CTD after Obsidian Screen Intro

Shadyfan4500 · July 11, 2017

I've been out of the modding game for New Vegas for quite a while. As I remember, my huge mod list caused huge instability problems at times, while most of the time it was completely fine and a great fun to play. I came back into pc gaming in a major way after purchasing Oblivion and Morrowind and beating Oblivion. I tried Morrowind for a while, but as hard as I try I got disinterested - strange considering I can pick up and play Arena and Daggerfall. I picked up Skyrim again and redid the entire mod list - having to completely remove the game and reinstall it several times before it ever became stable. Now I'm back to New Vegas, and I have 100+ mods installed, and ~200 plugins enabled. While writing this part, I just remembered that there is a 4gb launcher for the game, and I just downloaded it. Now, let's get to the problem.

Whenever I launch the game, I get the Bethesda loading screen, then the Obsidian one, then a black screen - which eventually goes back to desktop. Like I said, I have 100+ mods installed, so I'm pretty sure at least one of them has an error. Since I've been out of the game for a while, I have no idea which one it could really be. I'll give the entire plugin load order (LOOT-modified) which contains a merge patch created using FNVEdit and a few custom mods I made myself years ago (Natural Selection and Courier's Weapons or something like that - unreleased to nexus). I have all DLC as well, and a lot of the mods are the most recent versions of them. I have updated the mods as much as I could. I use NMM exclusively, which could be a problem, and that has a few errors when it comes to version checking.

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Also there are a few programs running in the background which may be interfering with the game. Programs like TeamViewer 12 have interrupted the mod creation process for Skyrim, which is why it warrants a mention here. I also use nVidia Shadowplay to record footage and since it's a part of GeForce Experience, it's always running and shows a message at the start of a game. Skype is always on too, but I really doubt that could crash the game.

Ladez · July 11, 2017

Way, way too many plugins. This game has a cap at 139 or lower depending on your hardware configuration. It may or may not be the cause of your crash, but your first troubleshooting step should be to lower that considerably as it will cause gamebreaking issues eventually.

dubiousintent · July 11, 2017

Also, to add to that sound advice: get rid of any unnecessary background tasks. Games written in 2010 do not tolerate being interrupted by other processes well. This is especially true of "multiplayer" overlays like "Overwolf" (and presumably "TeamViewer", which I am not familiar with). Skype as well as it has a high processor priority. Many people find they need to run with the Steam Client in "offline" mode so they can safely have AV disabled while playing.

-Dubious-

Shadyfan4500 · July 11, 2017

Yeah, I manually went through every plugin in chunks of 5, and found out that the game is capped at 159 exactly, at least, before the game couldn't be played. I could still load it, but I got an error message from Project Nevada I believe saying it couldn't load the HUD extension due to a bad installation or something along those lines, and it was glitched in a way that I couldn't click or hit enter on the "Ok" button. Since I'm using the 4gb launcher, the original cap is probably increased. Still, I have the message pop up in my game about HUD extensions, but it's after I actually load into the game so I can click Ok and ignore it for the most part. I reinstalled PN and PN Extras manually, but nothing changed.

I don't understand what's going on, because I remember having all of these mods and WME (because I haven't actually changed the installed mods in years) and having all of it actually working in a somewhat stable way. Now I get into the game, remove some mods including WME and disabling most of the XFO plugins and I can play but I get an error message each time. Probably back around 2014 or so, a while before Fallout 4. I wasn't big into the Elder Scrolls back then, and huge into Fallout. Fallout New Vegas was my main game, and back then I was still on a Hard Disk. Since then, I've put the game down, swapped out the Hard Disk for a Solid State Drive (keeping the old drive in storage, which proved useful in this case), picked up Oblivion and Morrowind and got into Oblivion, then back into Skyrim, then back into New Vegas. After that, all the headaches started. I loaded up the game using NMM and I found that all of the old plugins were still there - for some reason - but no mods were installed by NMM. I went to the old drive and found the Mods folder used by NMM for New Vegas, and copied it on over, then switched back to the SSD. Then tried to install all of the mods and bam, more headaches. Restricted Access so it can't uninstall files, completely removed all the mods then deleted the FNV folder and reinstalled, reinstalled all of the mods, LOOTed the load order, and the game doesn't run. eh, I got it working now, although the load order is a shadow of its former self.

Btw, TeamViewer is a tool that allows you to remote control other pc's. I had it in place so I would be able to access my PC from school if I really needed to - which has proved useful in the past. It's a pretty good and well-made program, but it does interfere with Bethesda's CK or CS or GECK. It throws the program an error when you try to save that says you have to close all dialog boxes before saving. It took me a little bit to figure that out.

Shadyfan4500 · July 11, 2017

One of the biggest headaches about returning to an old modded game that you haven't touched in a while is, if you have to change the load order at all, then you probably won't be able to safely load your older saves. I removed a bunch of mods from Skyrim that drove me away from it, such as survival and realism mods, and I had to delete all of my saves - which I was iffy about. On one hand, I did spend a lot of time as that character, but on the other hand it doesn't really matter that's a different version of me. A cringier version of myself.

An odd feeling about it though is that, these saves, whether you finished the game or not, are still complete. It would feel really weird to return to them. I found it hard at times to remember my #1 priority when returning to Oblivion and sometimes my latest playthrough of Skyrim after a night's rest. Take that night's rest and stretch it to 3 years.

dubiousintent · July 11, 2017

A lot has been learned over the years (and still continues to be learned), so you need to think of starting over as an opportunity to do things better/differently. Much of the fun of an RPG is building up the character from scratch anyway.

Please see the wiki "FNV General Mod Use Advice" article. Think of it as a refresher on things you may have forgotten during your hiatus, or gotten confused from your foray into other games.

Please see the wiki "Fallout NV Mod Conflict Troubleshooting" guide for the most common problems and their solutions.

-Dubious-

Fallout New Vegas

CTD after Obsidian Screen Intro

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