Oblivion - Crashes/Lockups/Freezes

[maYuYang]

@Thacrudd

did you install the UOP after you installed your mods? Also, was it the installer version? I tried that before and guess what happened.. You should install UOP, but right after you installed the 1.20416 patch, and not after your mods(I don't know why, but it will cause crashes).

 

Btw, I disabled FFDShow, The FFs do not appear anymore.

I do have a new problem however, and that is a freeze when quiting the game(from ingame). You then see the normal yellowish screen, but i just doesn't want to quit. The problem is that the only way to get our of that is to resart the computer(worst way, but everything else doesn't work). Even the Task Manager is no help because it's window appears behind the oblivion screen, so you see the mouse icon when being over the Task Manager, but you cannot see the buttons of it. It's ironic that the ingame music is still playing at that time.

 

To quit ingame, I'm actually abusing another CTD, I'm loading another save file, so the game crashes and I'm on my desktop again. If it does not crash, then I select Quit which then will work. It's extremely weird...

 

Imo, those kind of freezes appear when the game is loading something, but I cannot confirm that.

[MrCooper2006]

Good news about the FFD.

 

But cant help you with that one maYu, I did have that problem but on my old computer. Yellowish exiting screen would just hang for ages, sometimes never close with ctrl-alt-del (I could see the taskmanager tho)

 

Dont think I ever mangaged to get rid of it just had to live with it. Stopped now on my new PC.

 

Althought didnt try it with any other saves or anything, as I only had one main character back then.

 

 

@Thacrudd again -

 

I think it mainly caused by the UOP, if you try an installation without the UOP at all it should be crash free.

 

And maYu's advice should work too.

[Slytovhand]

I've had similar things as MYY (hope you don't mind the abbreviation :) )

 

I also suspect it's when it's trying to load data from somewhere, as last time it pulled that one on me, I was in the character creation screen after quitting. At that stage, I had just installed Exnem's male and female, Beautiful Ppl, and (I think) Beautiful Elves. I load a new mod (or bunch of mods, in the case of OOO and it's related upgrades from 1.3 to 1.33) and see what happens. First CTD was going from a basic save to new, then quit.

 

My biggest 'issue' in all of this is that I owned Oblivion for a year or so, but didn't have the machine to run it. Now that I do, I downloaded a stack of mods and installed - so never knew what vanilla was like on it's own :P

 

 

Not that much of what I've just said helps anyone, but there you go... cacheing problem, perhaps???

 

 

Slyt

[MrCooper2006]

After reading all this - my theory is that all the CTDs that arent directly related to a MOD (i.e. that keep occuring at the same place, or doing the same thing) and excluding the main menu/quitting CTDS are linked to the hard drive loading the data.

 

 

The ones i kept getting were mainly outside, when i was moving quickly, so it had to quickly load lots of data from many mods and from vanilla oblivion itself, either there some bad coding somewhere that means it cant load what it needs to when it needs to (resulting in freeze or CTD) or purely that it cant load everything at once, since its modded its not using just the vanilla objects so the game cant recognize when to tell the harddrive to stop loading stuff, so it kinda goes overboard and tries to load more data than its capable of (also resulting in freeze or CTD)

 

 

Hope this makes sense.

 

Anyway i mainly think this cos ive never once had a crash when im in a loaded cell, ie in a fight on in a house/building whatever, its nearly always outside, when im moving, or its still loading stuff a second after iv stoppped moving.

 

Wonder if any tech guys will read this and have an explanation, cos i really dont think its PURELY related to what mods you have and theyre load order, those are quite easy to find and stop in some cases. Although they do obviously have an impact, a major one in some cases.

 

Whereas the crashes ive been experiencing are completely random, and would back up my theory.

 

Mayb a tool or utility like streamline but purely for caching?

 

I know theres the tweaks ie. hardrive caching but these dont seem to make any difference (that iv noticed) althought im not 100% what the tweaks actually DO.

 

Thanks

[Thacrudd]

did you install the UOP after you installed your mods? Also, was it the installer version? I tried that before and guess what happened.. You should install UOP, but right after you installed the 1.20416 patch, and not after your mods(I don't know why, but it will cause crashes).

