CTDs upon entering certain cells

[chaospearl]

Hey folks. I'm having some CTD issues and I've exhausted all the usual suspects, so I hope somebody can offer some advice.

 

It happens consistently upon entering certain cells in the game -- the two I've run into so far are right outside Skingrad's east gate on the road that goes between Tamika's and the Surilie Brothers' vineyards, and another one on the road midway between Skingrad and the IC (it's the cell that Darvil's Cabin is located in, from the Old Crow Inn mod, if that helps).

 

At first when it started happening I immediately suspected the Old Crow Inn mod was causing it, but I tried deactivating that and it still crashes when I enter that cell. Apparently it's just bad luck that the cabin happens to be there. I then tried totally deactivating ALL my mods; every single mod I'm running including the Unofficial Official Patch. Doesn't help; I still crash the moment the game tries to load either of those two cells. And if there are two, I bet there are more I just haven't stumbled into yet. My character has stayed close to the IC up until now; I've been down to Braveeel and environs, and from Anvil to Skingrad (long story... a mod magically teleported me from the IC to Anvil so I haven't actually traversed the road between). I haven't been anywhere near Bruma, Chorrol, or Cheydinhal yet and I have a bad feeling there are plenty of other CTD cells awaiting me.

 

I'm managing to avoid the "bad" cell outside Skingrad by simply walking around it, but I'm not quite sure where the "borders" of the Darvil's Cabin cell are and after four crashes in five minutes while trying to walk around it, I came here for help.

 

Does anyone know what on earth would be causing CTDs just by entering a cell? Is there any way to fix this?

[Jenrai]

Unfortunately, whilst deactivating mods will help you troubleshoot some issues, only removing the esm/esps, and all the other files that came with those mods actually removes them from your game and prevents them effecting it at all.

To put it bluntly - Just deactivating mods does not uninstall them.

In future use either BAIN or OMOD to install everything to rectify that. I prefer BAIN (from Wrye Bash) as it includes better project management, but OMOD (From Oblivion Mod Manager) is slightly more straightforward and generally more powerful thanks to OBMM's ability to handle BSA's.

 

Anyways... on to your specific issue;

Due to the fact its wilderness cells, and these can contain all sorts of random bits and bats, much of which you probably won't actually see or realise is there, troubleshooting it can be tricky. Fortunately, we have someplace to start as you've got 2. It would be everywhere outside if it was something that broke a global variable (IE the weather) but I recon we're still going to need a load order list. Bben has an article on how to post one on the File Server articles page but for a start, get and run BOSS if you haven't already. If this is a mod conflict it could be solved by something as straightforward as jiggling your load order a little.

 

Let us know how you're doing, and if I can't help further I'm sure someone else will.

Good luck

Jenrai

[przemekG]

I had exactly the same problem today: i closed one of oblivion gates, was in need to go to chapel in skingrad to cure myself, and just as I was about to enter the road leading to Skingrad the game crashed (I am sure we are talking about the same place). At first I was sure it was adobe updater that caused that crash as I saw it in task manager after the crash, but later after loading my save game, closing the gates and heading back to Skingrad it crashed again in exactly the same place. Weird thing is I never have any issue walking around that area before - it happen today , ~60 hours into the game/

Tomorrow I will post my mods list (now it late night and im on linux atm).

[chaospearl]

Hi Jenrai; thanks for riding to my rescue for the second time in as many days! (I'm the same idiot having issues with a prizefight between Setsuna's training dummy versus Qarl's Harvest, round three, KO).

 

I apologize for not being clear; when I said "deactivated" all my mods I actually meant that I uninstalled the mods that are OMODs using OBMM. A great number of them aren't OMODs to begin with however; they're just naked esp files without any accompanying BSAs, textures, meshes, audio, etc. Does unchecking those in OBMM completely rid them from my game, or are they permanent additions once I've created a savegame with those esp's active, even if I deactivate them later?

 

I mentioned that one of the cells giving me issues is the one that contains Darvil's cabin from Old Crow Inn -- that mod is one of the naked esp files. When it's running, I can stand in the cell right next to the cabin and I can see that cabin quite obviously in front of my face. I don't crash until I take a few steps towards it and enter the actual cell it's in. Now, when I deactivate the mod by unchecking its esp, and reload my game, the cabin's not there anymore. I'm standing in the exact same spot and instead there's just normal wilderness where the cabin had been. Only when I take those same few steps forward and enter the cell where the cabin used to be... KA-BAM POW, immediate crash to desktop. It happens no matter which direction I approach the cell from, and whether the cabin is there or not, i.e. whether the mod is active or not. Since it's just an esp and not an OMOD and has no other accompanying files, I'm not certain how else to eliminate its effects from my game.

