Weird mouse/keyboard temp freeze in interiors only

[eccentricflower]

When Bethesda offered their free download of Morrowind GOTY a few days ago I thought, "Yeah, it's way past time to replay that." I played Morrowind back when it first came out, so it's practically like a brand-new game to me; I've forgotten almost everything. :tongue:

 

The first couple of nights I played, as far as I could tell, everything was fine. But today, I started to see the game doing a strange thing, and only in interior locations. Outside, it runs like whoa. Even with long sight distances it's fabulous. Inside, as I move around and the game has to draw new areas, mouselook mostly stops working (turning is very slow and sometimes won't work at all) and SOME keys stop responding. I'll try to press F or R and it'll take many tries for my sword or my hands to actually appear, but opening doors, menu keys, etc are all fine. If I stop and let the game "catch up" a bit (several seconds), then eventually I can mouselook again and turn around, and use keys normally, but this will only last for a short while; I turn a corner or enter a new room and it does this again. It doesn't seem to be frame rate. Frame rate stays solidly at the 144 FPS settings cap whenever I'm in an interior. I tried limiting it down (to 75) and it didn't affect this problem. Shadow settings, lighting settings, and view distance settings seem to have had no effect. There does not appear to be heavy disk thrash while the game is doing this weirdness.

 

Today was the first day I did any serious wandering in Vivec and I thought, "OK, well, it's Vivec, Vivec slowed the game down even in 2002," but now it's doing it in every interior. The larger the interior the worse it is, apparently. Corners are the real killers. The winding stairs in Vivec are where it's worst.

 

It's not a game-breaker but it's super-annoying. When I had to steal darts in Ald'ruhn, every time the guards weren't looking I'd turn back to the bed with the darts and it would freeze up mouselook AGAIN. By the time the game let me turn again, the guards were back.

 

Anyone here ever seen anything like this? I tried searching and didn't see any likely threads.

 

Plugins/patches: I have the most recent Morrowind Code Patch, the most recent MGE XE with DIstant Lands on, some (not all) of the original Bethesda bonus content (e.g. Master Propylon Index, the island with all the skeletons), and the most recent Tamriel Rebuilt (which content I haven't even touched or looked at yet).

 

WIn 7 64-bit

Intel Core i7 960 w 12 GB RAM

nVidia GTX 1060 6 GB

 

P.S. since I'm considering messing with them to see what happens:

Interior Cell Buffer = 10

Exterior Cell Buffer = 32

[EDIT: Tweaking Interior Cell Buffer both up and down made no difference.]

Edited March 31, 2019 by eccentricflower