Crash and burn (Or just crashing repeatedly)

[legend8804]

Hey there Nexus, it's been a long while since I last touched FO3 (in fact, Zeta was the last time I touched it at all). I recently stumbled across Fallout 3 - Wanderer's Edition, and that pretty much made me want to play the game again.

 

I don't have any complaints, except for the fact that now it is literally getting to the point where I am crashing every couple of minutes. I am pretty damned frustrated by this point, and I've spent hours upon hours scouring the forums and the internet for some kind of solution to my problem, to no avail. So if the answer is something simple, I'm sorry, I just haven't stumbled across the right pocket of the internet yet.

 

- I have the latest patch installed 1.7.03.

- I have all of the DLC installed.

- I have updated DirectX, updated my video drivers, and even tried tweaking settings (which did nothing to help me).

 

I know for a fact that I had one gamesave corrupt on my already, and I had barely logged four hours into the game. This is ridiculous.

 

Here is my complete mod list that I am using:

 

Fallout3.esm

Anchorage.esm

ThePitt.esm

BrokenSteel.esm

Zeta.esm

PointLookout.esm

CRAFT.esm

CALIBR.esm

FO3 Wanderers Edition - Main File.esm

Mart's Mutant Mod.esm

Enhanced Weather - Rain and Snow.esm

CRAFT - Activation Perk.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

FO3 Wanderers Edition - Followers Enhanced (BrokenSteel).esp

WeaponModKits.esp

WMKAA12Shotgun.esp

WeaponModKits - FWE Master Release.esp

WeaponModKits - FWE Optional Worn Weapons.esp

WeaponModKits - OperationAnchorage.esp

WeaponModKits - ThePitt.esp

WeaponModKits - BrokenSteel.esp

WeaponModKits - PointLookout.esp

WeaponModKits - Zeta.esp

EVE.esp

EVE - FWE Master Release.esp

EVE - FWE with WeaponModKits.esp

EVE - FWE Master Release (Follower Enhanced).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 - FWE Master Release.esp

Mart's Mutant Mod - FWE with EVE.esp

Enhanced Weather - Rain and Snow in Fallout.esp

Enhanced Weather - Radioactive Rain and Snow Plugin.esp

Enhanced Weather - Sneak Bonus during Storms.esp

Enhanced Weather - Weather Sounds in Interiors.esp

EdCurrentMods.esp

 

Total active plugins: 45

Total plugins: 75

 

 

That's also my load order - I didn't bother listing mods I'm not using since they shouldn't matter. I pretty much had FOMM copy my list for me.

 

I use FOMM, FOSE, Archive Invalidation Invalidated, and FO3 Edit.

 

For a long while, I had a lot of issues due to an incorrect load order, but that *should* be fixed at this point. If it's not, load order is above.

 

Lastly, my specs: I have an 8800 GTS and an 8800 GTS+ 512 for video cards. I mostly use the first adapter for the game (since that's the one my main monitor is attached to). I have a Core2Duo processor, and 8 gigs of RAM. I have also told Windows that FO3 may access more than 2 gigs of RAM, so that's not the issue either. Lastly, I am running Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit, and yes, UAC is disabled (because it is a pain in my ass).

 

THE ISSUE, IN DETAIL:

 

It's fairly simple: It crashes when I walk into doors. It crashes when I go into VATS. It crashes when I'm walking around. It crashes when I go to activate an item. It crashes when I so much as jump in the freaking air. In the last few hours, it's taken to crashing when I die.

 

Of course, it's always random. Sometimes I'll get to play for an hour, no problems (short of dying a lot). Sometimes, I'll only get about four minutes before it crashes.

 

I'm really not sure how much more I can do, short of completely uninstalling the game, reinstalling it, and reloading ALL of my mods all over again, which will be aggravating to say the least. That's almost a whole day down the drain, and that's a whole day I'm not sure I want to spend.

 

Once there was a day when I could play FO3 for months without a single crash. Then Broken Steel came out and changed all of that. At least when I was playing Mothership Zeta last, I could get anywhere from a few hours to an entire day without a crash. Not the case anymore, it seems.

 

Help me, Nexus. I don't know what else to do.

[BossDweebe]

I see you have 30 mods disabled. That is a lot of data lying around in your folder either doing nothing or possibly being read when it should not. Disabling a mod may be OK much of the time, but some will stuff up if you don't remove the files.

