NBO and NPCAM Stability Patch

I currently play Oblivion Remastered with ~190 mods, 32 of which are UE4SS mods. When adding NBO, NPCAM and UltraCombat together, I experienced crashes because all of these mods are resource-intensive and step on each others' timings. Looking into this, I found that NBO and NPCAM did not have enough checks to ensure stability. In isolation they worked flawlessly, but with other heavy mods the problems started to surface.

Wanting to play with all of these mods together without crashing, I spent some time adding the following to the NBO and NPCAM main.lua files:

- Enhanced stability checks

- Object consistency verification

- Triple-wrapped pcall protection around the LoadPhenotypeDateFields function, which was often causing crashes when loading NBO-enabled NPC's in NPCAM

- Graceful aborts rather than crashes if there is a failure loading an NPC profile

I have now played with NBO, NPCAM, UltraCombat and ~190 other mods for dozens of hours without a single CTD. I wasn't planning on sharing this with the community when I first made these changes, but it worked so well that I'm putting this out there. I was even able to set the 'useCache = true' option in NPCAM, which the author said could not be done if NBO is enabled for NPCAM because of guaranteed crashing.

FAQ:

Q: If I'm using just NBO or just NPCAM and not both mods, can I just patch the one I'm using?

A: Yes. Just copy the appropriate main.lua from the download and place according to the installation instructions.

Q: Will this guarantee that I won't have crashes?

A: Of course not. There are no guarantees. Your Mileage May Vary.

Q: Can this be installed mid-game?

A: Yes. There is no effect on your save. You can install/un-install as many times as you want during a playthrough, as I did to test these changes.

Q: Will these changes affect performance?

A: You may notice slightly longer load times as this is doing more validation during cell changes. It has not been noticeable to me, however. It will not affect combat or normal gameplay performance.

Q: Are there any functional changes to NBO or NPCAM?

A: No. This patch simply adds protections to improve stability. In some cases when using NPCAM and NBO, you may see in the ue4ss.log that some NPC's don't load their NBO profile. This is better than a CTD which would happen anyway, and they will just have their default look.

Q: Why don't you have this packaged for mod managers?

A: This directly replaces mod files and unless you know what you're doing with a mod manager you can mess things up. I'm not willing to deal with the complexities involved in making this work for multiple mod managers. Please don't ask!

Q: Your install method is very un-eloquent.

A: You noticed!!