Post Update Crash, or DLC issue?

[BillHoff]

Yesterday I made what now seems to have been a serious error. I bought the Dead Money DLC at the same time that I allowed Steam to apply the new patch. Yeah, well, what can I say? It seemed like a good idea at the time.

After the download process was complete, I started the game through FOMM, without enabling the Dead Money ESM file. When my game loaded I got a new quest, go find a radio station near the abandoned BOS bunker. It seems that the DLC initiates whether the ESM is loaded or not. Curious. I played around for a few minutes, as time was short, and really didn't notice any difference from pre-patch FNV. I made a save then went to do what I had to do. Errands run, I returned, fired the computer back up and tried to get back to my game. The first thing I noticed was that I couldn't hurry through the splash screens with the ESC key. After sitting through all four I finally got to the load screen, but there is no text, no mouse pointer, no nothing. The only way back to Windows was reset. I did this several times. (I'm a slow learner.) After about the third time, I no longer got through the splash screens and hit a CTD while the first legalese screen was still up. I tried using the launcher instead of FOMM, disabling all of my mods, launch from Steam, no joy. Looking in the Data directory I found 5 new files. Four of them had Dead Money in the file name, the fifth was "update.bsa" or something like that.

Before patching I had had the presence of mind to back up the contents of the Fallout New Vegas and the FNV directories under My Games to another drive. I tried restoring the original exe file from the backup and deleting the "update.bsa" from Data. Still no Joy. Finally I deleted the entire contents of both of the previously saved directories and restored them from my pre-patch backup. Now the game loads and runs normally, although I get a message about missing content when I load the last save. (The one I made before shutting down to go errand running.) Since I paid for the DLC, I then restored the 4 Dead Money files to the Data directory. With them present, but the ESM still unchecked in FOMM, I get a CTD at the legalese screen again.

So, questions. On a purely "how did they do that" level, how does the DLC initiate with the ESM disabled? Is there more to the DLC than just the the data files? Is it worth the time to re-patch without the DLC or will that likely not work either? Will Steam even let me patch again without adding the DLC? Assuming I can even do it, will the current version of the DLC work with the older unpatched game. At this point it would seem not, but I may not have the whole DLC.

All answers or suggestions gratefully accepted, probably considered and possibly acted upon.

[PoliceSwat]

I believe, if there's any errors or file corruption, you can go into Steam, right click your FNV shortcut, bring up properties, click on the Local Files tab, then select Verify Integrity of Game Cache, however, this will reset any settings you've changed to your fallout.ini file. Just so you know. If not, then no worries.

 

If any file corruption is occurred, Steam will re-download the necessary file(s).

[BillHoff]

I believe, if there's any errors or file corruption, you can go into Steam, right click your FNV shortcut, bring up properties, click on the Local Files tab, then select Verify Integrity of Game Cache, however, this will reset any settings you've changed to your fallout.ini file. Just so you know. If not, then no worries.

 

If any file corruption is occurred, Steam will re-download the necessary file(s).

 

Thanks. I discovered that after poking through forums both here, on Steam, and Bethesda, but I can't recall exactly where. I am beginning to suspect that this has been a self inflicted wound. I ran FNVEdit's filters after the download and may have altered the Dead Money ESM file. Apparently the EXE checks file integrity itself during initialization and does strange things if it doesn't like the results. I hadn't realized that it messed with the INI files as well. The only alteration I made there was the archive invalidation way back when, and I haven't looked in it since. All of my replacement textures still show up, however, so whatever has been altered hasn't hurt me yet. Allowing Steam to re-download the files has fixed my problem and the game now runs, more smoothly than ever, so maybe there is something to the optimization they were talking about with the patch.

Thanks again.