 

Simple mods like animations and some individual clothes, items etc that don't impact on other parts of the game may be OK to just disable, but only if they were good in the first place.

If you disable any mod that is causing problems due to incorrect installation (and that is by far

the main reason for mods not working) w/o removing the files then you are asking for trouble. It may be you have, but I have to mention it.

 

I can't comment on specifics with FO3 DLC's just yet as I have only just arrived from Imperial City. I only have The Pitt and Op Anchorage DLC's,

but it sure took a lot of fixing to get the base FO3 game going.

 

Just looking briefly at the description of Wanderers edition I, personally, wouldn't install something that makes that many changes over a game that already has a lot of mods, or any for that matter. I would pretty much only do it with a new install,

but as someone on 57K dial-up this unlikely anyway.

 

I would truly like to get some of the big stuff, but if I could I would start from scratch. Saves heartache in the long run.

[legend8804]

I see you have 30 mods disabled. That is a lot of data lying around in your folder either doing nothing or possibly being read when it should not. Disabling a mod may be OK much of the time, but some will stuff up if you don't remove the files.

 

Honestly, most of those mods are ones that came with FWE or MMM and didn't get used, either because they were redundant or because they just weren't necessary. MMM is integrated within FWE, so there's about fifteen mod options that aren't checked because they can be toggled in-game instead.

 

However, there were a few mods installed beforehand, so here's the list:

 

F3C Leveling Changes (made obsolete since I am now using FWE)

galogen (also obsolete due to FWE)

Robco Certified (a perk addon, which I'm not even going to bother using because I think FWE has better stuff now)

UPP (It was pretty cool, but I'd rather get the basic stuff working first)

Ammo-Splodes (I've barely been able to use this one, not too worried about it for now)

LPCompanion (Who doesn't want a mini liberty prime? Not really worried about this guy right now though)

Death Canyon (A mod I've never actually been able to use, this one adds an area that's a little bit off the map to the north)

BossMonsterAddonV3 (This one was kinda fun, adds some more monsters to the wasteland for you to hunt down. Could this be causing issues?)

Nuke Weapons (A silly addon for when I feel like just blowing crap up, not worried about it right now)

Exaggerated Deaths (for lulz)

The Pitt Crash Fix (shouldn't be necessary anymore, right?)

 

 

Of that list, only a couple actually add any weapons or the like, but I wouldn't think that it should affect things all that much, right? I did have MMM installed before, but I'm not sure if it was RC4 or not (but I updated it anyways). I wiped all of my previous save data so I could start anew, because I didn't want to deal with the headache that uninstalling/reinstalling MMM would bring me.

 

Is it the opinion of the Nexus that I should just totally wipe and reinstall? I'm hoping there's something I am just overlooking myself.

[BossDweebe]

bben, Vagrant, buddah and the other moderators would be better positioned to say if you should reinstall clean.

 

It's just my personal preference. bben has a guide for reinstalling and keeping your mods together so they don't have to

be reinstalled individually (it's an Oblivion guide, but will work with FO3 is should think).

I used his technique when I installed Oblivion on my new machine. I reactivated the mods in groups of 10 and all is good.

 

RE the loose mods - It is just good practice to run your machine clean, and leaving files laying around in the folders is only asking

for trouble. It helps keep the guess work out of trouble shooting. You absolutely know a file cannot be accessed by the game if it is not there. Follow Murphy's Law, and I add a line to that - When all else fails, what you know can't be wrong is likely what you have to fix.

 

I'm a bit of a compulsive neat freak, so others may disagree -

Clean the trash from the Data folder first. Then -

Reinstall and do the patches. Then the Wanderers stuff. Then put the old Data folder etc. back in according to the bben plan.

 

I also promote clearing the page file on shut down ( TweakNow PowerPack 2009 works with Win 7). This was more important on my

old XP machine as it only had 2GB RAM, but it can't hurt. It does take a while to shutdown though.

[legend8804]

I'm still searching for a solution that works for this, but a small update:

 

It kept crashing *constantly* when I would die during combat inside of the Super-Duper Mart. Usually when I would die, it would crash, and I'd have to start over again. Now that I've cleared that area (took me many hours, what with all the dying and the crashing), I've started trying to move as far away from Megaton as I can, so as to try experiencing some new areas. The crashes seem to be occurring less often, but they are still happening, unfortunately.

 

The crashes do still randomly occur when entering VATS, they still randomly occur when walking around. That's not such a bad thing, I guess, because they're happening less often, but I am still hoping to find some sort of explanation as to why I'm even crashing in the first place.

