FCOM Crash -- 300TestCell26 hates me!

[lurker86]

@MrJim

Thanks for trying to help! :) but I might be in luck here, becouse (and i am a little surprised over this myself) my oblivion seems unhealthy stable :P it has only ever crashed during theese test procedures (probably becouse I never reached level 13 during my normal playthrough) so that is why I am desperate to get this annoying spawn under control, becouse as stable as this is, I don't want to reinstall and such things (or tweak the ini for performance unless something is required at this point). And about performance issues, well I ran through Vilverin with a whole bucket of things behind me and it would not crash except when I went through a door (to more spawns) so I think it is pretty definete that some spawn is causing this. Also, I trust BOSS in my load order, becouse as far as I have seen, no mod is acting weird, and everything seems to run well together. And I see no mods in the BOSSed load order offhand that have a wrong placement (but please, if you do spot something, do tell)

 

@Smooth613

Yeah you know, at this point i'm open for any suggestion to fix this, and i'm at a total standstill myself, so toss whatever you got in here heh :)

 

About experimenting with the patch - well, I am trying atm but to be quite honest here, I don't even know what i am supposed to do in there :P BOSS puts a whole lot of tags in theese mods, but no matter what I pick in there, even if rather major (say, for example, "import graphics" - Better Cities), I see no real difference in the game (i start "new game" of course). This goes for anything in there. Then again, I don't quite know what to look for in the game to see if the extra bash import options added stuff. The only thing that makes sense there for me, is that FCOM needs certain things checked, which I have done, and that "leveled lists" needs to be checked for all leveled things to work. The rest is a mystery.

 

Do you know how to use theese features in the bashed patch? And if they make a difference on my set of mods? The way I have understood it, is that, if a mod changes something, and then another mod after it changes it again, then all changes made by the other mod is lost and the bashed patch can remedy this. Well, this still does not explain if I should check theese things in there. I guess, if I were careless, id just check anything in there that BOSS "suggests" via tags, but if it were so easy, then why doesnt Wrye Bash do this automaticly. I hope you see my point :)

 

And thanks for telling me there was a masterlist update avaivlable :) I had the version before it. You were right, it did not help this problem in particular, but it's just as well to keep it updated for the rest of the mods ^^ and thanks too, for trying further to help me solve this :) it's much appreciated!

[Smooth613]

About the Bashed Patch -- You're partly correct on how it works, and you can trust the BOSS tags. The team that keeps BOSS up to date are some of the most active modders in the community. Ok lets look at a few examples of a patch and some imports. First I'm going to talk about "The Rule of One" which is what you're referring to when you talk about your understanding of how mods act. Okay so the Rule of One states that only one mod can change a single entry. This means the last mod in the Load Order (LO) 'wins'. Let me give an in-depth example of this rule and how it would work.

 

This example only involves 3 mods and 3 changes and is overall a simple example. There can be more complex merges, with 10, 20, however many changes being done by Bash depending on tags. And remember the changes might not always be immediately obvious but trust me it's going on behind the scenes. If you don't believe you can open your LO in TES4Edit(View) and see everything. I only suggest the Edit version for advanced users.

 

-LO- -Mod name- -Changes-

-6-Mod A changes Bandit 1 to be essential.

-7-Mod B changes Bandit 1 to carry a Glass sword, and wear Ebony armor.

-8-Mod C changes Bandit 1 to be a static level of 25.

 

Okay in the above example 3 mods alter Bandit 1 in different ways but only one can 'win'. In this case #8 in the LO, Mod C wins, only changing Bandit 1 to level 25. All other previous changes are lost because of the Rule of One. Now would altering the LO help in this situation to avoid conflict? No, absolutely not. If you move Mod A to slot 8 and Mod C to slot 6 then only the changes from Mod A will be seen in game. So the Bandit is now essential, but nothing else is changed. Still with me? Good. Now for the interesting part, the Bashed Patch, a way to 'cheat' the Rule of One. New paragraph to prevent a wall, we'll pick up here.

 

Okay so cheating the rule with the Bashed Patch. We're still using the above example. We have 3 mods changing one entry (Bandit 1) in three different ways. How do we get all the changes in game? Merge them! So here is where Bash works it's magic. It will merge these records into the Bashed Patch so that the changes from all three mods are seen in game. Now with proper tags and a properly built patch you will now have Bandit 1 set as essential, carrying Glass Sword and wearing Ebony Armor, and also is a static level of 25. I hope this explains what the patch does. In the next section we'll talk about what to select when building the patch.

 

Building your Bashed Patch and what to select. It's actually pretty simple, usually you want to select everything listed and include it in your patch. It's not careless to do this, it's the right thing to do. This allows those changes to make it to your game and not be overridden by another mod, but merged. Another quick example; The Unofficial Patches. Look how many tags they have, tons. This is due to minor fixes to lots of things. Well if any mod touches any entry altered by the Unofficial Patch these bug fixes are overridden, remember the Rule of One. So importing to your Bashed Patch merges all of these changes like I explained in the Bandit example. Like I mentioned earlier a mod will only show up here to be merged if it has proper tags. Well BOSS communicates with Wrye Bash and adds proper tags to most mods out there, especially the most popular mods and major mods. And again you can trust the tags added by BOSS almost all the time. Very rarely will you have to add or remove a tag from an already tagged mod. The guys behind the scenes do their research.

