CTD when approaching Raider Encampment (near flooded metro)

[TheHermit84]

Please help!

I'm 30 hours into my playthrough. I keep getting a CTD when approaching Raider Encampment (near flooded metro) from either side.

Fast travel is turned off with FWE. Please watch the video I've attached for more information.

 

My Load Order:

 

 

Fallout3.esm
Anchorage.esm
ThePitt.esm
StreetLights.esm
BrokenSteel.esm
PointLookout.esm
Zeta.esm
Unofficial Fallout 3 Patch.esm
iHUD.esm
CRAFT.esm
CALIBR.esm
Project Beauty.esm
FO3 Wanderers Edition - Main File.esm
Mart's Mutant Mod.esm
RH_IRONSIGHTS.esm
Point Lookout Reborn by Jcro25.esm
FO3 Wanderers Edition - Alternate Travel.esp
DarNifiedUIF3.esp
MME Save-O-tron.esp
Project Beauty- Broken Steel.esp
Project Beauty- Point Lookout.esp
krzymar-MoonSize_200%.esp
Dree Perks.esp
BoSPatrols.esp
megalight.esp
Realistic Megaton Shack Final - Update 6.esp
FO3 Wanderers Edition - Main File.esp
FO3 Wanderers Edition - DLC Anchorage.esp
FO3 Wanderers Edition - DLC The Pitt.esp
FO3 Wanderers Edition - DLC Broken Steel.esp
FO3 Wanderers Edition - DLC Point Lookout.esp
FO3 Wanderers Edition - DLC Mothership Zeta.esp
RH_FWE_Bridge.esp
FO3_WRP.esp
Bornagain Zeta Combat Armor Texture Patch.esp
Bornagain Outcast T-45d Texture Patch.esp
BetterRadiationSuits.esp
Mart's Mutant Mod.esp
Mart's Mutant Mod - DLC Anchorage.esp
Mart's Mutant Mod - DLC The Pitt.esp
Mart's Mutant Mod - DLC Broken Steel.esp
Mart's Mutant Mod - DLC Point Lookout.esp
Mart's Mutant Mod - DLC Zeta.esp
Mart's Mutant Mod - Master Menu Module.esp
dD - Enhanced Blood Main.esp
Xepha's Darkened Interiors.esp
Xepha's Darkened Interiors - OA.esp
Xepha's Darkened Interiors - BS.esp
Xepha's Darkened Interiors - PL.esp
RagdollOverhaulFo3.esp
JIP Companions Command & Control.esp
suitcase_nuke.esp
MoHDusty - FO3.esp
Millenia_AK47_replacer.esp
Radio Stutter Fix v0_85.esp
Blackened FWE + MMM + Project Beauty.esp
TheOutbreak - WMS Vanilla Combo Pack - C12H.esp
Merged Patch.esp

 

[Billy1969]

Deactivate Marts Mutant Mod and it's dependencies, load your last save and try to get where you CTD, I bet it won't crash this time...

 

Edit: I read in another thread you have the same problem in Alexandria Arms, same thing deactivate MMM and try again

Edited June 23, 2014 by Billy1969

[TheHermit84]

Thanks for the effort, Billy! I tried your suggestion - fully uninstalling MMM and deactivating its dependencies. I tried several saves and they all CTD at the same place still

Maybe some script is broken? :confused:

[Billy1969]

Thanks for the effort, Billy! I tried your suggestion - fully uninstalling MMM and deactivating its dependencies. I tried several saves and they all CTD at the same place still

Maybe some script is broken? :confused:

 

Now that is strange, 95% times out of 100% I CTD'd for no reason in a place before it was always MMM increased spawns that screwed the game memory with too many AI actors moving around.

 

With MMM fully deactivated and you still have CTD then you have the very rare remaining 5%, a corrupted mesh. Ok this is what you do, reactivate MMM, go into your fallout3/data/meshes folder and start renaming the subfolders for example armor to armortest, then you reload your game and try to reach your CTD zone again without CTD'ing, you continue until you find the folder containing the culprit .nif file, once you find the correct folder, you move 50% of it's nif files to a backup folder somewhere else on your HDD, then you rename the folder back to its old name, start your game again, still no CTD? nice, the culprit is moved to the backup folder, if it CTD's then the culprit is still in your renamed folder. then you replace the meshes 10 by 10 until it crashes again and then until you find the correct mesh that makes your game crash.

 

It's a pain, I know but it's the only solution, because starting a new game is no option, the faulty mesh will screw things up again sooner or later until it is fully removed.