 

I installed it like this-

1. GOTY clean install (no patch needed already up to date)

2. unofficial Oblivion Patch (installer version)

3. unofficial SI patch

4. unofficial KOTN patch

 

I then tested it. CTD upon exiting the game. I then disabled until I found it was the UOP causing the CTD. (In my experience if you get a TCD when you exit the game you're bound to get more frequent CTD's when playing as well)

 

5. installed FCOM

TEST - OK

6. installed qarls

TEST - OK

7. TONS of other smaller mods

TEST - OK

8. Better Cities

TEST - CTD on quit (later found it was MMM - City Defences)

 

That is where I am at now. Last night I got a couple CTD's during play but not one upon quit so I don't really don't know why. I still think it's better cities since It was doing okay before that.

 

Playing with BC for ME is usually unplayable unless I put Object/Item/NPC distance at 10 or lower. (5th of the bar/slider)

 

Even then it was barely playable. Streamline installed - even the IC Market Distrct runs perfect, with only a minimal drop in visual quality, however, because of the higher FPS it looks better anyway as its smoother.

 

 

EDIT: This of course is worse with Texture Packs installed eg. QTP3. Due to every object added by Better Cties is Qarl'd (made to be 4x its original size). and with something like VWD this will kill your gfx card, possibly even burn it out so be careful.

 

Right now I'm running QTP and BC on a 8800GTS 320MB card. I do however have the FPS booster versions of Chorral, Skingrad, and Bruma installed. Those cities really bogged it down. I'm gonna do some work on it tonight and see if BC is what's still causing my random crashes. BTW, I'm running the FULL esp version, not the individual city esp's If I can narrow it down to a certain city though, I'll let you all know.

 

EDIT - Most all of my crashes occured on loading screens, it didn't matter matter if it was int. or ext.

[BossDweebe]

except of course AA, which is unavailable.

 

Actually AA is available with HDR if you set it in Nvidia Control Panel.

I have mine set to just 2 and it has helped heaps with the "fuzzies".

I also have AF at 8.

 

I wrote a few days ago that I was running smoothly with a number of the UL

mods, Natural Environments, Illumination Within, Akaviri Kojima and UOP, plus a few lesser mods

on a new install. Frame rates dip to about 25. average around 35-40.

Well that has changed somewhat. I did get a random lockup tonight.

This would have been after about half an hour. It may have been while loading an outdoor cell,

but I'm not sure. It think I'll turn the "unnecessary messages" back on so I know when

an outdoor cell is being loaded. Still only play testing so I don't know what will happen after

an hour or two.

 

I have kept my ini tweaks simple - turned on the threaded options is about all with the graphics

settings.

 

Glad to have learned about Elys Crash Shield tho. I'll pop that in next. Anythings worth a try.

I currently have only about 25% of the mods I had previously. Haven't started in on the

bodys, clothes and armor yet. I think I'll probably reduce my body textures and normals back

to 1024 from 2048 as well

 

I haven't used any of the "big" mods (OOO, Frans, MMM, BC etc.).

[MrCooper2006]

Yeah im back up to about 200 mods now, get occasional CTDs at random times.

 

Iv pretty much given up hope on tryin to fix them, I can live with them once in a while, forces me to take a break anyway.

 

I dont think its possible to fix them completely, unless you wanna play Vanilla. Oh well....

[BossDweebe]

I just found another source of freezes. Well, on my machine anyway...

 

I have Corsair XMS DDR 400, however my motherboard wants

to default to 333, (ASUS A8N-E 939 which is supposed to handle 400).

 

So, Mr. smartie that I am, I set it to 400 in BIOS.

This is fine - sometimes. But, after a lot of angst over random freezes I

have found that this has been my problem. This varies from game to game,

and Oblivion is one of the major offenders. I just discovered this while playing

R6 Vegas. It locks up while shooting for 5 or so seconds, and then comes good

for a while. Unlike Oblivion that likes to stay locked, requiring a re-boot.

@ 333 I finally have stability.

[Slytovhand]

Well, after being fairly ok for a while, I now keep getting CTD on game exits pretty much all the time now! And I'm getting slow downs on loading areas too.

 

I've put in a few new mods since last post, so I presume it's one of them. Clear water type things is the most likely problem, as the other mods are weapons/armour. When I've got more time, I'll sus out what it might be!

 

I will add though, I had a problem with Erthor which I fixed following the advice on tech sup (I chose to 'mod' it, and fix the script on OOO - but only after I tried turning off OOO (which then failed to load Oblivion). So, after reactivating it (using Wrye and OBMM), I didn't get a CTD. I think the relevant part of that is the load order has changed, with OOO addons now being lower down the order.

 

Slyt