Game crashes after 5 seconds of load

[Hastein]

when i load Fo3 i can get to the main menu and click continue but after 5 seconds the game crashes

[Alastair91]

What are the mods that you have installed? Please post us your load order.

[Hastein]

fallout 3.esm

broken steel.esm

mothership zeta.esm

point lookout.esm

anchorage.esm

the pitt.esm

calibr.esm

followers relax.esp

calibrxmerchant.esp

arms dealer.esp

three dog follower.esp

ARC.esp

sentinel lyons follower.esp

bus home.esp

ravenrock forever.esp

beefed up citadel.esp

citadel armory.esp

[mechine]

Uh if you click continue it's going to do that, an promote coruption, which is why we don't ever click on it. Click load, then pick a save game. Turn off all your auto-saves (disabled) then each time you want to save press Esc and create a new save, don't delete any of the saves until you are ready to delete them all an start over. Don't add or remove mods until you are ready to delete all the saves an start over, but if you are only adding mods it's less risky that you would run into problems.

 

Then never quicksave, which isn't a full save, an also it doesn't pause the chaos going on while it's saving like Esc does, so it promotes coruption just like autosave or the continue button. Then you know if you wanted a little extra protection. Get the Groovatron mod, which has tools in it besides the fun stuff. One of them is the ability to teleport, and place a teleport marker anywhere you want. Which is helpful because there isn't always a door around which would allow safe purging of the cell buffer.

 

The basic way is to enter a door, then open the console ~ an type PCB (purge cell buffer) watch the poopy data flow by, turn around an go back out the door to force a reload of that cell you are in, only with a clean cell buffer ready for max performance. This is most notable as frame stutter while roaming around in the actual wasteland from cell to cell with tons of chaos going on. After 10-20 minutes an 20 different cells you just ran across, the cell buffer is full of all kinds of useless data. Which drags down the system.

 

Now if you just run around typing ~PCB it's going to cause you to crash sometimes. So it's risky, the door trick an groovatron trick don't crash. With the Groovatron all you would do is hit X to place the teleport marker, then hit X again and teleport to the all black room, ~PCB, watch the poopy data go by, hit X teleport to the all white room, spin the player charicter around 180 degrees or so in 3rd person, (watch to see that the normal map is being used on the clothing when you turn, the gloss from light) (which is just so that when you go back to the wasteland it loads all the normals around you) Hit X an teleport to your marker in the wasteland, which forces the reload of that cell, only with a cell buffer ready for performance. If you don't go to the white room, then when you go back to the wasteland the roads an rocks an stuff will look really dark even though it's daytime, run 20 yards or so an then the system loads up the normals an they now look like they should. Heck I guess you could try just teleporting to the white room an see how it works out.

 

The thing is, when you get a really good install an build, it boils down to all the useless data in the cell buffer, then the data maybe going corupt inside your computer system's cache, then any glitches which might come along. You can purge the Cell buffer, then avoid saving data like that into save games. You can reboot your computer every 2-3 hours which will avoid your system cache going corupt. The the glitches are pretty rare.

 

It's not that easy though, before you can get to that point, you still would need to spend time, tweeking an testing a vanilla fallout install, patched, then later testing again with DLC's installed, then installing mods either one huge one at a time or about 60-80 little ones. Because it takes about the same about of time to fix a huge mod with FO3edit as it does about 60-80 tiny mods. However, if you split up the workload into testing sessions where you install mods, fix mods, test in-game, then tweek, you get plenty of game time, rather than the two weeks straght it would take to fix a load order you threw together in one day or a few days. Have a plan, slowly build it up, starting with a known good an tested vanilla install.

 

 

The 1.7 patch fixes stuff, then tweeking the config.ini folders fixes stuff, setting your grapics cards settings, setting in-game settings, having updated drivers an software, defragmenting the harddrive, cleaning the registry, purging temp folders, Creating a merge patch with FO3edit, Fixing the mods top to bottom with FO3edit to all work together, then even a master update with FO3edit. All this crappy work you have to do which almost never ends just to narrow it down to only 2-3 possible causes for corupt data or crashes.