Freqent freeze ups. Possible load order conflicts?

[Takkonen]

Not sure as to why another topic was started within here

It happens. Unfortunately.

 

Anyway, I noticed you suddenly got the streetlights mod. Ironically that's exactly one of the mods BOSS screws up on. Put it under the Zeta.esm instead of between the DLC's. No mods should be allowed above or between the DLC's at any time.

 

More then 2 followers? Well, in the vanilla game you can't even get more then 2 followers, so that's the first problem you've got to tackle. Or have you already? I know just about every one of your mods, but I know of none that resolves the followers problem.

If you need an "unlocker" for this, just ask.

 

Aside from the above, the only problem one can run into with having lots of followers is that when you suit them all up in fancy high detail armor, your frame-rate might drop substantially when looking at them. (I've even managed to make the entire game ctd from time to time because of this, but then we are talking about lots of followers.)

 

You still experience freezes but not nearly as often? How often are we talking here?

 

Also, could you post the specs of your rig?

 

 

Yeah, I added a couple mods and deleted a couple. The only one I added other than the streetlights mod was the EVE Operation Anchorage add-on, which I discovered was the reason for my not seeing the new gauss rifle effects I mentioned in my first post. I had downloaded it and forgotten to add it. Anyway, I realize you typically should not have any mods in between the DLC's, but had read that there are rare circumstances in which you need to. For example, if it is specifically stated in the readme for a mod. The streetlights description said that it needed to be listed before Broken Steel DLC if you have it. Hence it's current position. I can move it though.

 

I have not had any issues with picking up and going with all the followers I currently have (4 at the moment) and as I recall, the mods were designed in such a way that they would follow you regardless of whether you had other followers with you at the same time.

 

I do have all my followers in different power armor, but I typically don't have any performance issues when looking at them or anything. Also, I ended up uninstalling the 3 extra NMC texture packs in hopes that it would help. I shouldn't have had any problems with them as my system components have all been overhauled within the past 2 months aside from my graphics card (done in January 2011) and pretty much any game I play can be run at max settings in every category available. Still, I figured the full pack on it's own would be sufficient.

 

As far as the freezing goes, it can occur within a couple minutes, and other times it may take 20+. It is very sporadic and never consistent, which is irritating. It occurs indoors and outdoors, during and out of combat, while quicksaving occasionally, when transitioning to a new area through a door, while moving, while standing still, etc. It doesn't happen while navigating my menus or while I'm speaking to someone though. I had a hunch it might be related to EVE in some way but that was an uneducated guess and essentially not proven as the issues occur while using non energy weapons and/or when EVE is checked off my list.

 

The only changes made since my post earlier today have been the addition of the EVE Operation Anchorage.esp, a new merged patch, and the addition of the fake fullscreen.exe as I was reading that it helped with stability regardless of system specs. The problem continues though.

 

My system specs are listed in my profile, but I'll paste them here:

 

Processor:

Intel Core i7-2600k, OC'ed to 4.4 GHZ

Memory:

(16 GB) G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666)

Motherboard:

GIGABYTE P67A-UD5-B3

Graphics Card::

EVGA GTX 470 SC

[BlackRampage]

The readme for the streetlights mod said it should be placed in front of broken steel? Very interesting. That might just prove to solve a minor issue I had been looking into. No, nothing major. Just some weird clipping issue. If placing streetlights in front of it works, I'll be sure to give you a kudo. :thumbsup:

 

About the followers: Yes, you're right. One can add as many custom companions as one likes. Only the vanilla followers suffer from the aforementioned issue. Download this to get rid of that: http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=632

 

I would also strongly doubt this is caused by the Eve mod. Especially when seeing your system specs. Should handle it just fine.

The fake fullscreen does indeed help with stability issues, but that's usually only true on older or less good rigs. Good find though. I do so like it when someone can do a little digging themselves.

 

Lets see: since you mentioned ctd's also occur during area transitions, do you have FO3's vanilla autosave feature disabled. If not, it's strongly recommended that you do so. (also helps with corrupt savegames)

Also, since you've got over 2 gigs over ram, do you have the ram boost or 3 gig enabler? In other words, can your FO3 run over 2 gigs of ram memory? By default it can't.

 

One other "mod" I could recommend to you is this one: http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=15877

Don't download the V3 version of it though, that one was just uploaded for testing and bug reporting. My suggestion is to try the one under optional files first.

 

Right now that's all I can think of. (it's getting pretty late here though)

 

 

P.S: EVGA graphics card eh? Excellent choice. Good for overclocking.

[Takkonen]

Went ahead and installed the files you posted. I disabled the autosave features as well. I did perform the 3 gig enabler trick awhile back. And thanks, I've stuck with EVGA cards the past couple times and they've done really well. I haven't overclocked this one yet, basically because it runs everything fine as it is, although it is really easy to do so with the precision tool they make. Also, the 470's are well known for running quite a bit hotter than other cards, so I haven't felt like overclocking it until I can cool it more efficiently. I have a dual monitor system with a 27" primary and 24" secondary which bumps the heat way up as well, although it does just fine when I disable the secondary during gaming sessions, so not really an issue.

