CTD on cell entry/quicksave - MannequinActivatorSCRIPT issue, revisited

[lordstormdragon]

Hello, My (heavily) modded game is crashing after months of stability, even with around 150 mods. I'm not new to Skyrim or mods but I am new to cleaning and fixing corrupt CTD issues. The one I'm currently facing is showing up in my Papyrus logs as:

[01/27/2017 - 06:35:21PM] warning: Assigning None to a non-object variable named "::temp15"
stack:
[None].MannequinActivatorSCRIPT.ResetPosition() - "MannequinActivatorSCRIPT.psc" Line 184
[None].MannequinActivatorSCRIPT.OnCellLoad() - "MannequinActivatorSCRIPT.psc" Line 108
[01/27/2017 - 06:35:21PM] error: Unable to call Is3DLoaded - no native object bound to the script object, or object is of incorrect type
stack:
[None].MannequinActivatorSCRIPT.Is3DLoaded() - "<native>" Line ?
[None].MannequinActivatorSCRIPT.ResetPosition() - "MannequinActivatorSCRIPT.psc" Line 184
[None].MannequinActivatorSCRIPT.OnCellLoad() - "MannequinActivatorSCRIPT.psc" Line 108
[01/27/2017 - 06:35:21PM] warning: Assigning None to a non-object variable named "::temp15"
stack:
[None].MannequinActivatorSCRIPT.ResetPosition() - "MannequinActivatorSCRIPT.psc" Line 184
[None].MannequinActivatorSCRIPT.OnCellLoad() - "MannequinActivatorSCRIPT.psc" Line 108
[01/27/2017 - 06:35:21PM] VM is freezing...
[01/27/2017 - 06:35:21PM] VM is frozen

 

So this has something to do with Mannequin Activator, whatever that may be?

I cleaned all my dirty stuff in TES5Edit and that fixed the CTDs, for about two cell changes. I could enter Skyrim and one other place, but any third place crashed me again, with the same MannequinActivatorSCRIPT spamming in my logs.

Curiously, before I cleaned my dirties (Update, Dawnguard, Hearthfire, and Dragonborn) the log was 100MB and after, it's far less in size. 6MB, then 3, then .5MB as of my last crash. So it seems like the cleaning helped?

I don't know what to do next except the tedious process of one-by-one checking which has always killed my desire to play, in the past. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

[cdcooley]

Those errors won't be the source of your crashes.

 

They could be appearing because you've uninstalled a mod and kept playing with that character. Or maybe you used MarkForDelete on a mannequin. But it could also just be one of the many quirks of the game's scripts.

 

The Papyrus logs are virtually useless for solving crash problems. If you want the most stable game you should turn off Papyrus logging.

[lordstormdragon]

Thank you, cdcooley. If Papyrus isn't helpful for diagnosing my CTDs, I can turn it off and dismiss it and look in other areas.

I'm still having CTDs, but only in weird and certain places. Getting frustrated but I may just have to start over. I'd really like to know how to diagnose what's going wrong in this game, but I'm getting nowhere on this - and I mean since the game originally was released.

Do you have any suggestions on how to diagnose CTDs? I'm usually very technically skilled, and it's pretty frustrating to be thwarted on what should be a pretty simple thing.

[cdcooley]

Special Edition shouldn't be exceeding the memory limit which was the number one reason for crashes in the original game.

 

The next major source of problems is mod conflicts involving "dirty" mods. In particular any mod that marks any of the original game objects as deleted. Using SSEEdit to undelete references and disable them instead can fix that problem. Even if a mod author claims you shouldn't clean a particular mod you should look to make sure there aren't some deleted references. There are rare but (semi) reasonable reasons for having ITM (identical to master) records in a mod which is why some mod authors say not to clean their mods, but there's no valid reason for a mod to need deleted references. Update.esm and the three DLCs all need to be cleaned but mods by experienced and responsible mod authors (like Arthmoor) will already be cleaned. It still doesn't hurt to check all of your mods for deleted references though.

 

Deleted navmesh entries are a special case because they can't be fixed automatically. Fortunately when they are a problem you'll get very consistent crashes every time you try to enter the cell with the conflict.

 

Another potential problem is the Havok system glitching out because two or more items are trying to occupy the exact same location. Usually it would just move one of them or even let them overlap but occasionally it panics instead.

 

There's also a chance that a mesh or texture created for the original game can have a feature embedded that crashes SE. People who've been too impatient to properly convert meshes when porting a mod to SE might be part of the problem. There's a mesh converter utility available now but in the very early days conversion had to be done manually and some modders just didn't bother.