Random "Loading area" crashes.

[ptbptb]

For a while now I've been having more than my fair share of crashes with Oblivion. No warning, except that they usually (always?) occur shortly after a "Loading area" message or when changing areas in cities, etc. After checking around one possible suspect would seem to be the Unofficial Oblivion Patch.

 

After deactivating the Unofficial Oblivion Patch and related patches the crashes have much reduced and no longer appear to be related to changing / loading areas.

 

Obviously I'd prefer to have the patches than not, but I can't put up with the number of crashes I get. I recently found the Unofficial Oblivion Patch Hotfix v323a but it doesn't appear to do anything about this particular problem. Can anyone suggest a possible solution that would have the patches working without the crashes? Otherwise I'll just have to do without them.

 

The mods I have activated are shown below.

 

Unofficial Oblivion Patch

Unofficial Oblivion Patch Hotfix v323a

Unofficial Shivering Isles Patch

Unofficial Official Mods Patch

SM Plugin Refurbish

Robert's female bodies compendium

Robert's Male Body v5 Beta

Slof's Khajiit Retexture

Khajiit Auto Night-Eye

Loading Screens Themed Replacer

Loading Screens Themed AddOn

Vanity Camera Smoother

Birthsigns Expanded

Extended Imperial City

Extended Chorrol

Extended Skingrad

Crowded Roads Revisited

Stylish Jump - Animation Replacer

LowPoly Grass

Short Grass V3

Fixed Repriced Clutter

Better Imperfect Water

Map Markers

[DavidBudreck]

Realize that a good measure of this is simply that our beloved game is just plain unstable. It is buggy and unfinished. And, on top of that we pile on mod after mod.

 

The first thing to try nixing is the Extended mods. Rendering actors takes a LOT of game horsepower; that is why there are so few NPC's and creatures in Oblivion. Once you get upwards of 20 actors, everything starts to drag.

 

I have them too, but I save often :)

 

WHENEVER I move from one cell to another I save. Whenever I enter a new cell I save. For Months now, when in a game, I have not been able to load a save in ANY other cell than the current one I'm in. That is a guaranteed CTD.

 

Thank God for Clean Quit! On it's own, Oblivion has stopped even bothering to crash when exiting; it just freezes the screen :P

[ptbptb]

WHENEVER I move from one cell to another I save. Whenever I enter a new cell I save.

 

Not very helpful when you're wandering around the wilderness - the first I know that I'm in a new cell is when the game crashes. ;)

 

I didn't notice much, or any, additional dragging with the 'extended' lot. Also the crashes occur even when I'm in the wilderness so I'm inclined to think they aren't to blame this time.

[Branimirzg]

Disable autosaves

[DavidBudreck]

Sorry, I thought you had mentioned cities. Crowded roads does the same thing, adds actors, but in the wilderness.

 

 

I had a very bad experience with Unofficial SI Patch, but not with the regular Unofficial Patch.

[ptbptb]

Sorry, I thought you had mentioned cities.

I presume "loading area" is the wilderness equivalent of the city area-change on going through gate. I got crashes in both wilderness and city areas.

 

I had a very bad experience with Unofficial SI Patch, but not with the regular Unofficial Patch.

Similar symptoms? I deactivated all Unofficial patches (as I presumed it would not make sense to disable just the main one). I haven't gone near the SI quest (I have the SM Plugin Refurbish so I don't think it's even available yet).

 

Disable autosaves

Hmm, even if its crashing in locations (wilderness) where it wouldn't do an autosave? I did a Google search and disabling autosaves is one of the recommended things to try but I'm a little dubious it's going to make a big difference this time.

 

Incidentally I also saw that saving over the top of old saves can also increase crashes!? Oblivion must do something pretty odd when saving if that is the case. Normally I cycle through 3 different manual saves, but I can always try "New save" every time if that really makes a difference.

 

Thanks everybody for the advice so far.

[bben46]

Here is a link to Bben's Crash Help

http://www.tesnexus.com/articles/article.php?id=298.

[DavidBudreck]

OK, well that was all the easy stuff. I think you now may be reduced to disabling them one at a time to see. I am not an expert, by any means, on mod compatibility.

 

The problems I had with Unofficial SI Patch were not like what you are having. In my case, none of the scripts from SI would execute, at all, ever. I had to recompile every one of them to get them to run.

[ptbptb]

Here is a link to Bben's Crash Help

http://www.tesnexus.com/articles/article.php?id=298.

 

I'll re-activate the unofficial patches and give Windom Earle's Oblivion Crash Prevention System a whirl. The log might prove informative (to somebody) anyway ;)

 

OK, well that was all the easy stuff. I think you now may be reduced to disabling them one at a time to see. I am not an expert, by any means, on mod compatibility.

 

Well disabling all the unofficial patches works, it just leaves me with all the unofficial patches disabled. :(

[XJDHDR]

You could try the link in my signature. Until recently, I was bringing my system to it's knees (FPS of 8 wasn't uncommon) and even then, my game would never crash even after hours of playing.