Are Knights of the Nine, Shivering Isles, etc. just .esm files?

[Xaphnir]

I have Oblivion installed on my computer via disc. What I'm wondering is, could I just copy the .esm files for these DLC into my current installation after buying and downloading them via Steam, like you can for Dragonborn, Dawnguard and Hearthfire for Skyrim, or are there additional files that would complicate this?

[theo]

There are asset archives too.
However even if you transfer everything it might not work because addons may be incompatible with your game version

[Xaphnir]

Originally posted by theo:

There are asset archives too.
However even if you transfer everything it might not work because addons may be incompatible with your game version

It's patched to the last official patch, so I don't think that latter part should be an issue.

So I wouldn't be able to just copy a few files to my current installation? That's a pain, some of my OBSE-reliant mods were a pain to get working.

[-={LG}=-]

Every DLC has an .esp file. Many of them have a .bsa file with the same name. Shivering Isles has 5 .bsa and an .esp and if I'm not mistaken it requires an Oblivion.esm that has been patched. My Oblivion.esm is 271,001 kb. The original Oblivion.esm is 241,589 kb.

So hopefully you've already got Shivering Isles, since I don't know what the patching mechanism was anymore. Maybe it just does it when you run it, I don't know.

Other than that, if you copy all the .esp and .bsa files and enable them in the launcher you should be fine.

[Xaphnir]

Right, .esp and .bsa files, not .esm.

I copied the .esp and .bsa files into my non-Steam installation, the asset archives, and overwrote the .bsa and .esp files that were different sizes. Seems to be working fine. Probably will still work on getting my mods in my Steam installation, though, just to make sure there aren't any problems.