Repeated Crashing

[dilbert719]

Roy, I updated my audio drivers, and the situation is better, but not fixed. Almost immediately after I did that and got back in the game, I ended up on Mothership Zeta, and there were no crashes through the two sessions I played there. Of course, no radio, either. As soon as I tried to go back to the wasteland, it crashed out on me. I was able to get back to DC on a second attempt, and the game played without crashing for about an hour, but the radio continued to skip. I'll keep testing.

As for WMP, I don't actually use it for anything (well, except getting the codec information I grabbed a few days ago) so if that causes problems, I can get rid of it.

 

[b]Edit:[/b] Random idle thought. I'm having trouble with radios, so maybe there's something wrong with my radio mods. I'm wondering if it might be wise to get rid of GNR Enhanced and Extended NV Radio and see if the problem continues without those two mods being active. If that clears it up, perhaps I need to redo my installation of those. I'll test that and report back.

[b]Follow-up Edit:[/b] Well, that wasn't it. I'm having the same problems without those mods.

Perhaps related, I'm having some problems with NPCs not pathing correctly. I'm in the middle of Head of State, having just cleared the memorial for the freed slaves, and they packed up their Brahmin and Four Score, walked out of the Temple of the Union... and stopped a couple steps down the street. Even when I try to push Hannibal to get him back on track, he marches right back to where he was, and won't move. Similarly, I decided to go through the tutorial in FNV just for the heck of it, and Sunny walked to the back, gave me the rifle, I shot bottles... and she wouldn't move. I fast traveled to the Source, took care of the Geckos, came back, and she was inside the Prospector Saloon and wouldn't move. I went through the entire tutorial quest section fast traveling back and forth between where she should have been and where she was; fortunately, the quest stages updated properly and she gave me the right dialogue, just wouldn't go anywhere.

[RoyBatty]

All this is symptoms of mod incompatibilities. I am unfamiliar with some of the mods you use. Also is GNR Enhanced converted properly? Or any F3 mods you are using? Uninstall all mods (not just disable unless you are using Mod Organizer) and try a new game and make sure it stable. Then start adding mods and if you get issues, you'll know which one it is.

[dilbert719]

Well, that just told me I'm having far more severe issues than I thought. I uninstalled absolutely everything in FOMM down to just FNV and the expansions, and I'm still having the radio skip. (Didn't play it long enough to find out about the other issues; if the radio's skipping on my first transition into the Prospector Saloon with absolutely nothing installed except FNV, then I imagine this isn't the only problem I'm going to have.)

It looks like, if I want to clear all this out, I'm going to have to start from absolute brass tacks: delete/uninstall everything I have, redownload everything, and install it all from the ground up.

[khumak]

One suggestion I keep hearing recommended if you use Steam is to make sure Steam is NOT installed in one of the default program files directories because windows restricts access to anything in those which requires constantly jumping through hoops to get around by running things as administrator, etc.  I finally got fed up with all the hassles, deleted Steam, and reinstalled it to C:/Games instead of the program files directory.  Hoping that will cut down on 3rd party utilities failing to run, etc but I guess I'll find out soon.

Not looking forward to redoing my mods but both of the games I'm playing right now (Skyrim and TTW) I use MO for so it should be reasonably painless.

[jlf65]

I did the same thing... all games or game-related stuff goes into C:\Games\. Works better than the default in my experience.

 

[khumak]

So far after reinstalling Steam into C:/Games instead of the program files directories I've had no crashes at all so it did seem to make a difference.  I've only tested Skyrim so far but it's pretty heavily modded and was crashing constantly before, now no crashes at all and that's with 2 conflicting weather mods, 2 conflicting audio overhauls, and 3 different mods that use 3rd party utilities to auto generate content (Perkus Maximus, ASIS, and DynDOLOD).

Can't say for sure that the directory thing was my only issue because I DID reinstall everything rather than just slap my MO folder back in there and rerun the game but I've never had Skyrim be this stable before so I'll take it.

Next up, TTW :)

 

(edit:  Almost forgot, another thing I started doing that makes my life easier is that any time I see a note in a readme or compatibility patch or whatever for a mod that says to load this mod after x other mod, I will fire up Loot and add that to the meta data so that as I install mods, Loot learns the correct order to put stuff in.  It already fixes a lot of conflicts but some things it just gets flat out wrong unless you tell it otherwise.  The great thing about the meta data is that one you tell it, it remembers so you don't have to anymore.  Just click Loot and whatever accumulated knowledge you've gained about conflicts in load order are automagically fixed by Loot.)

[dilbert719]

[quote=khumak] One suggestion I keep hearing recommended if you use Steam is to make sure Steam is NOT installed in one of the default program files directories because windows restricts access to anything in those which requires constantly jumping through hoops to get around by running things as administrator, etc.  I finally got fed up with all the hassles, deleted Steam, and reinstalled it to C:/Games instead of the program files directory.  Hoping that will cut down on 3rd party utilities failing to run, etc but I guess I'll find out soon.[/quote]

I can say that this definitely does help. I've never had Steam installed to Program Files; it's a huge pain to do so. (To be sure, I've installed Steam to a drive that doesn't even have a PF folder.)

I did finally bite the bullet and started fresh (down to uninstalling F3 and FNV and reinstalling them; might I say installing F3 DLC from disc on Win 10 is a PAIN IN THE ASS.) So far, I've got TTW up and running with MTUI, NMC's Combined Texture Pack (thanks for the detailed instructions, Roy) TTW Redesigned, Breeze's and T3 body mods, MCM, and I just added (and have yet to check) GNR Enhanced (also here, thanks for the detailed video, Roy) and Extended NVR Generator. I've yet to add in any quest or weather mods, they're next on my list, but everything I've done so far has worked like a charm. I hadn't realized this when I came back to the game, but things like NMC weren't working either in my old install, so doing this back up from scratch, while it's taking a while, was definitely worth it.

[b]Edit:[/b] Well, I must have screwed up somehow, though I don't know how. My GNR Enhanced esp was pusted, and it looped news without playing any music. I switched out the esp for one I found elsewhere on the site, repackaged the fomod, and it works, except it now loops the last few seconds of some songs and ads. Better, but still not quite right. I'm probably going to take another crack at editing the esp and see if I can make GNRE work properly before I move on to any other mods. Other than that, though, the game's much more stable.

[khumak]

I'm definitely happy that I finally made the change.  In addition to the lack of windows permissions issues I also had some stuff installed wrong before that I fixed in the new install and my game is completely stable now.  I haven't done TTW yet but after ironing out all of my instability issues with Skyrim I noticed a trend.  Every single one of my crashes in Skyrim was due to either mods with conflicting sound or skeleton files.  Most of the audio and weather mods in particular seem prone to CTDs without an extensive list of compatibility patches.

There's a crash fixes mod for Skyrim that usually gives you a popup window when you crash that tells you why you crashed (skeleton conflict, missing nif, etc) rather than something incredibly unhelpful (to me at least) like a hexidecimal memory address.  I haven't found one that's as easy to decipher for FNV.

I definitely plan on installing mods with lots of compatibility patches and/or sound/weather/skeleton changes last when I get to TTW.  I've never had a stable Fallout game.  If I can get it to be as stable as Skyrim I'll be in heaven.