CTD Problems

[WillWorthington3]

So I've been slowly building my own mod (which I may or may not release) and I've run into no end of problems editing an exterior area.

 

The location I've chosen is due West of Aleswell Inn, near the little dirt path that goes to the fort.

 

Anyways, enough backround, onto the problem(s):

 

About 80% of the time I crash on loading of those ares when it's ~25% loaded. So I tinker with it trying to remove anything that could be conflicting with .. well .. anything.

 

I spent half a day beat my head against the desk before I learned that the "Hand Changed" flag is your friend. No idea what it does, but it seems to be needed for Exterior cells.

 

I've run into HUGE problems with packages, even if they're essentially duplicated ones with a new target location. To give an example of the kind of crap I'm putting up with:

 

StoneSlabVamp under Furniture, caused a crash when it was outside, deleted it and no more crash. So I made a tent using the Aleswell dummy cell as an interior so that the 2 guards I have could sleep somewhere. Yeah, no dice. Worked once. Now crashes. WTF?

 

Please someone .. anyone .. help a guy out with some ideas on what I'm missing? Cause I'm about ready to punch my monitor. which is a shame seeing as A) it hasn't done anything (that I know of) and B) it's really a rather nice one.

[David Brasher]

What you describe is not typical. You should not be having this many problems. I bet that if you had vanilla Oblivion with no mods and no texture packs you would not be experiencing any of these problems at all. A simple test would be to temporarily deactive all your mods and run a play-test.

 

If you have a bad custom texture pack, it would be harder to remove. Missing meshes and textures in a bad texture pack can cause CTDs.

 

You can isolate the mod conflicting with your mod and causing CTDs by systematically removing groups of mods until the problem goes away.

 

I have made and uploaded a number of mods, and I have never used "Hand Changed" and do not know what it does. This leads me to believe that it is not important and it is not a necessary friend and you do not need to trouble with it.

 

You have to be careful with AI packages because they are tricky and certain of them do cause CTDs 100% of the time. This seems like the most likely culprit. The reason your mod isn't working. If you find which package is causing crashes, then you can eliminate or change it. Certain follow packages or packages referring to non-existent , unreachable, or dead targets can cause CTDs.