New to mods, crashing, what have I got wrong?!?

[Clairefun]

Hello all, I'm new to all this.I used to play Oblivion on PC and enviously looked at all the confusing mod talks, then hubby bought an xbox and my pc became very out of date / buggy / linux / old. We have had to replace at last and my new pc will run pc games woot, so I bought Fallout 3 GOTY edition and started trying to understand mods. I have more than one save of about 200 hours on the xbox, and have still never actually finished the game. I'm a tinkerer / scavenger / collector type who likes to bugger about with the playerhomes. One playthrough I collected every teddy bear I encountered and tried to place them all - pleasingly - in my megaton house. You can understand 200 hours...

 

SO! I ony have a few mods (so far!) and have 'fixed' a couple of 'crashes-at-startup' things, but now it loads and things are fine for anywhere between 5 - 20 minutes, and then it crashes and I have to log out to get any response. Here's the load order :

 

Fallout3.esm

Anchorage.esm

ThePitt.esm

BrokenSteel.esm

PointLookout.esm

Zeta.esm

Lings.esm

Enhanced Weather - Rain and Snow.esm

aMpPlants_2_eng.esm

Asset - Brahmin Milk.esm

LingsDLC.esm

ActionFigures.esm

CONELRAD 640-1240.esp

MoreMapMarkers.esp

MiniHideout.esp

UndergroundHideout.esp

Enhanced Weather - Rain and Snow in Fallout.esp

Enhanced Weather - Sneak Bonus during Storms.esp

The Annex.esp

Total active plugins: 19

Total plugins: 19

See? Hardly anything! And there's some really good looking ones I want (DC Interiors springs to mind, the collector in me is very excited). I use FOMM, most of these are installed using the package installer, I have patched to 1.7, have tried to thing where you edit the ini file to say busethreads whajamacallit. (I was more exact at the time). I have just left the vault and am trying to discover the mini hideout - is it that one? 'Cause I'd *reallly* like to keep it - or is it a combination? Have I missed something really obvious? I don't actually know what I'm doing, I'm just doing what each mod tells me to do...

Any advice would be wonderful, and also any mods I have missed that would be welcome to someone who spends hours placing interesting unique items in her playerhomes. Homes mods? Unique items mods? Easier to place things mods? (I'm hoping to try Feng Shui if I can get these paltry few to work).

Thanking you all very muchly in advance! (oh plllllleeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaassssssssseeee someone answer me!)

Claire

[M48A5]

What are your computer specifications and install path?

Also, LingsDLC.esm need to be placed just below Lings.esm.

[prensa]

Clairefun - Hello!

"things are fine for anywhere between 5 - 20 minutes, and then it crashes and I have to log out to get any response."

Is the game freezing? If so it's probably the Fallout 3 multi core bug.

Fallout 3 has trouble with multi core computers, mainly with ones that have more than two cores & use hyperthreading.

So if you have a multi core computer, that's likely your problem.

There is a fix, you need to edit your Fallout 3 .ini file.

The one you want to change is:

For XP:

My Documents\My Games\Fallout3\

For Vista & Win7:

Documents\My Games\Fallout3

The file you want will be called:

FALLOUT.ini

Open the .ini with Notepad & change this line:

bUseThreadedAI=0

to:

bUseThreadedAI=1

& insert this line under it:

iNumHWThreads=2

Save & close your ini.

Hope this helps!

Prensa

[Clairefun]

Thank you both!

 

M48A5, I have a quad core i5, 3ghz running Windows 8. Install path is C:\Applications\Bethesda\Fallout3 (as I read somewhere here that NOT allowing it to install into Program Files is A Good Thing?). I have moved Lingsdlc.esm now, thanks!

 

and prensa, yeah, quad core, (it is freezing rather than crashing, yes) but as I mentioned I have already edited the ini file. I saved the iNumHWThread=2 first and when that didn't make a difference, changed it to 1 instead of 2 as per some advice on a 'stop it crashing' thread. Still does it!

 

Any other suggestions? It didn't appear to crash this much when I played a little bit un-modded, as I got to the 'about to leave the vault' stage with no issues and then added mods for a better game when I did leave...do I have to remove the mods and give up if I want to play the game? I've already seen enough to know that would make me very sad.

 

btw this is my only game on my pc and the only one I care about (aside from trying to make my Grim Fandango CDs work but that's a whole other issue) so I'm desperate!

[prensa]

Clairefun - Hello!

 

The fact you've got a quad core & it's freezing points to the multi core bug. You mention adding the one line but did you do both?

 

Both lines are needed for the fix to work:

 

bUseThreadedAI=1
iNumHWThreads=2

 

Also, make sure you edited the correct .ini as a common mistake is to edit the Fallout_default.ini in your Fallout 3 folder instead.

 

The correct .ini to edit is the FALLOUT.ini in your Documents folder, exact locations mentioned in my post above.

 

Hope this helps!

 

Prensa

[Clairefun]

Hi again prensa!

 

Yes, both lines done, and to the FALLOUT.ini file in my documents/games/fallout3 folder. I changed line bUseThreadedAI=0 to bUseThreadedAI=1 and added line directly beneath iNumHWThreads=2. Following further advice when that didn't work, I then changed the second line to iNumHWThreads=1. I should have made it clearer I had done these things already, my apologies. I was a bit overexcited/caffeinated when I did the first post :D

[Lendglas]

Sorry to bump into this Thread.

 

You Could yet try the F3 Configator. It comes with a Friendly Ui that allows you to do that Tweak and Others.

 

Give it a shoot if all else fails.