General
Adds new traits, operators, selectors, and menus. See the relevant article.

Fixes a bug that affects all vanilla textboxes, where pressing the up or down arrow keys inserts invisible garbage characters into the text that you’re entering. These characters are retained when saving any text, may be visible in modded fonts, and may affect alphabetical sorting. Text already affected by this bug cannot retroactively have garbage text characters stripped out.

Disables texture filtering for the menu cursor. This addresses an unknown bug that severely breaks texture filtering for all other menu assets whenever the cursor receives texture filtering. The effect of this is that all assets look cleaner, particularly high-resolution assets that are downscaled and displayed at different sizes, though the cursor will look rougher.

Prevents menus from receiving Tab keypresses generated when Alt+Tabbing out of the game.

Prevents the player from entering tab characters into their name when editing it in the RaceSexMenu. If a character name contains tabs, all attempts at saving the game fail silently unless you use the SaveGame console command with a custom filename.

Save files are now sent to the Recycle Bin when deleted, instead of obliterated forever. OBSE co-saves are also accounted for.

The game’s XML parser no longer uses “lazy” number recognition. Trait values will no longer be recognized as numbers if they: consist solely of decimal points and/or minus signs; or have more than one decimal point or more than one minus sign. This means that strings like “127.0.0.1”, “.” and “...” are no longer recognized the number zero. Whitespace-only strings are still recognized as zero.

Like MenuQue, NorthernUI patches the game's XML parser to add parse-time XML entities: amp, apos, gt, lt, nbsp, newline, quot. NorthernUI also adds entities that MenuQue does not add: minus. The NBSP entity isn't a proper non-breaking space, but it allows you to have a whitespace-only value without that value being parsed as a numeric zero. NorthernUI also adds support for numeric XML entities, e.g. #x2E or #46 for a period.

In Oblivion, activating a horse counts as activating its rider. However, the vanilla game still processes the horse, not the rider, when deciding what reticle icon to show. NorthernUI addresses this.

The local map now renders at a user-configurable resolution. The default for NorthernUI is 1024px per cell. The original resolution was a grainy 256px.

The keyboard navigation system for menus has been patched slightly. When writing menu XML, you can use REF operators to tell the game that a certain keyboard navigation keypress (including gamepad buttons) should count as mousing-over, clicking, or shift-clicking a certain tile, by using certain traits with a REF operator. The vanilla game processes only the first REF operator it encounters. NorthernUI patches the game to run through all of the REF operators on the tile, preferring the earliest one with a "valid" result. This allows you to define fallback cases (e.g. "keynav to this list if it isn't empty, or to this other list otherwise").

Patches the game to account for non-mipmapped textures that were improperly saved by the GIMP-DDS exporter. The patch ensures that these textures render properly (instead of displaying garbage data) when the player uses a lower texture quality. Technically, this fixes a GIMP problem, not an Oblivion problem: GIMP identifies these textures as having one mipmap (it should identify them as having zero), so Oblivion can end up reading past the end of the file and displaying whatever nonsense it finds there.

Patches the game so that you can use forward slashes in XML prefab paths even when specifying files within a BSA. (BSA files exclusively use backslashes, so forward slashes actually count as different paths and yield missing-file errors.)

Patches the game so that run-time changes to an image tile's "zoom" trait count as changing its size. In vanilla, if an image's zoom changed after the image has been rendered (due to operators using data that changes while a menu is open), the tile would not be redrawn and the change would not take effect.

The in-game debug console has been patched. Entered lines that begin with "!xxn " will be handled differently, allowing me to create convenient debugging commands for use at run-time.

The game's camera inertia has been patched. In vanilla Oblivion, entering or exiting a building can sometimes cause the camera to swerve wildly, almost as if it's trying to show off the area you're walking into (and doing a very bad job of it). This is in fact a bug in the camera inertia: interior spaces are essentially pocket dimensions and can use their own coordinate systems, and load doors are teleporters. If the "outside" door has a very different alignment from the "inside" door, then the camera inertia system interprets your walking through the doors as your rotating a significant distance in a single frame, and in the vanilla game, it tries to animate the camera accordingly. NorthernUI's fix (which can be turned off if desired) forces the camera inertia to reset when you change spaces (from a worldspace to an interior, or vice versa, or from one interior to another).

Though this has no effect on the game’s actual functioning, several MenuQue patch sites are detected and “cleaned up” if MenuQue has patched them, making them easier to view in a disassembler. Specifically, vanilla opcodes that are “split in half” by MenuQue patches and skipped during execution will have the skipped, broken halves overwritten with NOPs. (NorthernUI generally also does this for its own patches.)

XInput
XInput is loaded from the user's system and used as the API for gamepad controls.

Gamepad input is sent to the menus by virtue of the existing traits for that purpose, e.g. xbuttonlb.

The xbuttonstart trait is not enabled. Code analysis and testing both indicate that even if a menu has an xbuttonstart handler, firing that handler won’t stop the game from opening the PauseMenu. No vanilla content ever used xbuttonstart, so there’s no reason to believe this would’ve been different in the Xbox version of the game; accordingly, the trait was considered an acceptable loss when addressing an input bug.

Supports LockPickMenu by allowing the joystick to control the menu cursor while that menu is open. This is a notably imperfect solution with poor responsiveness.

Re-enables the gamepad-specific cursor on the MapMenu. This is conditional on a trait on the root tile.

Supports PersuadeMenu by teleporting the cursor to the right minigame quadrant when the joystick or D-Pad are used. This is conditional on a trait on the root tile.

Camera and movement code is patched extensively both to enable gamepad controls, and to enable 360-degree movement and multiple third-person camera modes.

Menus
AlchemyMenu
The root tile can use traits user16 through user20 to receive data from the RepairMenu and MagicPopupMenu when an item is being selected. Traits are updated on every frame.

• The user16 trait indicates that the DLL’s frame hook is running.
• The user17 trait indicates that the RepairMenu is open.
• The user18 trait is copied from the RepairMenu if it’s open, or set to zero otherwise.
• The user19 trait indicates that the RepairMenu is open and the MagicPopupMenu is visible.
• The user20 trait is copied from the MagicPopupMenu if user19 is &true;, or set to zero otherwise.
  

• The vanilla game animates the sneak meter between four different alpha values, one per distinct detection state. The values for all four detection states (lost, unseen, noticed, and seen) can be controlled with the user22 through user25 traits.
• The user20 trait is a Boolean indicating whether the player is in sneak mode.
• The user19 trait estimates the animation percentage for the vanilla user8 trait.
• The user21 trait is the value toward which the vanilla user8 trait is animating.