 

Anyway... an update. I realized something incredibly stupid last night. On your advice I re-downloaded BOSS and gave it another shot. I'd tried it out once before a month or two ago when I was first starting to use mods, but discarded it after one run because it didn't seem to recognize more than half of my mods. Well, it turns out that it wasn't recognizing them because I, in my glorious stunning idiocy, had renamed a lot of the esp files. Why? I wanted to keep better track of the mods I was running and some of the esp names are really odd and give little indication of the purpose of the mod. For instance, the esp file for Bank of Cyrodiil is named zabankmod.esp. I'd renamed it to, duh, Bank_of_Cyrodiil.esp. And by doing that of course BOSS wasn't recognizing the mod. Gee, I can't imagine why not.

 

I'm sure you're laughing at me by now; this was a real headdesk moment when I realized it, and I honestly don't know why I didn't understand earlier that BOSS recognizes mods based on the esp's name. (I'm not actually an absolute moron and I do have a little bit of experience as a programmer; I'm just unfamiliar with the language of mods and related files, though I've picked up more in the past three days than I'd known in three months before I opened the CS). In any case, I took the BOSSlog list of mods that it hadn't recognized and went down the list checking the original 7z archives -- I keep the archives for every mod I install -- to see what the esp's name was supposed to be, and righting the ones I'd renamed in my folly. Then I ran BOSS again. Sure enough, this time out of 225 mods there were only half a dozen it didn't recognize. (Oscar Wiener, anyone?)

 

Happily, I found that by reordering my mod list using BOSS, I was able to eliminate a couple of particularly aggravating bugs I'd been having trouble with, and even a few that I stupidly didn't realize WERE bugs until suddenly they'd been fixed, lol. Turns out I hadn't updated the BSA redirection after installing Diverse Grasses and a mod that updates most of the merchant shops' signs, so those mods were only taking effect in part and I'd never realized I wasn't seeing the full effect. Heh!

 

If anybody's still actually reading this, I commend you for tolerating my rambles... oops. The end to this long tale is that unfortunately BOSS was not able to fix my two broken CTD cells, so in a fit of pique and coffee, I went ahead with a full reinstall of Oblivion. When I chose to take that step I thought I'd be up all night reinstalling my mods one by one. However before I completely wiped all traces of the game from my machine, I backed up my Data folder to a flash drive so I'd be able to do some comparisons if things didn't go as planned. After I had reinstalled the game in all its vanilla glory but before adding even a single patch, I paused a moment, shrugged my shoulders and copied the old Data folder back into its place. I knew there was a high probability that I'd just re-copied whatever had caused my problems to begin with, but I figured I'd give it a shot because if it turned out I was still crashing in those two cells, it'd only take five minutes to do another fresh reinstall of the vanilla game from the CD and try again without the obviously corrupted old Data folder -- but if by some chance it worked, I would have saved myself hours and hours (and a pot of high-octane coffee) of reinstalling over 200 mods from scratch.

 

You know how this ends or I wouldn't have bothered posting it. It worked!!! By copying over the old Data folder I saved all my mods and everything is working as it should, only without the aggravating immediate CTD in the Skingrad and Darvil's Cabin cells. I noticed a bit of an increase in FPS too; not spectacular, but every little bit helps considering I'm running a heavily modded game on a laptop, not to mention playing using a Sixaxis controller from my PlayStation 3. (I know, OMFGBBQ blasphemy! ruination! why o why!?! ... it's because I'm disabled, advanced arthritis, my hands are like claws and I have very little mobility in my shoulders and none in my wrists; it's been years since I was physically capable of using a mouse.)

 

I still don't know what the hell caused the issues to begin with. Just that it evidently had something to do with a corruption outside the Data folder that went away with a fresh install. Hallelujah.

 

On the other hand, after all this drama, I finally started up my savegame again and marched triumphantly down the path to Darvil's Cabin, crash-free... and you know what? The damn thing's locked. Needs a key, too. Arrghhhhh! (Yeah, I know it's not a bug, I simply haven't done the quest associated with the mod yet... but I found it ironic, lol). I got back on my accidentally stolen horse and rode away in a fit of pique. Another day, another septim. I love this game!

[Jenrai]

lol.

