Corrupt Saves - StrCount > 0xFFFF - CTD on load

[EpitomyofShyness]

If you do that and present the info you find in a very organized manner you will be helping a lot of people. :blush:

[zelazko]

That is best article on the modding stability. Can't wait for some Russian vigilant hacker to fix that issue. Honestly there is no hope for Beth she won't fix it.

 

Btw if you're lucky you can bypass string limit by using threading/multithreading feature of ENBoost.

Edited April 2, 2016 by zelazko

[BoredErica]

If you do that and present the info you find in a very organized manner you will be helping a lot of people. :blush:

Well, I'll report back in a week or two (100 hours of gameplay takes time). Still deciding on what build to do (I wanted to do a 'semi cheat build' this time for once, but that shortens the time it take to complete.)

[EpitomyofShyness]

Time isn't so much the issue I think, more content completed. So doing a cheat build wouldn't be bad, after all you'll be completing the same amount of content, just at a faster pace.

[archtrtd1]

@EpitomyofShyness

 

That is what I'm trying to do. I've just started the Wyrmstooth questline and will report any growth to my string count when finished with it. I'm curious to see if actual interaction with the mod added content will cause the count to grow faster than my usual 17 strings per level.

[Rubbermatt]

Just a thought but it's been reported that Run For Your Lives and When Vampires Attack have 0 strings.

But was that on a brand new game? Because dragons don't start attacking until after you've started the main questline and gone to the Western Watchtower, and Dawnguard vampire attacks don't start until you hit level 10.

So if you could keep an eye on those two and let us know if they trigger strings later in the game?

[Garfink]

The evolution of Skyrim modding is so "life" like. First its broken saves due to errant scripts and snips and then comes the Sheson memory fix then the enb fixes and finally you think that things are stable, and everyone starts piling on the mods again, you have this totally unforeseen string load debacle! What is sad, is I have come across EVERY single skyrim issue in my modding adventure, every single issue has affected me! Its nuts!

 

Just started a new playthrough and so far so good. I will also keep an eye on what the strings do.

 

BTW, I tried the Sheson 1.58 Beta DynDoLOD, didn't work well for me, had some weird LOD issues at Whiterun (at least) that cause CTD for me. so I would wait before anyone here tries it.

[bcsp]

Just a thought but it's been reported that Run For Your Lives and When Vampires Attack have 0 strings.

But was that on a brand new game? Because dragons don't start attacking until after you've started the main questline and gone to the Western Watchtower, and Dawnguard vampire attacks don't start until you hit level 10.

So if you could keep an eye on those two and let us know if they trigger strings later in the game?

And how would you determine it was those mods that added the strings and not another mod after 10 levels. I can tell you that it is definitely not zero though. When vampires attack has around 200 properties.

But lets be clear. Properties are the correct way to do things. We've always been told that. I don't want to see anyone harassing mod authors to reduce their string count (not directing this at you personally, but in general). If they try to make their mod more efficient string wise then that's great! If not you'll just have to accept it. It's not the mod authors fault. This is a skyrim limitation. You'll just have to make a call on what mods to use yourself.

Edited April 2, 2016 by bcsp

[zelazko]

Just a thought but it's been reported that Run For Your Lives and When Vampires Attack have 0 strings.

But was that on a brand new game? Because dragons don't start attacking until after you've started the main questline and gone to the Western Watchtower, and Dawnguard vampire attacks don't start until you hit level 10.

So if you could keep an eye on those two and let us know if they trigger strings later in the game?

When I get more time off the work I will try to report it. My old character is level 12 and both dragon and vampire attacks triggeted and I just recently added both Arthmoor's mods to my load order.

You guys think any cracker out there will simply try to fix that issue by cracking TESV.exe? Because this is issue is hardcoded and increasing string count to be 32 bit is not something Bethesda will do for us not even if this was DLC paid patch. That's why petitions are banned on their forum. I only could see them releasing string count patch if paid modding did not end up to be total fiasco for mods, players and Beth.

Edited April 2, 2016 by zelazko

[kamikatze13]

What exactly do strings do and how are they handled?

 

The limit of 64k strings may not be an issue as much as efficient scripting/programming may be. Hear me out...

 

If Sheson is pushing out to JSON, he's most likely doing it to convert to/from arrays in the scripting. In other words, 64k strings is not an issue IF they're used properly.

 

The MCMs are a great example because, if I'm writing a program properly, 1 MCM = 1 string, the MCM's tabs are your first array dimensions, it's categories and items within those tabs are a second dimension, and they're values a third dimension. One string, one 3D array. The same would hold true for dialogue trees, special items and their states, and so on.

 

As I said at the top, I don't pretend to know how or why the strings work or what they're used for, but it seems to me that IF they can be limited by utilizing arrays for collections of data instead of independent strings, from a programming perspective, then they should be limited through the use of arrays.

 

I agree that it is more an optimization issue than a game bug. I suspect neither beth was aware of this becoming a limiting factor when they designed skyrim, nor the modders when they made the mods.

If I understood it correctly, the problem is that papyrus can't handle multidimensional arrays or arrays of mixed object types - which is where jArrays kicks in. Seems that beth was quite wasteful with the resources to begin with.

 

Now, most of the mods are no longer being worked on and beth is working on fallout 4 so we're pretty much all by ourselves here.

 

Two things came to my mind:

> is there a correlation between >the amount of String[] property declarations in a mod's script psc's and >the amount of strings being used in the string table? if so, we could just text search for string property declarations and count them for every mod/load order.

> kinda related to this: would it be possible to automate the conversion of string arrays to jArrays? my gut feeling says no, if we want to take advantage of nested arrays.

 

just noticed that it's not only string properties but also unique ((!) duplicates don't seem to count) string vars which seem to increase strCount. So even if we manage to convert papyrus string arrays to jarrays, we're still left to deal with string variables =/

 

 

You guys think any cracker out there will simply try to fix that issue by cracking TESV.exe?

 

honestly? no. the amount of work to be put into seems overwhelming. no source code, no certainty if it is only the saving subroutine which can't handle >16bit integers or more complex functions that rely on strCoung being uint16. And then its a problem for heavy load orders only so not so many peeps are affected to begin with...

Edited April 2, 2016 by kamikatze13