups for you, so you don’t have to remember about them at all.
Archive Invalidation (redirection, to be precise) may be necessary, especially if you've never used any texture replacers for ruins before. Archive Invalidation is included in OBMM as one of its tools - probably the simplest method is to make use of this one.

There’s a couple of textures that I didn’t change on purpose. First is on big boulders which look like runestones – I didn’t touch them because if I did, I’d mess up other, much more important objects. Besides, they look nice as they are. Second is the stairs texture – I left it out because technically it belongs to the castle ruins set, and it's postponed until v05.

THE FUTURE
1. I’ve started tampering with ruin exterior’s UV maps and I’m pretty happy with the effect (stretch marks, blemishes, and unwanted wrinkles be gone – ladies’ dream come true)

2. I can't remember seeing any castle ruins, but as soon as I come across one, I'll extend this mod to castle ruins, too.
Please, let me know if you've heard about any ruined castles in Cyrodiil. (I'm especially looking at you Tobbs. You're the nexus' master cartographer ;P

3. I'm still looking with some contempt at that floor. Expect a new one in the next version.


CREDITS
The starting point for this retexture was one of the textures from an open-source game The Dark Mod. (A great stealth game based on – and made by the same team as – the cult Thief series. Honestly, get it – it’s Thief remade on custom game engine, and it’s free!)
Pillars are based on edited and modified Quarl’s textures (QTR3 Redimized) with added lichen. A lot of lichen.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
From the top of my heart (insert a cute sad-eyed deer and a couple of doves here) big thank you to:
You – for support, comments, screenshots, criticism or praise.
Bethesda – for a lot of fun and sleepless nights.
The GIMP Team and authors of various plug-ins – for GIMP and its plug-ins :)
Quarl and his follow-ups – for massively inspiring work.
Looking Glass Studios – for exactly the same.
http://texturelib.com - for being a goldmine

SPECIAL MENTION
Dennywood – for being wonderfully enthusiastic about this mod from the very beginning ;)
Malachi Delacot - for letting me know about Dark Mod (which sparked this retex)