showracemenu CTD when changing from male to female - mods question

[NastyDibella]

well disable all mods when starting a new game and then right after helgen turn them back on. Works for me

[narphous]

If I only used showracemenu at the start of a new game, that might work, but I don't. I also need it to generate .npc files, which means I need certain things loaded.

[narphous]

Still digging into this, and I'm pretty sure it's related to texture memory exhaustion. I found that I could usually get into showracemenu with 3-5 hair mods loaded once, then the same hair mods would lock at showracemenu if I tried to go back in. So part of this also seems to be also that skyrim doesn't clean up/release texture memory on exit very well, or else it's an issue with the nvidia driver not releasing the texture memory. My working hypothesis is that when you go into showracemenu, all the textures for all the hair mods get loaded at once, which would make sense. Not sure how much further I can go from here without starting to force system dumps and getting the symbol files for the nvidia driver and tesv.exe. The workaround I'm using for now is to reboot before I start skyrim if I need to make character modifications. That seems to force a flush of the texture memory and let's me get into showracemenu at least once. The other thing I've found is that if I don't play for several (>8) hours, I can get into showracemenu again, so evetually, the texture memory does get released. I guess when the nvidia driver finally does its garbage collection/flushing.

 

I'll know for sure if I ever manage to snag the 680 w/ 4 gig of texture memory I have my eye on. If it works more reliably there, then I can be sure it's texture memory related.

[Shad0wThirteen]

Same issue here :wallbash:

I can't change from male to female and since 1.6, I get more and more random freezes, very often in Riverwood.

I thought that it would maybe be Extended Slider Colors, but as none of you seem to have that mod, I think that's not the problem.

 

2012-05-31 v.1.3.Fixed

Added individual tri files for all hairs.

ESM file updated to prevent CTD in showracemenu

 

That's what Apachii wrote in the changelog, so it seems to be quite a regular issue :verymad:

 

Before 1.6 update it was all fine.

 

You have any ideas?

[Rabbit1251]

I have the problem with an ATI graphics card so it may not be linked solely to the nVidia card.

 

 

Rabbit

[narphous]

OK, I can say with a fair degree of confidence that, at least in my case, the problem is entirely due to texture memory exhaustion. Got my EVGA 680 FTW last night, which has 4 gig, and now I can switch races, switch sex back and forth, etc., and all with zero CTDs. So, graphics card upgrade time, people. At least if you want to have a bunch of hair mods loaded like I do.

[yafi]

The problem with this isn't to do with mods neccessarily, it's to do with how the scripts load and how powerful your CPU is. When you change race and gender scripts need to run in order for it to change, and changing from male to female can sometimes cause CTDs depending on how many scripts are currently running. So it's better to do showracemeny earlier on in the game and inside an interior cell that doesn't have much going on. I've also noticed changing from or to a custom race from or to a vanilla race causes CTDs, it's how the scripts are initiliased and loaded in to the savegame.

[narphous]

The problem with this isn't to do with mods neccessarily, it's to do with how the scripts load and how powerful your CPU is. When you change race and gender scripts need to run in order for it to change, and changing from male to female can sometimes cause CTDs depending on how many scripts are currently running. So it's better to do showracemeny earlier on in the game and inside an interior cell that doesn't have much going on. I've also noticed changing from or to a custom race from or to a vanilla race causes CTDs, it's how the scripts are initiliased and loaded in to the savegame.

 

 

That's been the common wisdom, and in my case, common wisdom is simply wrong. I changed nothing else other than swapping out my 570 with 1.5 gig of ram for a 680 with 4 gig. With every single mod loaded, I can change sex and race at will, even in a large cell. So, common wisdom needs to change, at least in the specific case that I was seeing, which was hard locks of the game when running show race menu.