 

And finally for your question on why Bash doesn't do this automatically? Well it's for user control. No two modded Oblivion games have the same setup. Even with the exact same mods I could customize some aspects to leave them out where you may want to include them. i.e. Maybe I hate that Mod X added Uberdubersuperweapon Kill all pansies to my leveled list or inventory. I could, with options in the patch choose to exclude that mod from my lists. Where as you might be like, "But Smooth!!! What are you thinking!? Uberdubersuperweapon Kill all pansies is my favorite! I must have it in my game! You can alter your patch to include it. :thumbsup: See where this is going? Good. It's all about customization and user control.

 

I hope that clears some things up for you about how a Patch works and helps to explain why merging is important, and even necessary. Too bad I still don't know why your game crashes unless it is a conflict that needs to be merged. Again all I can suggest with your patch is a little experimentation and do a lot of reading. Let me link you to a page. Wrye Bash. I hot linked you to the Bashed Patch section. I urge you to read about each option, maybe read it a few times. Then I suggest you scroll to the very top of that site and start reading, and read it all. I still use it as reference to this day. Don't forget there is an HTML version of your Patch, the ReadMe, and other documentation located in Oblivion > Data > Docs. Look over it from time to time.

 

Whew, that turned out to be more than I intended. Oh well it'll help clear up some of your concerns. :cool:

[Megatarius]

This random crash is caused by a creature loading. That's my guess. If the crash happens when the cell loads, rather than when you're supposed to be coming in sight of the creature, then I understand now how it's not meshes and textures.

 

If I were you, I'd open up the 300 test in the CS and look at what's supposed to be in the cell. If it's a leveled list that produces random spawns, what's in the leveled list? Find out, and perhaps make a new cell with each of those creatures standing loose in the room. Through process of elimination, you should be able to find out which one it is.

 

Then you might be able to fix what's wrong with it, but with FCOM, just looking at one mod that governs this creature may not be enough, as I'm sure you're aware....

[lurker86]

@Smooth613

Thank you. Seriously. That clears up well... everything for me :O Seems I will have to redecorate my bashed patch with like 99% :P At least now I know what i'm supposed to be doing :)

 

@Megatarius

Yes, I agree with your guess. I have never used the CS but I just fired it up for this purpose. I can't really say that I know what i'm doing here, but from some random digging into the 300_test.esp this seems to be the case:

 

- The room "300testcell26" (actually named "Test Cell - 27") contains 9x leveled creature spawns. This is no surprise as this crash only happens on level 13.

 

- To be exact, it spawns 9x of "LL1UndeadBones100"

 

- If I look at the "leveled creatures" list to the left, and find "LL1UndeadBones100" in there, and "Edit" it, it lists from level 12 and forth: LL0Skeleton3Hero100 (as a "Form editor ID")

 

Which is a little weird I guess, becouse, in game, there is definetly not just skeletons in cell 26. There are various undeads and sometimes even things from other factions (causing fighting in the test cell)

 

So what gives? I feel like i'm drawing near here, at least in terms of locating the culprit (fixing it will be a different story) but i'm kind of at a loss on how to test this further. If someone knows how to go about this, please say it - i'll try anything :)

[Smooth613]

Do you have your Leveled List merged into your Bashed Patch? If you don't have it merged that could explain the crash. MMM is calling on a mob that has not made it to the final leveled list. Merge your LL to be sure. Steps are as followed.

 

1. Uncheck Bashed Patch.

2. Right click and select Rebuild Patch.

3. Go down near the bottom of the column of the left side. Put a check mark in the box beside Leveled Lists. Make sure Automatic is checked. (automatic usually will suffice)

3a. Now might be a good time to add other things to your patch too. Remember what I mentioned earlier, it's safe to check everything that has been imported by tags. Don't be afraid to try, you can always go back and uncheck this stuff and rebuild the patch again if an undesired change is applied.

4. Rebuild Patch and Activate it.

5. Try it out, see how it goes.

 

Keep us updated. :cool:

[lurker86]

@Smooth613

 

I have already done that of course 8) it's part of the FCOM instructions after all :)

 

But this is a day of celebration - I fixed the issue :D

 

For anyone maybe having this issue:

 

The FraNewItems.bsa was the culprit. After some digging and experimenting in the CS, I saw that the Fran mod was giving items to the skeletons after lvl 12, and as a test, I downloaded the optimized version from the thread I used as an installation guide and removed FraNewItems.bsa from the Oblivion.ini and removed the file itself (which seemed perfectly fine btw) and renamed (as per instructions) the new optimized BSA to FCOM_Convergence_FraNewItems.bsa and just dropped it in the oblivion "Data" folder. This seems to have solved my crashing in cell 26 :) I can only pray that there wont pop up any more of theese nagging issues :)

 

Thanks to everyone that have tried to help me :) now off to (dare I say it?) actually PLAY this damned game :P

[Smooth613]

Congratulations! :thumbsup:

[Megatarius]

Nice.