Constant CTDs

[MelThorn]

Another thing I forgot to mention:

Some NPCs have black faces. I'm sure this is due to some body mods mixing together. It seems kind of random whose faces are black. Most of them are fine, but every once in a while one of them will show up and freak me the hell out.

 

I'm going to start another new game with a default race rather than a custom to see if that helps any. I'm also checking to see if I have any texture mods still hanging around that are messing things up.

 

I'm using the DarNified UI system as well for my game.

Edited December 10, 2015 by MelThorn

[Striker879]

I'm retired, so I live a different Bill Murray movie ... Groundhog Day.

 

So are you saying that even without any of the horse related mods installed the stables are your crash hotspot (so what I'm saying is complete uninstallation for testing ... no meshes or textures or sounds left behind)?

 

Also to help you get an idea of what "somewhat normal" is, without the use of anything to reduce crashes outside of gameplay habits I generally can get somewhere in the neighborhood of an hour to maybe hour and a half without a crash. This will vary depending on what quests I'm currently running and to an extent on how many bandits etc. I've left alive either through NPCs Yield or console necromancy. My pattern is to save whenever I'm remounting my horse or when dismounting to go into a city or one of the places I've acquired (the chance of crash on major cell change goes up the longer the play session). Every hour or so I save and exit the game, usually check this site or the weather etc. before restarting the game if I'm going to continue playing (I never leave anything like a browser up in the background while playing). I'm on a machine that has only 2 GB RAM for a Core 2 Duo 3.0 GHz and an old GeForce GTX275 with 896 MB VRAM. My gameplay style has my save game size up to around 3700 to 4000 KB with an OBSE save file size floating around 63 to 64 KB.

 

Like I've said, I've made some choices that work against stability, but I've never had the expectation that I should be able to start the game and play non-stop for half a dozen hours or more without a hicup. For one thing I'm too old for that ... I'd need therapy on my hands after that long on mouse and keyboard. That Oblivion Reloaded page I linked has a ton of tips discussed on getting the game more stable (game stability is one of the features of OR, augmented by some other tools).

 

That is, if your horses aren't at the root of your problem.

 

- Edit - Your NPC face problem will likely be related to OCO v2 not playing nice with anything that touches race records (i.e. race mods/beautification mods). Also NPCs added by other mods can have some pretty ugly faces as a result of the OCO v2 changes to heads. Best advice is get a base modded game working correctly (just OCO v2) and then add one possibly conflicting thing at a time and test.

Edited December 10, 2015 by Striker879

[MelThorn]

Nope. Still crashed, same spot: at the Cheydinhal stables after fast traveling.

 

It seems fast traveling directly into Cheydinhal is fine. Just traveling to the stable makes the game crash.

 

And yes that is without any horse mod activated. I only had All Natural activated, and of course any texture/mesh changing mods that don't have esm or esp files.

 

As for NPCs added by other mods, I don't have any mods that add NPCs to the game, other than the CM Partners mod-- it adds various companions to the game. I didn't have it activated during testing.

Edited December 10, 2015 by MelThorn

[Striker879]

What about fast travel to Harlun's Watch and then go to the Cheydinhal stables the slow way? Just looking to narrow down if the problem is fast travel related or more rooted in where you are trying to fast travel to.

[MelThorn]

I'll give that a try next. I'll be back when I'm done.

Edited December 10, 2015 by MelThorn

[MelThorn]

Okay, so. This is interesting:

For once, I disabled All Natural and all its components, but I also enabled my files for Robert's body replacers, the UOPs, DLCs and nothing else. Then I stole a horse and rode the long way to Cheydinhal. No crashes.

I went back down the road, turned back, and returned to the stables on horseback again. No crashes.

I did it again. No crashes.

I dismounted, fast traveled to Imperial City, no crashes.

Fast traveled to Cheydinhal stable again. No crashes.

I fast traveled back and forth several times. Nothing happened whatsoever.

 

This again could be a fluke or a coincidence... but could it be the weather mod I was using?

 

I'm going to go back into the game and try it all again to really make sure.

Edited December 10, 2015 by MelThorn

[MelThorn]

I fast traveled to every single stable, and no fast-traveling caused any crashes. I always ended up in the place I wanted to be and could move around. However, on my last fast travel to the Black Waterside Stables by Cheydinhal, I rode my horse into the pen and it crashed right after that.

 

But I did several fast travels before then without any issues. Even Skingrad didn't give me trouble. And I was able to ride up to any gate and/or stable without a game crash. I'll give it a few more tests to be sure. I'll avoid going near the pen to see if that was a cause of a crash.

 

EDIT: No crashes on fast-traveling, but eventually the game crashed when wandering down the road away from Cheydinhal. I was able to fast-travel several times before this happened. So, it seems the issue with fast-traveling is gone. Now I need to get rid of the crashes during traveling.

 

And I guess I won't use All Natural anymore.

Edited December 10, 2015 by MelThorn

[Striker879]

I use Enhanced Weather myself, but that's because it had fixes for weather problems at Kvatch when using an older now unavailable version of Kvatch Rebuilt that was required for MOE (an older alternate start mod). Weather All Natural is the more modern descendant of EW. Could be if that turns out to be your sticking point for fast travel that it will have some tweaks that can be made to get it stable. As I've said, I don't fast travel at all so I can't say how EW reacts to fast travelling.

 

I've been around all the main areas of Cyrodiil so much that I know where all the choke points are ... every spawn point for every type of critter/badguy close to all the main roads. Often I attribute a crash to the game loading up a spawn point (loading the NPC/critter and intializing it's AI package). I find that it's more likely to happen after playing a while (the game does a poor job of memory management, and I have only 2 GB on a 32 bit OS so the 4 GB patches would do nothing for me). Are you using any patches to enable the game to use more of your RAM?

[MelThorn]

In regards to a patch for my RAM, I wasn't aware those existed. Do you know of any that'll work well?

 

I also had Improved Trees and Flora installed, and decided to remove it to see if it helped. I followed the uninstallation instructions provided and ended up with a vast sea of pink/missing grass/bush textures. So now I have to fix that somehow. Possibly will have to uninstall and reinstall Oblivion again... /headache. I moved to "center" and waited three days. That did nothing, nor did archive invalidation. This keeps getting funner and funner :P

 

Man, this game is gonna be so great when I actually get to play it.

[Striker879]

What ... wait a minute!! We're supposed to PLAY the game??

 

Just kidding.

 

Here's a link to a Nexus Wiki article on the subject. There is a link down that page to 4gb Ram Patcher but I have seen quite a bit of discussion concerning the need for patching DLLs (there is a long discussion on that in the OR mod comments). It's for the most part above my paygrade (plus I'm not in a position to utilize any of it) so I can't say who may be right on the subject. I also have a link to 4GB Patch, which may be the same patcher (the author is the same as the NexusMods Oblivion link).

 

- Edit - Not much experience around stuff like Improved <whatever> as I already tax my hardware enough. I would think that providing all of the resources for the removed mod are also removed (all meshes, textures etc) your game should be using the resources from the vanilla BSA files (Oblivion - Meshes.bsa, Oblivion - Textures - Compressed.bsa etc). You aren't using BSA Alteration as an archive invalidation method are you??

Edited December 10, 2015 by Striker879