The dreaded "enter area" bug

[x29]

This is the bug where you enter an area and the game crashes (http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Technical_Support#Crashes). But the workarounds listed on that page don't really work for me.

 

What I'm seeing is that I visit Shardrock for the very first time, and after a second or two, the game crashes.

 

I am running under Wine on Linux, but the other reports I've seen of this bug are from Windows users, so I don't think the problem is Wine/Linux.

 

In my current game this happened before, but I was able to go back to a previous savegame, and only lose a few hours of play time. But now, I'm about ready to give up altogether if I can't get a fix. It's just too frustrating for me never knowing when this will happen again and how many hours of game play I'll lose. Bleh.

 

I suspect the problem is some dangling pointer in the savegame file. If I knew the savegame format, I might be able to write a program to repair the savegame file. Maybe I'll look into that.

 

Anybody have ideas on this problem?

[TheTerminator2004]

Yay! Another Linux user :) Just in case it is a wine thing (though I agree it might not be), what distro, and what wine version, are you using?

 

There is an excellent program for editing save game files, as well as doing other useful things, called Wrye Bash, but I don't know whether it would work under wine- there's no entry for it in the appdb :confused: It needs python 2.5.1, and wxpython 2.8.7.1 ANSI, but I don't know whether you'll need to install them under wine as well, or whether it'll be able to use the native Linux libraries. You'll just have to experiment :)

[x29]

I'm using Ubuntu Gutsy with Wine 0.9.50. But since so many Windows users have reported what sounds like this very problem, I suspect it's a bug in Oblivion itself.

 

I've gotten Wrye Bash working under Wine, at least the import face function I used. It works with python 2,4 for Windows, but it has bad problems under Python 2.5, if anyone's thinking of trying it. However, I was under the impression that Wrye Bash does not fully understand the savegame format. It only knows parts. I've found a page that describes the known parts of the format, but in order to "clean" a savegame, I think I'd have to know it all. I'll have to look into it some more.

 

So anyway, I do really like this game a lot despite the bugs, so I decided to start over and try the workaround on the page I mentioned in my first post about not using the "Quicksave/Quickload" functions. So far, no problem entering any areas, but I do still have occasional crashes. (Just like everyone else :)

 

(Edit/Followup)

So, through diligent effort :), I've got well over 100 hours into my restarted game without using Quicksave and still no "Enter Area" crashes or crashes from apparently corrupted savegames. This really seems like the solution to my problem.