DAR - Dynamin Animation Replacer mod causes CTD

[Skybroom]

(skip to questions at the bottom of the page)

First off, I am a LE gamer, modder a little bit, and a huge fan of DAR - Dynamic Animation Replacer mod. I have buit a pretty large collection of DAR addons and animation packs for Player and Non-playable characters to make each of them a bit more unique. And I love it, really enjoying the thing when I launch the game with DAR and DAR-related mods enabled.

Problem is, I start experiencing CTD's after having played with DAR for awhile (after several sittings, several saves).

I wish I knew what exactly causes the game to crash, not immediately, but after a few hours of gameplay. I have a low end PC and that's probably the main issue, but I'm still hoping to find a work around. Asked on the mod's page by the way to no success, so I'm asking here.

I can only guess that there might be a stack of script instances of some sort getting bloated up and get my system overencumbered at some point, making it impossible for the machine to carry on. I know nothing of it,  but there must be a limit for anim events that system is able to process at a time.

The only way around that I found so far is to disable DAR and DAR-dependent mods and play without them. I noticed that after awhile I can enable them again and there will be no game crashing for awhile until it gets bloated again.

So, my questions are:

1. What happens when the game crashes? What causes the game crash?

2. Where is the file, the momory buffer that contains the digital information about the current and recent script events, anim events?

3. Is there a way to clean up, empty that memory buffer (off the game) without harming the saved game?

Edited October 21 by Skybroom
making thing more clear

[scorrp10]

DAR is a .dll SKSE plugin.   It has no scripts, and no forms.   It is essentially a process that exists outside of game's engine, and when the game tries to retrieve an .hkx file to run some animation, DAR may supply a different one depending on conditions.   But it should really have no impact on your game in general.   I mean, to the game engine, it should be 'invisible' that it is playing a different animation file .   Maybe there are certain specific animation replacements that you have in place that game's engine has a problem playing (i.e. animation trying to move a non-existent bone in the skeleton)   You could try installing Crash log mod, and see if it tells you anything.    It could be that a bad animation file is played not every time that animation is called for.   I.e. if you have 10 different chair sitting animations for females, chosen randomly, and one of them is bad, it might take a while for you to get a bad roll.

As to your questions:   Generally, a crash occurs due toy an exception (error) in the code.    Most commonly caused by a corrupt resource being processed.   Could be an invalid mesh (i.e. dropping an item with double-sided shader flag is a CTD), could be a bad texture, could be a morph that does not match a mesh (i.e. using vanilla head morphs with High Poly Head), could be a lot of other things.

You could check DAR log in Documents/My Games/Skyrim/SKSE/DynamicAnimationReplacer.log to see if it holds any clues.    Or crash log (see above) in game's main directory.

DAR should have absolutely zero impact on your actual save game.    And there is literally nothing to clear.    If the crash is called by an invalid animation file/mesh/texture, the only solution is to correct or eliminate that specific file.

Another issue of yours is you are sticking with a dead product.    Support for LE is almost non-existing, and LE version of DAR has not ben updated since 2020.   Most people today use a much more robust Open Animation Replacer(OAR) with Skyrim Special Edition.

[xkkmEl]

I'll add that there are bugs in the game engine.  Specifically, there are rare circumstances in which it mishandles memory allocations which can lead to all sorts of errors and exceptions.  Very little is known about where and why they occur, otherwise someone would go in and fix them.

I have seen for example one instance in which a small rectangular "light and shadow mask" got attached to the display, showing pale highlights from a door that was fixed on the screen and not following the door itself.  I was able to go through a load door, with that shadow mask still stuck... and the game crashed a few seconds later.  Reloading fixed it.

Most of the time, you just get strange malfunctions, followed by a CTD a few minutes later.

Fortunately, they seldom impact the saved games.

[Skybroom]

It really looks like addressing and eliminating the errors and other issues listed in DAR's SKSE log (DynamicAnimationReplacer.log) (missing esp's, invalid conditions...) helped! No CTDs so far.

To my shame, I had no idea about that log's existance. Thank you guys for your help!

Edited November 3 by Skybroom
more info