New Game Black Screen Crash with Mods

[Tuilinn]

This is my first post on this forum. I have the GOTY version of Oblivion on disc. I was playing Oblivion fine for 25 hours with a bunch of mods, then decided to add Roberts and BAB body replacers. I ran all my mods through BOSS and Wrye Bash and rebuilt the Bashed Patch. I updated the masters for the saved games. Thereafter, my saved games would crash, even after removing the new mods and running Wrye Bash again. So I completely de-installed Oblivion, including the user/my games/Oblivion folder, and ran Registry Reviver. I did a clean boot (no background tasks) and reinstalled Oblivion from the discs.

 

Without any mods, a new game would load, and I could create a character. But since I had played it with some mods with no issues, I wanted to try putting the non-crashing mods back in. So I backed up the clean data folder and installed the mods I had used before. However, when I start a new game, the game crashes immediately upon reaching the character creation screen. I removed the mods one by one, but I can't find the culprit.

 

I have enabled >2 GB memory for the exe, run exe as Administrator, and done the suggested graphics tweaks in the ini file.

 

This is my system:

 

Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

Intel® Core i7 CPU 960 @ 3.20GHz (8 CPUs), ~3.2GHz

6144MB RAM

DirectX 11

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 with 1 GB memory, driver version 260.99

 

Oblivion graphics settings on medium, no Vsync, no HDR, no Bloom, No Distant Landscape, no antialiasing

 

Mods in load order:

Oblivion.esm

Cobl Main.esm

CM Partners.esm

Unofficial Oblivion Patch.esp

DLCShiveringIsles.esp

Unofficial Shivering Isles Patch.esp

Cyrodilic Brandy.esp

Inebriation.esp

SoT_Holiday.esp

DLCHorseArmor.esp

DLCOrrery.esp

DLCSpellTomes.esp

CapesandClaoks.esp

CM_Better Wine.esp

Slof's Horses Base.esp

Slof's Extra Horses.esp

Cobl Glue.esp

Cobl Si.esp

Cobl Tweaks.esp (merged)

BlissfulDreamsCOBL.esp

DLCFrostdrag.esp

Knights.esp

Shadowcrest_VineyardCOBL.esp

xulAncientYews.esp

Millstone_FarmCOBL.esp

MillstoneCOBL_UL_Patch.esp

Salmo the Baker.Cobl.esp

MidasSpells.esp

Item interchange - Placement.esp (merged)

Item interchange - Placement for Frostcrag.esp (merged)

CM Partners.esp

CM Partners Special NPCs.esp

CM Partners NPC.esp

CM Partners More NPCs.esp

CM Partners Marker NPCs.esp

CM Partners Extra NPCs.esp

Cobl Races.esp

Cobl Races - Balanced.esp

Cobl Silent Equip Misc.esp

Bashed Patch.0.esp

 

In addition, I installed Natural Faces textures and Enayla's faces overtop that, along with the ArchiveInvalidation.TXT that came with Natural Faces. I also installed the Cobl Cosmetics for use with Cobl Races.

 

These mods all worked before the disaster, and I am stumped as to why they are causing a CTD on a clean installation.

 

I would appreciate any ideas on what to try, or if some of these mods are known to conflict (I looked through the readmes, but didn't find conflicts). I did merge the graphics and so on when rebuilding Bashed Patch. They all show green or blue in Wrye. I did take them out one by one as groups depending on masters, but to no avail. I know that Salmo the Baker is supposed to be buggy, but taking it out didn't help (and it was ok before). I know people are running many more mods than this with no issues, so I'm wondering what I'm doing wrong.

[Shadowfen]

This is my first post on this forum. I have the GOTY version of Oblivion on disc. I was playing Oblivion fine for 25 hours with a bunch of mods, then decided to add Roberts and BAB body replacers. I ran all my mods through BOSS and Wrye Bash and rebuilt the Bashed Patch. I updated the masters for the saved games. Thereafter, my saved games would crash, even after removing the new mods and running Wrye Bash again. So I completely de-installed Oblivion, including the user/my games/Oblivion folder, and ran Registry Reviver. I did a clean boot (no background tasks) and reinstalled Oblivion from the discs.

 

Without any mods, a new game would load, and I could create a character. But since I had played it with some mods with no issues, I wanted to try putting the non-crashing mods back in. So I backed up the clean data folder and installed the mods I had used before. However, when I start a new game, the game crashes immediately upon reaching the character creation screen. I removed the mods one by one, but I can't find the culprit.

 

I have enabled >2 GB memory for the exe, run exe as Administrator, and done the suggested graphics tweaks in the ini file.