 

I am beginning to suspect that it might actually have something to do with MMM RC4. When I was inside Springvale Elementary, I got down to where all the ants were and encountered some real strangeness - namely, I couldn't hit the damn bugs except when I was in VATS most of the time! Not even with a shotgun at point-blank range! It makes sense to me that MMM may have made a change to the skeleton of these particular ants (because the Fire Ants I've encountered so far don't seem to have any issue) that causes this to happen. In addition, when I would kill an ant, they would randomly 'freak out'. You know when you kill something and then you see the corpse start jumping and stretching all crazy like and flying around like mad? That happened about a third of the time I killed one of those things.

 

If anyone has any other suggestions for me to try, or anything, please post. I would love to be able to play this game for more than a couple of hours before I quit the game, figuring that it'll just crash on me soon anyways (assuming that it somehow has managed not to crash up until that point).

[pob255]

Out of intrest which version graphics card drivers are you using? I've had a lot of crash issues with different versions of the nvidia drivers, it took me a week to find ones which where stable before I could even start playing fallout (without mods)

 

I've found 195.62 is the most stable for falllout on this pc, win XP & 9800gtx

 

asking because just wandering around the main world map and entering vats mode where the two times when I'd get crashes

[BossDweebe]

legend - If mmm impacts on the areas where you crash more than others then it would seem to be the likely cause.

Are you running the two cards in SLI, or using one as a physX ? It may be worth experimenting with their configuration.

Either turning off the SLI (if that is doable), or the physX if that is what you are using.

 

I too have the 195.62 with a GTX 260 and Win 7 - also a 8800GT on XP.

Both computers had issues with vanilla FO3. I sorted out my Win 7 machine before starting into the mods,

and things are still good (I used the XP machine the first week).

There are still some black screen crashes, but this is a Bethesda game, and I do run the specs high.

The Win 7 machine started as the worst offender with constant freezing. All is good now that I found the various fixes

(Audio codec and drivers, dual core (on four core machine) fix to ini, were the majors).

[legend8804]

Out of intrest which version graphics card drivers are you using?

 

The very latest ones. I installed them earlier in the week I think, to see if it might alleviate the problem. (It did not.)

 

Are you running the two cards in SLI, or using one as a physX ? It may be worth experimenting with their configuration.

Either turning off the SLI (if that is doable), or the physX if that is what you are using.

 

I have one of them running with physX. I just tried a test while using the settings I had been before (which I was crashing), where I changed the card that was doing the physX (still crashed), and then turned physX off. It still crashed on VATS entry.

 

It seems to crash more often in VATS because, honestly, I'm spamming it a lot more than I used to. So that's not the issue either, I'm afraid.

 

For the record, I am using the newest nVidia drivers right now, though I suppose I could attempt to rip them out by the root and install an older version.

[legend8804]

A small update, just in case this might help others who are having similar issues to mine:

 

I have noticed that if you have an incorrect load order to start with (namely regarding the MMM mods), things can get quite strange indeed. Even worse, however, is that even once you fix your load order, the crashes may still occur (if not occur more often!). What you may need to do:

 

- Go to a Megaton House (or Megaton in general, some place not populated by mobs)

- Wait about 10 days (to force cell reset)

- 'uninstall' MMM (by which I mean uncheck MMM and all its components)

- reload game, save, quit

- reload MMM (and components)

 

Now, I didn't immediately see a difference, however as of lately I have been experiencing fewer and fewer crashes within the game. This suggests that MMM may, in fact, have been the culprit as I had though earlier. VATS seems to be responding much better now, and I don't seem to be getting as many CTDs randomly (which is always an improvement). I am considering messing around with the .NET framework install (uninstalling it, reinstalling an older version of 3.0), but I am not sure how that would affect some of the programs I run, since I am currently using 3.5.

 

But if you are experiencing a lot of crashing and it is frustrating you as much as it was for me, check your load order and make sure that you didn't have it messed up from the start. MMM is strange in that even after you fix the load order, it is STILL necessary to purge the cell buffers so that you can play (relatively) crash-free.

 

Hope this helps someone else.

[elustran]

You said you had to wait 10 days to force a cell to reset - there are other places where I've seen the number of days listed as 4.

 

First, is there an easy way to wait for 10 days since regular wait caps out at 24 hours, and second, did you wait for 10 days arbitrarily, or did you see that number of days somewhere else?