 

Anyway, on top of these most recent changes, and an adjustment to MMM to drop the spawn rate to the lowest setting, just to see if that would help seeing as most recently I was getting attacked by a large group of ghouls in the irradiated metro causing the freezing to occur more frequently, it still hasn't taken care of the issue. I left a couple of followers in Megaton and took only Dogmeat and Charon with me back to the exterior of a previously visited location, and this time a behemoth spawned with some mutants I had killed earlier along with a floater. I was blasting away at all these guys without an issue and right when I had almost dropped the behemoth, it froze again. By the way, it isn't actually ctd, it just freezes up midframe. If I tab out to see the error mesage it shows one of the general AppHangB1 errors. I looked that error up, but it is too general an error to allow me to find anything useful to help me diagnose it.

 

This is irritating, I'm figuring maybe I'll be better off just doing a fresh install and adding back mods one at a time to see if I can either stop the issues or at least narrow it down. unchecking them in fomm doesn't seem to change the situation. In case it makes a difference, my C drive is a 150 gig raptor drive, but after reading up on the benefits of having games installed on a separate drive, I moved my games to a different drive. It's a 1tb caviar black. Anyway, I have had zero issues running my games off the drive, including Fallout 3, which I had played over 30 hours on this playthrough until I decided to start using mods. I attribute these issues to my being a novice when it comes to using mods, and not knowing all the troubleshooting tips yet. It is really irritating because I had actually never used mods to this extent in a game before, and never once on my first playthrough of Fallout 3, so adding all of these things makes it seem like a new game to me, which is awesome! I need to get these issues figured out, because I can't go back to playing the standard vanilla version now, haha.

Edited June 30, 2011 by Takkonen

[BlackRampage]

Oh, I actually kind of forgot to mention that the invisible walls bug remover mod should be all the way at the bottom of your load order at all times and do not let FO3 masterupdate it! (well, unless you want to experience even more crashing :tongue: ) Same goes for when you make a new merged path. Just disable it before you do these, the re-enable it when you're done.

 

Also, the downloaded folder comes with 2 esp's, right?

 

Don't use both! only use "James Invisible wall bugs remove V2.esp"

 

 

Placing the streetlights esm in front of brokensteel didn't work btw, but thanks for the heads-up :thumbsup:

 

Heh, I know what you mean with the adding of all the mods... Whenever I disable all my mods (testing, etc.) the vanilla game suddenly looks... empty. Did you know that there are actually some who can't even install a single mod without their game crashing right away? (something to do with their hardware) Just thinking of that would almost give me the creeps. *hugs all of his favorite mod authors* :biggrin:

Edited July 1, 2011 by BlackRampage

[Takkonen]

Yeah, I believe it mentioned that in the description for the invisible walls remover. No big deal, I make sure I read everything in a mod's description to make sure I don't flub up somehow. Just out of curiosity, previously I had been deleting my old merged patch and making a new one when I added or removed mods from my list. Are you saying that isn't necessary? I assumed it would go off the previous information, so I felt I needed to delete it and make a new one. It's not really an issue as it takes very little time, but if I don't have to, that would be even better.

 

As far as streetlights goes, no problem. Hope you get it figured out. At least it isn't a huge game stopping issue though!

 

Yeah, ever since I started playing with mods, which has only been within this past week, I can't see myself going back to the regular version. Oh, how I love playing games on a PC! All the possibilities are open to us. Now I'm going to have to go back and play New Vegas again, except with mods this time. I'll probably wait until all the DLC's come out for it though before I start modding. I have plenty of other games to play in the meantime. I also need to mod Dragon Age and go play through that again!

 

By the way, I was tired of dealing with the issues I was having, and seeing as I didn't have a huge set of mods installed, I decided to reinstall Fallout and start over again. I haven't added everything back yet, but I have added one at a time and play for awhile to make sure there are no errors, and so far I am not having any freezing issues. I haven't installed FOSE or FO3Edit or some of the other things yet, but so far I am running fine. I'm doing it different this time though. Before, I was just manually installing to my data folder, but this time I've figured out how to turn everything into fomods first and I'm activating them that way. This way seems to work much better for me, plus I can easily uninstall them now without having to search for things. Just a matter of time before I learn how to do all these things. So far the larger mods I have: NMC's full texture pack, EVE, MMM, and Fellout, all seem to be working great together added with a few smaller mods. Gonna keep adding one at a time and playing for awhile to make sure there are no issues before adding more this time.

 

Thanks for all your help though, it's much appreciated. Hopefully it doesn't start happening again!

[BlackRampage]

Ah, yes. It is such a nice change to see someone actually able to figure things out on their own for a change.

 

About making a merged path: I'd actually recommend making an new merged path whenever you decide to install a new mod or deleting one. Same goes for the masterupdate mode. As long as when you make a new merged path and run masterupdate, you disable the invisible walls bug remover first. If you do, you'll get a high probability of random crashes and other fun stuff. :tongue:

 

Nah, the bug with streetlights is nothing mayor, just a clipping issue with one of the poles for the last forcefield pylon near the Jefferson memorial. Coincidentally I discovered this while testing a copy of the invisible walls bug remover for the author of that mod.

 

Hmm, yeah, sometimes the best thing you can do is simply starting over again with a clean install. It's actually something I've considered doing from time to time, but I've got over 150 mods installed so, well, you get the picture. :psyduck:

I'm actually impressed you managed to figure this all out in just 1 week though. :thumbsup:

 

Was happy to help.