 

This is my system:

 

Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

Intel® Core™ i7 CPU 960 @ 3.20GHz (8 CPUs), ~3.2GHz

6144MB RAM

DirectX 11

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 with 1 GB memory, driver version 260.99

 

Oblivion graphics settings on medium, no Vsync, no HDR, no Bloom, No Distant Landscape, no antialiasing

 

Mods in load order:

Oblivion.esm

Cobl Main.esm

CM Partners.esm

Unofficial Oblivion Patch.esp

DLCShiveringIsles.esp

Unofficial Shivering Isles Patch.esp

Cyrodilic Brandy.esp

Inebriation.esp

SoT_Holiday.esp

DLCHorseArmor.esp

DLCOrrery.esp

DLCSpellTomes.esp

CapesandClaoks.esp

CM_Better Wine.esp

Slof's Horses Base.esp

Slof's Extra Horses.esp

Cobl Glue.esp

Cobl Si.esp

Cobl Tweaks.esp (merged)

BlissfulDreamsCOBL.esp

DLCFrostdrag.esp

Knights.esp

Shadowcrest_VineyardCOBL.esp

xulAncientYews.esp

Millstone_FarmCOBL.esp

MillstoneCOBL_UL_Patch.esp

Salmo the Baker.Cobl.esp

MidasSpells.esp

Item interchange - Placement.esp (merged)

Item interchange - Placement for Frostcrag.esp (merged)

CM Partners.esp

CM Partners Special NPCs.esp

CM Partners NPC.esp

CM Partners More NPCs.esp

CM Partners Marker NPCs.esp

CM Partners Extra NPCs.esp

Cobl Races.esp

Cobl Races - Balanced.esp

Cobl Silent Equip Misc.esp

Bashed Patch.0.esp

 

In addition, I installed Natural Faces textures and Enayla's faces overtop that, along with the ArchiveInvalidation.TXT that came with Natural Faces. I also installed the Cobl Cosmetics for use with Cobl Races.

 

These mods all worked before the disaster, and I am stumped as to why they are causing a CTD on a clean installation.

 

I would appreciate any ideas on what to try, or if some of these mods are known to conflict (I looked through the readmes, but didn't find conflicts). I did merge the graphics and so on when rebuilding Bashed Patch. They all show green or blue in Wrye. I did take them out one by one as groups depending on masters, but to no avail. I know that Salmo the Baker is supposed to be buggy, but taking it out didn't help (and it was ok before). I know people are running many more mods than this with no issues, so I'm wondering what I'm doing wrong.

 

Try removing the ArchiveInvalidation.txt file - or rename it if you prefer. I recall having a similar problem and discovered that removing that file fixed it.

[Tuilinn]

Try removing the ArchiveInvalidation.txt file - or rename it if you prefer. I recall having a similar problem and discovered that removing that file fixed it.

 

I was really hoping that would work, but no. I'm going to keep trying stuff. If it worked once, it has to work again!

 

Update:

With a clean data folder, I got Oblivion to load the character creation screen and save a character, but only with these mods installed:

CM Partners.esm

DLCShiveringIsles.esp

DLCHorseArmor.esp

DLCOrrery.esp

DLCSpellTomes.esp

Slof's Horses Base.esp

Slof's Extra Horses.esp

BlissfulDreams. esp (non Cobl version)

DLC Frostdrag.esp

Knights.esp

Shadowcrest_Vineyard.esp (non Cobl version)

Millstone_Farm.esp (non Cobl version)

CM Partners. esp

and the extra CM partner NPC files

 

These were working, but I wanted a better elf character, so I added Elves of Lineage II, and that was okay.

 

I'd like more mods (especially NPC faces), but I'm afraid to add anything at this point. I did not make a bashed patch for these.

Edited December 12, 2010 by Tuilinn

[GetOutOfBox]

That 3GB memory patch is known to cause instability, regardless of what program its used on. All that utility (and all the utilities like it) do is add the "/LARGEADDRESSAWARE" flag to the executables headers. Not only is it more complicated than simply adding a flag to an executable to get it to use more than 2GB of memory, the very concept of this system causes issues and its generally reccomended that developers use a 64-bit executable instead.

 

1. This flag is usually added by the compiler when the developer is compiling their applications source code into an executable file, but the application must be specifically designed in such a way to take advantage of the extra memory space, all this flag does is tell Windows the application is capable of it, but keep in mind, if the flag has been added, but the application itself is not designed to be Large Address Aware, at best, you'll simply see no improvment, at worst you'll get memory corrupt (basically crashes).

 

TL;DR, the application must be written to have support for this, the flag just tells the operating system the application can, its still up to the application to utilise the extra memory

 

2. This creates bloated memory allocation, and basically makes the OSes kernel operate in a way it was not designed to. So even if you get this working, you may actually run into even worse performance issues.

 

3. In Windows XP, you have to add "/3GB" to the boot config file so that LAA even works, or be using a 64-bit operating system.

 

All in all, I reccomend you avoid these types of patches, especially if you're experiencing crashing.