Helpful (hopefully) suggestions and fixes for CTD!

[TheStrangerPJM]

Hey all!
So I've taken some time away to do some research, and while I've always appreciated the S.T.E.P community (here's a link for anyone unfamiliar. Great stuff. http://wiki.step-project.com/Main_Page), I've also come across a very detailed guide from an unlikely source: A user named 'Vixen' on an alternative site called 'LoversLab.' I know what yer thinkin'... that site's for adult mods! Well generally, yes. However, this woman speaks truth from a very sound IT perspective. Here's the link.

http://www.loverslab.com/topic/22517-wip-vixens-guide-to-stable-skyrim-modding-v112-2013-11-13-latest-addition-skyrim-ram-explained/

It's a great guide. But two things I took away from it are this:
My strange "flashing polygons" didn't come from any particular mod. There are a variety of mods that can cause this problem, but are perfectly fine on their own. The biggest revelation of all to me was that texture size matters a LOT LESS than people initially surmise. As I play for hours with the reduced texture options for Skyrim HD and RealVision ENB, I notice my framerates drop NOT in areas where there are lot of high-res textures, but high script loads. Let me explain:
As the aforementioned guide suggests (start reading if you haven't already), many mods that cause things like inventory CTD are not inherently buggy. Most of them are cleaned using TESV edit, and their only fatal flaw is that they don't take into account the numerous scripts that additional mods also add to the worldspace.
My most recent crash fiasco came from Bleak Falls on the way back to Riverwood. I was wondering just why any of this could be the case. I do have an expanded cities mod that enhances Riverwood, but not so much so that it could cause a ctd by itself. I also run SkyRE, SkyTEST, Realistic Needs/Diseases, and Frostfall. And I have good news: They all seem to be working beautifully now. Here's how I managed to fix my issues.

Let's break down what happens in the game normally, if you've got all the DLC's and you've started a new game. After you've leveled up a few times, and traveled back to, say, Riverwood, you'll notice a ton of scripts going on at once. This is in the vanilla game too, mind you. The courier boy will try to find you and give a letter from the Jarl concerning property ownership (a poorly managed, never 'delayed' "Lets push out this script ASAP" method by Bethesda) all within the same in-game hour as the leader of the Dawnguard approaches you for a recruitment opportunity. On top of that, you may even get a vampire attack that same night, and if you have Interesting NPC's and Immersive Patrols walking through a town that's been modded and expanded... you can see where I'm going with this. That level of detail is infinitely more taxing on the game than a few textures could ever be.

What I did to alleviate these conflicts:
1) I used Wrye Bash and made a patch for those. Specifically, I prevented Dawnguard from spawning its vampires randomly when there were other scripts enabled. The game is now more "passive," requiring me to wait in the town for a little while before anything like that ever happens.

 

2 I deactivated some of my mods.
I wanted to keep the main elements of SkyRE, SkyTEST, Frostfall, and Realistic Needs, and I was willing to go to great lengths to make that happen. Solution? I asked myself what portions of the aforementioned mods would add the most scripting. For example, when installing SkyRE, I wanted a more immersive, realistic combat experience. But I didn't want to totally overhaul and "break" skyrim, using the uncapped encounter zones, or the changes made to item values in my inventory. So I chose the main perk changes, enemy AI, and Frostfall. This freed up space for scripting elsewhere.
For immersive Patrols, after realizing Dawnguard's annoying nighttime vampire attacks were causing crashes at worst (and my favorite "radiant" NPC friends to die in some cases), I didn't want any more hostility in the world of skyrim than was necessary. The way I see it, Skyrim is a big, beautiful place, with plenty of space to explore, make new friends, and enemies. Immersive Patrols has a lot of the latter and a lot less of the former. So when chosing which parts of Immersive Patrols to install, here was my logic:
**Anything that added traveling bandits or factions to the world space would inherently have to apply the enemy AI scripts to them, as well as possible SkyTEST animal interactions. All I wanted was to see some more friendly (or unfriendly) faces on the road in my travels. And since the Civil War is really kind of a facade, the only two mods I chose were the salespeople and the military patrols, both of which would never plan an attack on a town at inconvenient times. Less hostility means fewer fast-paced scripts.

3) I used ENBoost. Now some of you out there may have tried it, only to discover that it unfortunately deactivates your ENB. The mod author doesn't really explicitly say how to avoid this, but I figured it out after culling other forums for answers. In the enblocal.ini, you need to set "UsePatchSpeedhackWithoutGraphics=false". By default, since the newest update was meant to also be used for folks without ENB, this is the setting that needs to be changed. Everything else can remain the same, and voila! You have ENB and enhanced performance. If you see screen-tearing, enable Vsync=true.

4) THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT STEP!
Most of you are either going to hate me for suggesting that your saves are totally corrupt, or facepalm when you realize how simple this fix can be. Either way, it's helped me and will likely improve your stability as well. It's simple: stop autosaving and quicksaving. Just stop it. It's bad. Skyrim's autosave is unstable enough as it is, and while it will never cause a crash in an UNmodded game, it does present with issues like random NPC misbehavior and inconsistent loads (Ie, my follower and the wolf I just hunted is two feet in front of me, and the next time I load the autosave, it's raining and the wolf is behind me etc). When you mod your game like crazy, there's that much more information that can go awry. A lot of times, autosaving misses half the scripts it needs to run because it's just saving randomly and taking a quick snapshot of your character only. Think of it like doing a hard reboot on your computer when it's still shutting down programs vs. slowly and formally turning it off the safe way from the shut-down menu. Same principle.
So start a new game with all your mods enabled. Turn OFF all autosave functions, period. And from now on, whenever you save, do so in a safe location only from the menu (pressing 'esc' and saving from there.) I can't say that this will fix everyone's problems indefinitely. I still sometimes get freezes and crashes. But the game IS much, much more stable for me. And I'm confident that you too will see improvement. Remember, everything runs on scripts. Autosave is, in and of itself, a type of script.

That's all I got for now folks. I'll be back in a few days to let you know if my computer exploded or if I wound up completely talking out of my ass with horrendous data corruption etc.
-Patman.