Unable to load save game with huge LO

[84Cronos]

A couple of people are currently testing an alpha version of my upcoming quest mod. I've esmified the .esp and everything runs absolutately fine on my end(fully vanilla without any mods installed). One of my alpha testers was able to play through the mod without any problems with a moderately sized LO but as soon as he and some other alpha testers switch over to their giant LOs my mod stops working, which means that they can't load any save files or that any save files which they try to create while my mod is active are being corrupted.

 

Does anyone know what the problem might be? Is there some kind of limit that these guys are hitting? Is there any way to find out what went wrong? So far we didn't have any success with script logs or buffout logs. Should I try to use the canary save file analyzer?

[Fantafaust]

Do they have many mods in common? Is your mod strictly quest-related?

What are their plugin counts?

 

Is there any particular reason your mod is esmified?

[KikiVelika]

Another thought or question for your testers: can they actually start a new game and leave Vault 111 with their huge LOs with and without your mod?

 

If they can't, and rely instead on loading their mods after they left V111, their test results should be treated as invalid since their saves might already be corrupted, especially if they have script-heavy mods that affect anything related to your quest mod.

 

 

Do they use default papyrus settings in their .ini or have they increased some of those following values from their defaults?

[Papyrus] 
fPostLoadUpdateTimeMS=500 
iMaxStackDepth=100 

From my personal experience increasing both values by reasonable (50%, 100%, 200%) amounts tends to help with the stability of huge LOs, especially if one runs a lot of Creation Club content.

 

Checking the other papyrus settings might be worth a look as well. For some strange reason people often increase "iMaxAllocatedMemoryBytes" to very silly values, despite a couple of MBs being more than enough. Especially the settlement crowd seems to think that cranking up all papyrus values will help with large LOs.

 

 

And last but not least, have you checked how many loaded refences your mod has with and without the ESM-flag? Since an ESM won't increase the amount of loaded references by much, your testers should be fine, unless they are all literally close to the limit in Fo4 (~2M refs, iirc)

[84Cronos]

Do they have many mods in common?

I haven't really looked at their specific LOs yet, so I can't really say if they're using the same mods, but from what I know we're talking about really large LOs.

 

Is your mod strictly quest-related?

It's basically a DLC-sized quest mod. With a small new worldspace, a dozen new interiors and several bigger and smaller quests which are all tied together to form a big quest line. Obviously a lot of other things like new factions NPCs etc. are included as well. You can check my profile for screenshots.

 

What are their plugin counts?

The largest one being ~835 ESP/ESL/ESM. I haven't gotten any feedback yet from my others alpha testers with hopefully more moderately sized LOs. But as I've mentioned earlier, as soon as one of my testers played a more basic LO everything worked fine. I don't know if it's a conflict or the ref limit.

 

Is there any particular reason your mod is esmified?

I checked some other quest mods and found this guide https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/48580?tab=description&BH=1 and since Bethesda is only releasing big mods as esms I assumed that this helps with loading related problems and I was also approached by one of my testers who requested an esmified version so I created one and also turned the unique NPCs persistent.

 

Another thought or question for your testers: can they actually start a new game and leave Vault 111 with their huge LOs with and without your mod? If they can't, and rely instead on loading their mods after they left V111, their test results should be treated as invalid since their saves might already be corrupted, especially if they have script-heavy mods that affect anything related to your quest mod.

I will ask them if they can do that for me.

 

Do they use default papyrus settings in their .ini or have they increased some of those following values from their defaults?

[Papyrus] fPostLoadUpdateTimeMS=500 iMaxStackDepth=100

From my personal experience increasing both values by reasonable (50%, 100%, 200%) amounts tends to help with the stability of huge LOs, especially if one runs a lot of Creation Club content. Checking the other papyrus settings might be worth a look as well. For some strange reason people often increase "iMaxAllocatedMemoryBytes" to very silly values, despite a couple of MBs being more than enough. Especially the settlement crowd seems to think that cranking up all papyrus values will help with large LOs.

I'll ask them that as well.

 

And last but not least, have you checked how many loaded refences your mod has with and without the ESM-flag? Since an ESM won't increase the amount of loaded references by much, your testers should be fine, unless they are all literally close to the limit in Fo4 (~2M refs, iirc)

• ESP: Found 95152 temporary and 1284 persistent (96436 total) loaded references

• ESMified:Found 95139 temporary and 1297 persistent (96436 total) loaded references

This is just the alpha which contains roughly 50% of the planned content, but a lot of the expected level design for the mod, so my mod will probably end up with ~130k-170 references I guess. I'm beginning to wonder if I should let my alpha testers check their ref count? The total limit is somewhere around 2M, right?

[KikiVelika]

 

And last but not least, have you checked how many loaded refences your mod has with and without the ESM-flag? Since an ESM won't increase the amount of loaded references by much, your testers should be fine, unless they are all literally close to the limit in Fo4 (~2M refs, iirc)

• ESP: Found 95152 temporary and 1284 persistent (96436 total) loaded references

• ESMified:Found 95139 temporary and 1297 persistent (96436 total) loaded references

This is just the alpha which contains roughly 50% of the planned content, but a lot of the expected level design for the mod, so my mod will probably end up with ~130k-170 references I guess. I'm beginning to wonder if I should let my alpha testers check their ref count? The total limit is somewhere around 2M, right?

 

 

Still 95k loaded temporary refences as ESP with the ESM-flag sound like a lot. From what I remember from a while back when I was giving feedback to another author who was also working on his own worldspace, one would expect that the count of temporary refences would decrease by about 80-90%. However he didn't have any quests in his w.i.p. mod at that time.

 

Sadly I don't have my collection of Fo4 tech docs at hand atm, since I'm on a business trip and only have some basic modding-tools on my laptop, but the limit was either 2^21, 2^21-1 or 2M flat.

 

Personally I think it doesn't hurt if your testers check for loaded refences, especially if they also have mods with custom worldspaces or a lot of interior cells in their LOs. Even some of the more illustrious settlement mods tend to add a lot of them.

 

I assume that you made sure to set the persistent reference flag on actors and other objects referenced in quests/scripts before flagging the plugin as ESM? I think the Creation Kit tends to not set those automatically, if it saves the plugin as ESP.

[84Cronos]

Still 95k loaded temporary refences as ESP with the ESM-flag sound like a lot. From what I remember from a while back when I was giving feedback to another author who was also working on his own worldspace, one would expect that the count of temporary refences would decrease by about 80-90%. However he didn't have any quests in his w.i.p. mod at that time.

 

Sadly I don't have my collection of Fo4 tech docs at hand atm, since I'm on a business trip and only have some basic modding-tools on my laptop, but the limit was either 2^21, 2^21-1 or 2M flat.

 

Personally I think it doesn't hurt if your testers check for loaded refences, especially if they also have mods with custom worldspaces or a lot of interior cells in their LOs. Even some of the more illustrious settlement mods tend to add a lot of them.

 

I assume that you made sure to set the persistent reference flag on actors and other objects referenced in quests/scripts before flagging the plugin as ESM? I think the Creation Kit tends to not set those automatically, if it saves the plugin as ESP.

I used another script which came from the guide to set the persistent flag for the unique actors. I ran through the whole thing 1-2 times afterwards, which another alpha tester with his medium LO did as well and everything worked fine. Do I also need to flag all the other quest aliases/references in my quests as persistent or is that done automatically?