 

Edit : just to speed things up; the folders where the culprit resides are likely to be armor, architecture, weapons but no guarantee, if I were you I'd start with those first. Also you can try to rename your meshes folder entirely to meshestest, but if you use a custom race, hair or anything else non vanilla on your character that will likely make you CTD before you reach the menu in fallout, but hey it can save time if it works and so you're sure it's a mesh or not

Edited June 23, 2014 by Billy1969

[M48A5]

You have another problem that you did not mention. When you activate the PipBoy, you are losing the textures on your arm. I don't recognize the armor you are wearing, but I think it might be the problem.

[TheHermit84]

Really appreciate the comments, people. I was worried no one would reply :blush:

 

You have another problem that you did not mention. When you activate the PipBoy, you are losing the textures on your arm. I don't recognize the armor you are wearing, but I think it might be the problem.

 

@M48A5, I thought somebody might point that out. It's not actually a loss of texture. When using an ENB, if you bring up the PipBoy the ENB is temporarily disabled. At about 3:12 in the video where I bring up my PipBoy, the arm appears to turn an overly saturated red. This is compounded by the fact that my character had chem effects, which change the colour of the screen, but this is only visible when ENB is disabled. The armor I'm wearing is the Road Rascal Leather Armor, which I believe is from FWE? Either way, I can live with that graphical issue. It's not game breaking :cool:

 

 

Thanks for the effort, Billy! I tried your suggestion - fully uninstalling MMM and deactivating its dependencies. I tried several saves and they all CTD at the same place still

Maybe some script is broken? :confused:

 

Now that is strange, 95% times out of 100% I CTD'd for no reason in a place before it was always MMM increased spawns that screwed the game memory with too many AI actors moving around.

With MMM fully deactivated and you still have CTD then you have the very rare remaining 5%, a corrupted mesh. Ok this is what you do, reactivate MMM, go into your fallout3/data/meshes folder and start renaming the subfolders for example armor to armortest, then you reload your game and try to reach your CTD zone again without CTD'ing, you continue until you find the folder containing the culprit .nif file, once you find the correct folder, you move 50% of it's nif files to a backup folder somewhere else on your HDD, then you rename the folder back to its old name, start your game again, still no CTD? nice, the culprit is moved to the backup folder, if it CTD's then the culprit is still in your renamed folder. then you replace the meshes 10 by 10 until it crashes again and then until you find the correct mesh that makes your game crash.

It's a pain, I know but it's the only solution, because starting a new game is no option, the faulty mesh will screw things up again sooner or later until it is fully removed.

 

Edit : just to speed things up; the folders where the culprit resides are likely to be armor, architecture, weapons but no guarantee, if I were you I'd start with those first. Also you can try to rename your meshes folder entirely to meshestest, but if you use a custom race, hair or anything else non vanilla on your character that will likely make you CTD before you reach the menu in fallout, but hey it can save time if it works and so you're sure it's a mesh or not

 

 

@Billy, I had high hopes, man. I even went as far as disabling all my mods and only running the core fallout 3 files (DLC etc). I still had the crash! I even tried coc'ing back to Megaton, waiting in an interior cell for 6 days. Saving. Deactivating MMM. Reloading. Saving. Reactivating MMM. Saving again. Reloading. returning back to the Citadel and trying to walk that same path. Boom! CTD.

 

I too wondered about a corrupted mesh. I had a very similar problem in Skyrim when using the Project Parallax Remastered for Winterhold. Every time I looked in a certain area of the city the game would crash. But that would occur regardless of a clean save or whatever. Here the issue is only prevalent in my most recent saves. I can return to a save 15 hours before with no issue what-soever. Nonetheless, I will try your suggestion, Billy. I just don't understand: how can a mesh be fine in an earlier save, but not in a current one? Surely it's the save file itself that's the problem?

 

NB: I'm using MME Save-O-tron, which makes clean saves every 30 minutes. It's an alternative to CASM. More up-to-date and efficient, apparently... http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout3/mods/18712/?

[TheHermit84]

So I made a video trying out your process of elimination suggestion, Billy

 

 

Is it safe to say that it's not a problem with the meshes?

Isn't there a program for FO3 that can clean scripts up? I understand that scripts don't attach themselves to save games in the same way Skyrim does, but I'm wondering if it's something embedded into the save games itself.

[Billy1969]

So I made a video trying out your process of elimination suggestion, Billy

 

 

Is it safe to say that it's not a problem with the meshes?

