CTD Issues

[GeneralVarusII]

After a year or so of enjoying my copy of Fallout 3 GOTY I felt that I needed to purge the excessive amounts of obsolete mod material from my hard drive and start anew. I installed the game, the DLC, and a few mods (which will be listed shortly) and played around for a while. Roughly three hours after installation, I got a CTD at the Test Pattern/Please Wait screen whenever I tried to launch the game. Since this started just after installing a group of mods I went through my load order and tried to resolve any issues as well as test all of my mods to see if any were the culprit.

 

I disabled everything except the DLC, deleted the Fallout.ini in the My Games\Fallout 3 directory, and installed the latest driver for my video card as well as getting the latest patch. Still a CTD.

 

I disabled everything except Fallout.esm and now I don't even get to the test pattern screen; the screen flickers for a moment or two, then it goes back to the desktop where the game is in a windowed mode, completely black, and the error "Failed to initialize renderer. Unknown error creating the Gamebryo renderer."

 

 

Here is my load order before testing mods for incompatibilities:

Fallout3.esm

Anchorage.esm

ThePitt.esm

BrokenSteel.esm

PointLookout.esm

Zeta.esm

DCInteriors_ComboEdition.esm

RH_IRONSIGHTS.esm

IMCN.esm

RH_IronSights_Basic_VanillaPlugin.esp

RH_IronSights_Basic_AnchoragePlugin.esp

RH_IronSights_Basic_PittPlugin.esp

RH_IronSights_Basic_BrokenSteelPlugin.esp

RH_IronSights_Basic_PointLookoutPlugin.esp

RH_IronSights_Basic_ZetaPlugin.esp

RH_IronSights_Pitt_NewRifleSights.esp

RH_IronSights_PL_NewItems.esp

RH_IronSights_RemoveReticule.esp

DCInteriors_DLC_Collectables.esp

dD - Enhanced Blood Main.esp

Springvale Water Tower.esp

RWD.esp

RWD-ThePitt.esp

RWD-PointLookout.esp

RWD-MothershipZeta.esp

RWD-BrokenSteel.esp

Slower Levelling - extremely slow.esp

15day interior resets.esp

Ammo Box Respawn.esp

medkit and toolbox respawn.esp

corrected weights clutter.esp

WeightMed.esp

no_car_explosions.esp

Directional PipLight.esp

MrSlackPants-Radiation.esp

Imp's More Complex Needs.esp

IMCN - 5 DLC Merged.esp

DisplayedAmmoWeight.esp

WeightAmmo.esp

 

Total active plugins: 39

Total plugins: 39

 

Here it is after:

Fallout3.esm

 

Total active plugins: 1

Total plugins: 39

 

I didn't have these problems when I installed the game last year, so why it won't work now is a mystery. Thanks to anyone who offers assistance.

 

P.S. I am using ArchiveInvalidationInvalidated (disabling it did nothing), don't use ffdshow or any other interfering audio or video program, patched to the latest version, will give specs if needed.

[GeneralVarusII]

Alright looks like I have fixed some problems, created a new one.

 

After trying out New Vegas (which had been running adequately enough before I reinstalled Fallout 3) and finding the same problem I tried other games and discovered my graphics card drivers were causing incompatibilities. I deleted the drivers, rebooted, and reinstalled said drivers. New Vegas worked, and so did Fallout 3.esm.

 

I tried checking the DLC on and bingo, the game started up too. My mods all checked? No problems.

 

But if I turned on FOMM's Archive Invalidation option or activated AII the game crashed at the test pattern screen.

 

So I guess my next question is, why doesn't AII work this time when it worked swimmingly last time?

[Jeoshua]

Sounds like you have some file-only replacer that's causing issues. Could be a bad mesh, could be a bad sound... can't really say.

 

You could try ProcMon to see what file it crashes on, but that's a bit technical. Your easiest bet would be to reinstall.

[GeneralVarusII]

My apologies in advance for my lack of experience with the subject, but could I use FO3Edit or something like that to diagnose the problem? I ran ProcMon, but frankly all the information baffled me and I didn't know the first thing to do. Also, supposing there was some way to diagnose the problem would it be more time-consuming to do that rather than reinstall everything and test it against AII? Thanks for the response.

[Jeoshua]

Oh I'm pretty skilled with a computer and most of that information is completely baffling to me, as well. The secret to using it is first of all getting a baseline log and filtering out everything that isn't related to the program you're dealing with. Right click on and entries that don't need to be there, like an explorer.exe or svchost.exe function call. Exclude them process name. Once you only have Fallout3.exe stuff, filter out all the registry calls. Exclude those by Operation. Then, you should have only Fallout 3's file access hooks logged.

 

Now, it's a bit tricky and you kind of have to know what the wrong kind of behavior is, but right during the part where the game crashes you will see a File access call to WerFault.exe (if you're using Vista/Win7). Everything after that is ignorable. Right before that you should see some files being accessed. Those may be your problem. Although, they may not be. The thing is that the last file accessed MAY be where your problem lies.

 

At any rate it's a place to start looking. You could search through using Fo3edit for a year and not really know which objects access what, and would have no clue as to vanilla replacers.

 

Try working with procmon to get a lead on what file might be causing it. If that doesn't work, try reinstalling Fallout 3, beforehand erasing everything in your Data folder. Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.

[GeneralVarusII]

New and exciting developments!

 

I went through my history and downloads from the last time the game launched successfully and the time I started looking for fixes, and located every mod that added something besides an .esp whether it be menu, texture, sound, etc. I took everything the mods added and moved them from data to a folder on my desktop.

 

I then ran my game with the mods that had worked previously and the newest mods that were only .esps, lo and behold the game ran with FOMM's Archive Invalidation tool!

 

All that remains is finding which mod was the culprit behind it all and making sure the other isolated mods won't interfere with the game crashing. I'll be posting an update here when I have it.

 

Thanks again to Jeoshua for the tip about bad files!

[GeneralVarusII]

It's done people, everything is coming up roses.

 

Turns out it was DisplayedAmmoWeight.esp that caused the problems. But I'll be the first to say that it was not OnmyojiOmn's fault, as it clearly states in the download tab for the file description that it is supported for vanilla FO3 only. As it usually is with computer problems, the cause for all the ruckus was the component between the chair and the keyboard, heh. Thanks again Jeoshua, I was at my wit's end trying to figure this one out!