I'm not laughing at you mate. More like with you. I know that sounds cliche, but you know what? I used to save esps I'd tweaked/changed more to my liking under different names, in case I broke anything with my little tweaks... and refused to use BOSS because it didn't recognise these mods for quite a while until I actually read up on it. Funny ole world ain't it. ;)

 

Glad you got that issue sorted... unconventional solution but hey, if it works, it works. :) The only thing I can figure would have caused it and been fixed by a reinstall whilst keeping the same data folder is maybe a dodgy archive invalidation entry as thats ourside your data folder, a slightly twisted mods folder or a glitch in the initial install that escaped attention until now... or something like that... I've no idea if I'm honest. I just know it shouldn't have worked, but hey, with how my game's built it probably shouldn't even start!

 

What can we say... the TES games and construction set work in mysterious ways!

 

Jenrai

[chaospearl]

Hahahaha... that's one of the reasons I keep the original 7z or rar archives of every mod I download, or at least every one that doesn't turn out to be crap. I've tweaked about a fourth of my 200+ mods I'd say, in one way or another, but I don't edit the esp names when I do so. No really big tweaks; a lot are typo fixes because it kills my immersion when I see "You're Magicka pool has increased!" or similar. I've also COBL'ified a lot of wells since there's no reason I shouldn't be able to fill my waterskins from the well outside the Et in Arkay Ego priory just because EiAE isn't a COBL mod. It is now, bwahahahaha. My copy is, anyway. :) I fixed the non-working apple press in Inebriation (and that one I'd re-upload to the Nexus if I could, since a lot of people mention in the mod's comments that the press doesn't work, but I couldn't get in touch with the original author for permission unfortunately). And last but not least, I have spent literally HOURS and HOURS re-naming crap in Apachii's Goddess Store, and removing the prefixes LAME adds to my spells. I understand why the authors of both chose to name things the way they did; it does make the items\spells order themselves more logically, but I just can't tolerate the immersion killer of seeing "RHH1: Minor Healing" in my spell list or "Dress Black Short Ecup HGEC" in my inventory. Personal preference. Possibly personal OCD.

[przemekG]

OK, good youre able to play the game without problems.

But where is that Darvil's Cabin? Or where I can find the mod to download.

I am just curious if our crashes were related.

Mine was happening in that area:

http://img94.imageshack.us/img94/4269/oblivion20100415124238.th.jpg

 

Reordering my mods with BOSS seamed to had fixed it.

I am attaching my mods list from before and after using BOSS.

[Jenrai]

Heya Prz;

Whilst I'm thinking your issues may have been related, I can pretty much assure you BOSS didn't fix yours, unless you've uploaded the wrong files. Check them for yourself, they're the exact same order. And thats all that BOSS changes, it doesn't touch anything in your game, so it must be something else.

Did you have the same crash outside Skingrad itself? If so, did you ever have the Old Crow Inn installed? (I know you don't now but that might not mean a right lot if it recorded a change to the cell before you created your current string of saves)

How many times did it happen for you? On your map it looks more like a land tear, because of the jagged, straight edge to your current cell. That shouldn't happen. You should be able to see into the cell, at least on the map, unless something is stopping that cell from loading completely.

If I remember correctly, doesn't one of the DLC's mod that area too? I no longer have them as I d/led them on an older computer and the site has gone bye bye (thank you very much Bethesda. Grrrr...) and I unfortunately can't find the receipts. I not saying the DLC is broken but its possible theres a conflict with another mod.

 

Jenrai

[przemekG]

Heya Prz;

Whilst I'm thinking your issues may have been related, I can pretty much assure you BOSS didn't fix yours, unless you've uploaded the wrong files.

 

Sorry, I was in a hurry and renamed wrong file to "before BOSS". Here are correct ones attached to this post - plugins.txt is the one I was using when I was having those crashes (it was 2-3 times, after that I tried not to go through that area again, played for about 5 more hours doing other things in Bruma and Leyawin; then I downloaded and installed BOSS, run it and after that Ive checked that area of Skingrad again and had no crashes.

And no the mods you saw listed in txt files are only ones I ever used with my current Oblivion installation.

But thinking... the only thing I did when I was having these crashes was changing streampurge value to recommended one (it was 4 I think) - and changed it back to bigger values (5 or 6)...maybe it had something to do with loading new areas...and streamline was purging memory too often.. or something, dont know really :)

[Jenrai]

Ah, yeah. Thats more like what I expected pre-boss. I think what might have been causing it was Streamline being too far up your load order then, at least for you. Just like most other mods, anything that loads after it and alters similar stuff will attempt to overwrite the changes. Most of the time that just screws mods up, rips the land apart, stuff like that, but with Streamline, because it changes so much and is changing it all the time, it can be a little more serious.

Glad you got it sorted anyways mate. =]

Jenrai