Blackreach - possible glitch

[Sharza]

Hi All

 

I was wondering if Im the only one experiencing some weird issues in parts of Blackreach... a very limited area in fact.

 

For reference I'm on a Intel I7 box, with an ATI 5870 gfx card, running with 11.10 drivers... I know there are never ones, those has been tested and did not resolve or improve anything, so went back to those, as they've been quite stable for me so far.

 

Its quite difficult explain exactly where this area is, however I've attached a scrshot.

 

I re-entered Blackreach through Great Lift at Raldbthar (yellow box on scrshot) after having dealt with my previos massive overweight, and if you go straigth right aroung outside the entrance, there is a waterfall leading to a quite low area. As soon as I enter this low area I start see screen flickering - quite heavy, almost intense blinking. It seems like its while textures being loaded, and in some particular places it keeps going on.

 

I had just upgraded my gfx drivers and activated some plugins, so I went turning those off, and after that moved through a number of ATI gfx drivers versions, even completely cleaning them out between versions eventually, because I was quite sure that it had to be gfx card related somehow. I've tried basicly all different gfx configurations, cycling through various types of AA modes and filters, as ATI so far has some issues with this in Skyrim, finally widening the scope to any other 3d option available.... all this to no avail. At the brink of considering a complete reinstall suspecting some leftovers from other ATI drivers, or MOD messups, I decided to move around this area abit and see how it all went down.

 

And slap me silly with a rubberhose if the game behavior itself has some issues in that area, hardly possible to blame on the ATI drivers... almost every time (80%++) I try to mine a vein in this area, my character faithfully brings forth his smithing hammer and starts working the forge... on a vein that is (experienced first time at pointer in red box on scrshot). Of course this yields no soulstones or other gems, neither does it bring up the smithing menu, however I have to manually activate again to make it stop. I can then retry and after a couple of attempts the pickaxe is finally drawn and the vein is mined as usual.

 

Leaving the area seems to leave the weird behavior behind. I've tried oldish savegames before any mods, just to make absolutely sure nothing has been messed with, but still the same.

 

SO - the big question here now which puzzles me a lot is, of course, am I the only one?? Searches for other best-problem-friends-forever has so far been in vain, the only topic involving blackreach issues being the guy with savegame issues posted here on nexus as well.

 

Any feedback highly welcome, if not for anything else, then only for the sole purpose at putting my mind to ease... I can live with it since its such a limited area, but its annoying nonetheless, as the first many hours of Skyrim hasn't exactly been entirely problem free :)

 

Cheers,

Sharza

[Sharza]

Thought I wanted to follow up on this, as it seems I, by chance as it happens, has partially stumbled and partially discovered a solution to my very own issue. So should anyone at some point in time run into this issue, this is a remediation you may want to try.

 

Some of the indoor places in Blackreach are merely stub areas of larger places, which has collapsed or similar, rendering them unaccessible, leaving only quite confined spaces over for the player to discover. While I was in one of those places my Y scale mouse sensivity went absolutely through the roof, completely out of sync with the X axis sensivity... could barely touch the mouse in fact, without either getting a very close look at the ceiling or the floor... quite annoying.

 

It didn't take much reading and subsequent testing to realize that the Y axis framerate is an equation of the current FPS, and the ini file parameters to align X/Y axis scaling merely moves the sync point (FPS up/down) and not performs any true scaling, which could bring about a good piece of sense on a widescreen display.

 

Anyway - the solution which could resolve this seemed to be the FPS limiter mod... yea I know... reducing your FPS to alleviate a mouse x/y axis movement scaling issue wtf? Doesn't change the fact that it is the only way beyond increasing the gfx quality to a level where the fps is low enough, most likely making most other areas of the game unplayable, or enabling vsync, which on my 120hz monitor is bound to generate serious nauseaing effects, as I do not have the powerhouse needed to consistently deliver 120 fps in all areas of Skyrim.

 

It seems that the physics in Skyrim is also based on equations derived from current framerate, which explains some other weird things which I've experienced but kinda just figured wasn't annoying enough to instigate an investigation. (Objects moving irradically around causing continous banging sounds, NPC's being speedmoved across screen to other locations (where they apparantly supposed to be in the first place), etc...

 

So could it really be? Could Bethesda really, seriously have done this? Taken into consideration that the better part of the game is designed for consoles, which are fairly equal power-wise, and therefore way more predictable, it might very well be so. And again - absolutely stunning - installing the limiter, and bashing in a 60 fps limitation on FPS, along with adjusting the x/y axis scaling to 0.0200 fixed the mouse issue immediately, and had no negative effect on mouse movement in gfx heavy areas.

 

So for the fun of it all I re-entered my problem area, and would you believe it... no issues here anymore... I reloaded immediately to retry mining the veins, absolutely flawless and no issues, no attempting to smithe a greatsword or whatever on the vein.

 

Now... the physics... I returned to a place where I know for sure the banging about of some inane half stuck iron cast pot has bothered me senseless while sneaking around, this issue was gone as well.

 

So indeed - for the love of consoles, another bright move on Bethesda's part. But well, since I was one of those unable to wait for the game, and one of those both interested in and able to mess around with the configs and external environment to the game, I tend to forgive them in the light I got a at least fairly playable game which have so far given me many hours of both game amusement and technical challenges. This will all be forgotten IF they detach the PC version from the console mechanics, and bring about something that at least works quite abit better than what we have now.

 

I at least hope so, since ENB only allows me to proxy one additional d3d9.dll, and that slot previously occuppied by the FXAA injector is now taken by the FPS limiter. (The FXAA was not the reason btw.... I did try to turn that off first, just to nip that one in the butt, should someone wonder ;) )

 

A lenghty update this, but I hope it may help someone else.

 

Cheers,

Sharza

[baltes]

I just started having this exact issue

I am additionally unable to mine geode veins, my game half freezes, I am unable to move, but menues open and operate fine. Problem persists even after a reload