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Cleaning a savegame from a broken script


deathstar2Razor

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Hi Nexus!

 

A week ago, I decided to pick up Skyrim again, with a wide selection of mods to go with it. I stopped playing back then because I was careless while installing new content and managed to break my installation to a point of no recovery. This time, I took care not to mess with the game too much. I would only install mods using the Mod Manager, sort their load order through BOSS and clearn dirty ones with TESVEdit. So far no problems - until I installed one mod too much.

 

It was a mod that came with a custom script for mannequins, presumably the one that was meant to prevent them from wandering off (came as part of another mod though). Playing the game, I noticed occasional, seemingly random freezes that forced me to kill the process and restart the game. I had no idea what could possibly cause this. I took a look at the Papyrus-logs in my documents and found out that, despite being simple .txt-files, they bloat up exponentially, reaching as much as 100 MB after about 50 minutes of playtime. Almost all of the stuff inside was the same thing, over and over again on loop:

 

 

[None].MannequinActivatorSCRIPT.OnCellAttach() - "<savegame>" Line ?
[02/21/2013 - 04:43:49AM] warning: Assigning None to a non-object variable named "::temp3"
stack:
    [None].MannequinActivatorSCRIPT.OnCellAttach() - "<savegame>" Line ?
[02/21/2013 - 04:43:49AM] Error: Unable to call Is3DLoaded - no native object bound to the script object, or object is of incorrect type
stack:
    [None].MannequinActivatorSCRIPT.Is3DLoaded() - "<native>" Line ?
    [None].MannequinActivatorSCRIPT.OnCellAttach() - "<savegame>" Line ?
[02/21/2013 - 04:43:49AM] warning: Assigning None to a non-object variable named "::temp3"
stack:
    [None].MannequinActivatorSCRIPT.OnCellAttach() - "<savegame>" Line ?
[02/21/2013 - 04:43:49AM] Error: Unable to call Is3DLoaded - no native object bound to the script object, or object is of incorrect type
stack:
    [None].MannequinActivatorSCRIPT.Is3DLoaded() - "<native>" Line ?

 

...and so on and so forth. These lines, over and over again, made my log-files humongously large. Not being able to identify any other possible cause for my random freezes, I went so far as to say this script must be responsible. I uninstalled the mod containing the .pex and started a completely new game to make sure - and voilá! Tidy logs and (so far) no freezes with that new test-save.

 

My problem though: The script is still active on my main-save and seems to be completely unable to be terminated.

 

I did see the currently featured post on the Nexus, about the process of hex-editing your broken scripts out of your savegames. After taking precautions and making a lot of backups, I did the hex-editing, which was equivalent to cutting out a tumour with a chainsaw. While it -did- fix the broken script (and tidied up my main-save's log), it also killed off most of the previously working scripts including Claralux's better lights, followers and a wide selection of quests. I decided that this approach is not satisfactory and breaks too much of my save.

 

Now, honestly, I don't really know what else to do. I have the latest version of the Skyrim Script Extender installed, as well as a SKSE.ini (in skyrim/data/SKSE/ ) with a command to clear invalid stuff. So far, this did not help.

 

I would appreciate any leads you could provide for me, I'd hate to start over just because of this.

 

Add.: Some 'trivia' to my problem. I cannot yet say if the script really is responsible for my problems. It is worth mentioning that my game never "crashed", as in a clean crash-to-desktop. Whenever it broke, it froze, with the background-music still playing. I have a powerful system and am still not running Skyrim on its highest settings, so this script, for me, has a higher probability of being the culprit than my system.

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There is no way to 'surgically' clean orphan scripts from save games. Even the SKSE new function is limited (for now). The hex editing method, as you no doubt know by now, should only be used when a save game is completely irredeemable and is suffering from more than just random freezes ('irredeemable' as in it's so bloated that you can't even load it up any more--but then, one might as well start a new game or go back to a previous save game than go through the aggravation of nuking the corrupt save game in the hopes of retrieving what would, at best, be a broken save).

 

However, it's also worth noting that the issues you've encountered with your current save game may not necessary be caused by the orphan script from the mannequin mod (what size is that save? Not the log--which BTW should generally not be turned on except when you are troubleshooting--but the save). It could be a just a coincidence (one should always hope). You could try and optimize the load order further to see if it can mitigate the issues you've experienced. Do you have save from before you installed that mod?

Edited by ripple
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My biggest save (the one with the faulty script) is 10.600 kilobytes in size. It's not too advanced, game-progression wise, since I only put a couple of days into it. Unfortunately, I installed the majority of mods before I started playing from scratch again, so there are no old saves not affected by this.

 

To further test, I will put some more time into a completely new savegame tomorrow to see if the freezes still happen. As of yet, I still cannot say for sure that the clean saves will not freeze, haven't played a clean save for more than one hour yet. I'll also go over my load-order again.

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I feel your pain on the saved game issue and the orphaned scripts. I have loaded and reloaded more times than I can count and I have not even been playing for more than 7 months? The most important thing I have learned is that no matter how tempting some mods might be to load if you start getting errors from them and end up not being able to correct the issue - chalk it up, put em on your blacklist and when you get tired of trying to fix the junk - just reload without it. Currently i have about 300 hours into my current installation, my saved games are about 12mb and my papyrus logs typically are less than 50k with 107 mods installed thru NMM and i don't know how many installed by hand. HOWEVER - my character no longer bleeds on her body and I have a cell where I ctd no matter what when I approach a specific area within that cell ...

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