Isn't there a program for FO3 that can clean scripts up? I understand that scripts don't attach themselves to save games in the same way Skyrim does, but I'm wondering if it's something embedded into the save games itself.

 

So you crash even without the meshes loaded, ok then you have a corrupted savegame, this can happen during an autosave, a quicksave or an automatic save. Yes, also with CASM or any other automatic saver, I had the experience myself so now I only save manually, never had a corrupted save again since. Problem is that once your save is corrupted, the corruption carries on to the next one in sequence and so on so it can take many hours before you notice it.

 

Generally crashing in the same spot is caused by too many MMM spawns which the game memory can't handle and it crashes, followed by a corrupted mesh, and this could have been an armor one, for example an enemy spawning with a corrupted armor mesh that makes your game crash to desktop once you approach the zone where he spawned sufficiently enough to make the mesh load into the game memory. Since you tried the waiting method also to make the zones reset, which would make the corrupted mesh reset also and spawn maybe a different enemy wearing another armor and then should cause your ctd to go away and that didn't work either we can scrap the mesh problem and the MMM problem, so what remains is the corrupted save, however I never experienced one that makes you ctd while having the MMM bug or mesh corruption symptoms.

 

Every save corruption that happened in my game would lead to at least one of these symptoms: crash on fast travelling (loading screen would show and then ctd), crash on saving, edit:crash on level-up, well not a crash actually but a freeze on level-up is more like it, you could assign your level up points, then choose a perk and when you click next the whole screen just freezes, no mouse response anymore, nothing. you can test this on every save-game with player.advlevel command in console, the most recent one not freezing in the perk screen would be my first save that doesn't have the corruption and the one I resume my playthrough from, hopefully for you that isn't too long ago.

 

edit: the crash on save thing can sometimes be cured by using the suicide and reset my game method, by effectively having your character killed in game, let the game reload and then you can save again (sometimes), but this is unlikely to fix your problem as you didn't mention crashing on save, but you never know, it doesn't hurt to try

 

edit 2 : please keep us posted if you find a solution or even if you didn't, then we'll keep looking for it, no worries

Edited June 24, 2014 by Billy1969

[TheHermit84]

Fallout will be the death of me! Ha!
I absolutely love the game, even on the 11th playthrough, but I'll be damned if I can play from start to finish without SOME problem.
Never known a game quite like it :(

See, I thought that perhaps it was MMM spawns and memory issues. But with ENBoost and NVAC, that problem should be fixed.
A combination of those two plugins helps to alleviate the 3.2 gig issue. I'm pretty sure it's doing it's job as well. The Mall, for example,
there must have been literally 40 super mutants, my player character, my follower, Willow, and 9 BoS soldiers in that cell duking it out.
There were no FPS drops, no crashing, I can keep returning there again and again even with all the dead bodies that remain and respawns there after.
Whereas, the Raider encampment only had about 10 raiders and I didn't get any crashing at the time.

As for the save corruption, I've turned off the in-game saving, and I only allow save-o-tron to make a hard save every 10 minutes.
I don't fast travel (except with FWE alternative travel, which I haven't actually used yet).
I had a crash on save in a previous playthrough. Much like Gopher's let's play FO3, I had to hang in the towel on that one.
I've not had a crash when levelling up yet. The last save before the corruption is about 15-20 hours ago. Doesn't sound like a lot, but that's a week of my time
and a lot of decision I'll never be able to do again. I must have done 10 missions in that time.

I also tried the infamous 'blow yourself up' method. It didn't work.

In the end I coc'd to Red Racer Factory and started the OA questline. I'm hoping that 10-15 days (as opposed to 5)
of avoiding that area will allow me to return there.

I'm not forgetting this problem at the moment. I would like it fixed. So I'll keep looking for a solution.
Personally I think it would have happened without any mods installed. I was very careful about the mods I picked this time around and my merge patch is
both automated and manually edited to be free of conflicts.

[Billy1969]

Something else I was thinking of, can you give me the size in Mb of your last savegame + the number of ugrids you preload in the memory with the fallout.ini file,

 

it should read uGridsToLoad=x where x is a number

and also the line iPreloadSizeLimit=x where x is another number (well a big number actually)

What could also help is that you try to monitor your cpu % load and system memory % usage before and during the CTD, with a utility like memory manager, I am curious as if you see a spike in either one or both just before you crash or not

Edited June 25, 2014 by Billy1969