Is it just me or are Fallout 3/TTW DLCs kinda broken? (The Pitt, Mothership Zeta)

[FiftyTifty]

Did you create a new save when you added/disabled any mods?

[Postal-Dude]

Yup, I did.

Anyway, just finishing up my FO3/TTW DC playthrough. The other DLCs didn't have any issues, aswell as the game itself.

To sum the problems up:
Mothership Zeta: Got several crashes in many cells, especially Steamworks.
The Pitt: Often got incorrect loaded cells in the main town and between the forge. Doesn't always happen and reloading the save (after going to the main menu) fixes it. The problems here are textures going crazy like suddenly I have random armor or object textures on the ground and also some meshes not loading in and showing this red exclamation mark.

I still dont know what caused it but guess I just leave it at that. Maybe someone will figure it out one day. I dont think these issues are new, at least not the Zeta one since I remember already back in TTW2 times people complained about it, especially Steamworks. I think I even got the Pitt issue back then but thats 5 years ago and I cannot remember that well. But who knows, maybe its just a weird conflict nobody can figure out.

Next I am playing FNV without TTW. I will see if I get such issues there too but I doubt it. Maybe my TTW files are corrupt but I dont know. Would be cool if the Installer had a checksum verification after creating the files. I have used the GOG games of FO3 and FNV for creation of the TTW files. I dont know if it matters but Steam and GOG should be the same, no? Beside of that I also use that uncompressed BSA mod by Roy but I hardly doubt this would introduce such issues. It is rather odd that only Zeta and Pitt is affected anyway. The main game and other DLCs run absolutely perfect.

[RoyBatty]

The random textures, failed cell loads and red diamonds (failed mesh loads) is a clear symptom of too many plugins or memory exhaustion issues.

[senegalparrot]

There is no need to use graphics and textures mods.
I think 3.3, Roy's fixed Someguy mods and FPGE will float my boat perfectly.

[Postal-Dude]

I was tinkering around with the problem quite a lot. I am pretty sure its not caused by texture packs, not directly anyway. The weird thing is, I usually seem to either fix it or drastically reduce The Pitt problem when I either change the load order or disable mods that change/add the Mod Configuration Menu in any way or even HUD elements. Yeah I know this sounds weird as hell and doesnt directly have anything to do with textures, what I thought would be the culprit. I dunno if those mods are the reason in the end since I was never really sure if I fixed it completely. I mostly played around with Hud Editor, Justmods and other Mod Configuration Menu mods and at some point I fixed it almost completely by disabling some and changing the load order.

Still, I wasnt able to really pinpoint the real cause. Maybe its just several mods being incompatible or causing havok on the engine. I even had the feeling that the mishing mesh and textures going crazy problem were 2 different ones caused by different things but I cannot seem to verify anything really. I guess those are just the oddities of modding. But maybe Roy is right and it is caused by too many textures or plugins but as I said, I even get this without ANY texture packs activated and the plugin list is below 60 which I hardly doubt is too much. Also keep in mind, I didnt test anything with Zeta at all, first because I cannot enter the cells anymore and second because waiting for random crashes triggering is... unnerving...

If I should discover anything more precise, I will report here. I still have the modbuild and saves for testing purposes but I already spent like 6 hours on this and couldnt completely pinpoint it but it seems I could heavily reduce it and it still seems to be several HUD, Mod Configuration mods causing this, for whatever reason. Also only a very few of all game cells seem to trigger this so far. Maybe Zeta is a whole different problem all together but so far I only got this missing mesh and texture bug in some The Pitt cells and for some reason in the Repconn Launch Facility Basement but reloading fixes it so I dont care too much, would be interesting to know what causes this though.

[jlf65]

If you see texture and mesh issues that go away on a reload, that's like 99.9% memory related. What system do you have? CPU, video, ram, yada yada yada.

You might also try rerunning the 4G patcher by hand - maybe it didn't take for some reason, so it's not using 4G. When you run with 2G, it's super easy to run out of ram, even with vanilla TTW. 2G will barely run NV + DLC, forget about + FO3.

[RoyBatty]

Zeta is broken because of Ragdolls, I've informed MadAce of this and he is fixing it, the Alien skeleton for NV and F3 is not the same.

[senegalparrot]

If some skeletons in zeta are broken,
isn't something 'broken' in point lookout? I am just curious.

[RoyBatty]

It's a mod causing that, not TTW.

[Postal-Dude]

That is cool to hear. At least one problem less, that was definitely a lot more annoying than those few little mesh and texture bugs I had. I finished around half of New Vegas and didnt get it anywhere except in the Repconn Basement. Odd as hell.

I didnt have a single crash in Point Lookout so I guess only Zeta is affected by that Ragdoll crash bug.

I dont know why RAM or Hardware specs would help in this case, since I hardly doubt this is the culprit but oh well here you go:
CPU: i7 9700K
GPU: RTX 2070 Super
RAM: 16GB DDR4 3200mhz
Disk: M2 SSD 1TB

I dont think it has anything to do with the 4GB patch. I also use ENBBoost. Because not even the 4GB patch is able to run my game with all textures loaded since it instantly runs out of its 4GB ram, 32Bit application after all so I have to use ENBBoost as workaroud, the game also runs way smoother with it. Cool stuff. And yes, I already tried to investigate this without ENBBoost but its the same so ENB isnt the cause of this.

I will try to keep investigating the issue a bit more if I have time and will. Thought about checking these cells out in GECK. There must be a reason or trigger in the cells themselves. Not that I think I will ever find it out.