Here’s a great Oblivion Optimization Guide. It includes many tips for improving both the performance and the visuals of the game, as well as a few other useful tweaks to enable screenshots, etc. Strongly recommended!
First off: If I owned an Xbox 360, I would have bought the Xbox 360 version of the game. I use keyboard and mouse all day at work, and way too much at home in the evenings, and playing Xbox games using the controller actually provides some welcome relief for my hands. But since this isn’t an option for me right now, I figured I’d try to find a way to play the game using a gamepad on the PC.
According to this article, Bethesda announced that the game supports the Xbox 360 controller on the PC out of the box, although the initial support will be incomplete. One of the first updates will include the Xbox 360 control scheme for the PC, which presumably will make a big difference in actually being able to play the game using a gamepad. Still, this was encouraging enough news for me to give this a shot. As I am planning to buy an Xbox 360 eventually, at which point I’ll need a second controller anyway, I went ahead and picked up an Xbox 360 controller
My initial attempt to play the game was less successful… I was able to move the character forward, back, left, and right, using the left stick on the controller, but I was unable to turn around using the right stick. After searching through the oblivion.ini file (which is normally found in My Documents\My Games\Oblivion\) for a solution, I noticed that the iJoystickLookUpDown and iJoystickLookLeftRight settings were set to 6 and 3 respectively, even though the comment right above suggests that they should actually be set to 5 (YRot) and 4 (XRot). After changing this, I still was not able to turn around until I also adjusted the fJoystickLookUDMult and fJoystickLookLRMult settings. These seem to control the vertical and horizontal sensitivity respectively and were initially set to extremely low values of 0.0020. After some experimentation, values of around 0.3 turned out to be ideal. So to summarize, these are the settings that (sort of) worked for me:
;X = 1, Y = 2, Z = 3, XRot = 4, YRot = 5, ZRot = 6
iJoystickMoveFrontBack=2
iJoystickMoveLeftRight=1
fJoystickMoveFBMult=1.0000
fJoystickMoveLRMult=1.0000
iJoystickLookUpDown=5
iJoystickLookLeftRight=4
fJoystickLookUDMult=0.3000
fJoystickLookLRMult=0.2500
Getting the buttons to work is a relatively simple matter of going into the Options menu and configuring them as desired.
In theory everything should have been working fine now. However, there are still a few major problems that I’ve been unable to solve:
1. Controller sensitivity: The Xbox 360 controller is extremely sensitive. This is generally a great thing, but since Oblivion doesn’t properly support the controller yet, it results in a very jerky and irregular response. In particular, there is no way to configure the deadspot for the analog sticks, which means that it is difficult to return the stick to a neutral position and stop the character from turning or moving. This is the main issue that prevents me from playing with the controller at this point.
2. Incomplete control scheme: While the controller (at least in theory) supports movement, view, and all buttons, I have been unable to use it to navigate the game menus. This means that the keyboard and mouse need to be used for this very frequent action (for example when looting bodies), which is obviously far from ideal. The same goes for shortcuts / quick keys, which are hardcoded to the number keys 1-8 on the keyboard and have no representation on the controller.
3. Interference with keyboard movement: After using the controller to move the character and returning the left stick to the neutral position in order to stop, the controller appears to still register a (negligibly small) forward movement (due to the aforementioned lack of deadspot control). When using the keyboard to move the character afterwards, the movement is extremely slow. This might not be a huge issue if the controller was a full replacement for the keyboard, but it is a significant annoyance regardless.
So for now I ended up disabling the controller by setting bUse Joystick to 0. I hope that the first update addresses these issues, as the game otherwise seems like it would be enjoyable via a controller (and obviously is in the Xbox 360 version).
I’ll keep you updated in case I find out anything new. In the mean time please leave a comment if you have any suggestions.