Weird black texture bug

Post by **anstand** » Fri Aug 19, 2016 12:41 am

Hello there,

I recently edited most of the Fallout 3 NPC's to use the custom race faces that come with FCO.

However, the female bodies (not male) for some reason turn black (after 1 minute of play) when there is a certain distance between me and them. As soon as I approach the female NPC's, the black starts to disappear. FCO only adds races with new textures and meshes for the head and does not alter with the body meshes and textures (respectively uses the vanilla ones).

So, I suppose the culprit are the heads. But the question of course is, what may be the problem here? Why the female, but not the male bodies? And why does it happen at all? Problem of my GPU driver (which is pretty new)? Engine limitation?

I never had any texture problems before the editing (it took me ages to modify everything and I hardly want to give everything up. Not now.)

Post by **RoyBatty** » Fri Aug 19, 2016 12:47 am

That's a UV mapping error.

Some clothing is incompatible with whatever body mod it is, or vice versa.

Post by **anstand** » Fri Aug 19, 2016 12:52 am

That black texture bug however did not happen before the editing. In all the countless hours that I played TTW. Besides that, the texture bug does not immediately appear, it seems like that the amount of FCO heads somehow brick something in the game, since it takes a minute before the bodies suddenly go crazy (normal vanilla clothings produce the same problems).

Post by **anstand** » Fri Aug 19, 2016 9:02 am

I did some further test runs (restart FNV, load Megaton save [place with around 20-30 NPC's], run around for 5 minutes) and it turns out that the bug does not always appear.

In the last two test runs, I could run around for 5-10 minutes without encountering the error. Not sure what to make of this. Will continue testing and maybe I find the cause for that one.

Post by **RoyBatty** » Fri Aug 19, 2016 12:27 pm

hrm sounds like a similar problem I had with hats and faces, try turning on multithreaded facegen in the ini.

Post by **jlf65** » Sat Aug 20, 2016 12:55 am

I recognize screenshot 8 - I get that all the time, but usually not until after an hour or two of playing. It's due to running out of video memory. Textures get loaded until there's no more ram, then you start to get black textures. I can adjust how long it takes to a small extent using the video driver memory feature of ENB. Install ENB for FONV, then in the enberies.ini file, turn off effects:

[GLOBAL]

UseEffect=false

Then in the enblocal.ini, set the memory settings like this:

[MEMORY]

ExpandSystemMemoryX64=false

ReduceSystemMemoryUsage=true

DisableDriverMemoryManager=true

DisablePreloadToVRAM=false

EnableUnsafeMemoryHacks=false

ReservedMemorySizeMb=256

VideoMemorySizeMb=3900

EnableCompression=false

AutodetectVideoMemorySize=false

The VideoMemorySizeMb will vary according to how much ram you have. Note that this is a 64-bit Windows thing. ENB can put its own video driver memory handling in place, launch more tasks that run in parallel to the game, and have each task manage up to 4G of video data. This supplements the video ram you have on your card. I've got an AMD A6 APU, which gives me 768MB of vram, of which I dedicate 256 to the ENB video system (that's the ReservedMemorySizeMb setting). I have 8GB of ram, of which the game can use something over 3GB for the game itself (using the 4GB patch), leaving me with 3900MB free for ENB to use as video ram storage. The enb site has an app you can run in windows to see how much free ram you can set in the ini file.

Using ENB like this, I can play for at least an hour despite having tons of texture-rich mods. Once I see black skin, I know it's time to quit and rerun the game to clear out all the unused textures cluttering the memory.

Post by **anstand** » Sat Aug 20, 2016 6:57 pm

Question is, how does that happen in such a short time (4GB VRAM)?

I can't really believe that the FCO faces blow up my VRAM that badly, although like I said, it started to happen after I edited all the NPC's.

Using the F4 hotkey of ENB also helps (if you are not using ReduceSystemMemoryUsage=true).

Post by **Mystical Panda** » Sun Aug 21, 2016 11:48 am

The only time I had a "strange" blackish texture was when something was missing or a path was pointing to an incorrect texture; not sure what's causing this though. You mentioned clearing vram within enb fixes it somewhat? I'm just guessing, but it almost sounds like there's a bad texture or map causing the graphics card to allocate more than it needs under certain conditions (almost sounds like specular mapping- light reflections). Or, a scaling problem per se; when you get closer to something, the engine scales up the texture, which is looking for a higher/ lower res and it can't find it. I wish I could offer more here.

Post by **anstand** » Mon Aug 22, 2016 8:28 am

Just wanted to tell you guys that setting ReservedMemorySizeMb in the enblocal.ini to 512 fixed the problem for me.

Was 256 before. :)

Thanks for the help everyone.

Post by **jlf65** » Mon Aug 22, 2016 4:15 pm

[quote=anstand]

Just wanted to tell you guys that setting ReservedMemorySizeMb in the enblocal.ini to 512 fixed the problem for me.

Was 256 before. :)

Thanks for the help everyone.

[/quote]

Thanks for letting us know what worked for you. And that makes sense - that field sets how much can be shown from the total stored in memory at any one time. With FCO, nearly everyone has a nice high-def texture, so under some circumstances, like lots of people in the area all showing new HD textures, you can fill up that reserved block to overflowing.