Repconn test site weird actor behavior [solved but also plugin limit discussion]

[Swanky]

Ok so at first I thought this was me using too many mods. But after I cleaned out house, made a fresh save and waited 3 ingame days I'm still having this weird behavior. Basically, whenever I enter the Repconn Test Site, Haversam is contacting me over intercom (all good) and when he's finished, all ghouls and Willow are teleported to my location, resulting in a *massive* FPS crawl.

 

I did upgrade my OS to Win10, however, with all the unpleasentries associated with New Vegas running on that OS. With the upgraded NV Tick fix this game is sailing smoother than even on my Win7 configuration, however. Or was, until Repconn happened. Didn't even notice anything out of the ordinary, either, or nothing that was related to actors / scripts not doing what they're supposed to. Was a first time loading into the building as well.

 

So far I tried: reducing mods to well inside the 130 boundary explicitly with bashed mods counting as well, cleaning upgraded mods from my previous playthrough, setting companions to wait outside. Made clean saves with 3 days waiting ingame to reset cells. Entering through the side entrance - same outcome, just different location. Disabling YUP and / or my bashed patch. Removing various NVSE related plugins. NVSE logs aren't showing anything out of order either. Also happens on older save load.

 

It's not a ram issue. NV ran with less than 900mb ram usage at the point I terminated it. It is specifically tied to the actors teleporting and activating to my location on cell load. Not sure if it's just actors or anything. Noticed Willow being loaded correctly into the building and then transfered into me during the Haversam conversation so I assume everything else is, too.

 

This is the last configuration I tested it with. (Note that I am using lstewieAi tweaks for saving)

 

 

00  falloutnv.esm
01  DeadMoney.esm
02  HonestHearts.esm
03  OldWorldBlues.esm
04  LonesomeRoad.esm
05  TribalPack.esm
06  MercenaryPack.esm
07  ClassicPack.esm
08  CaravanPack.esm
09  GunRunnersArsenal.esm
0A  YUP - Base Game + All DLC.esm
0B  IntimacyOverhaul_v1.0.esm
0C  SpeedyResources.esm
0D  oHUD.esm
0E  NVInteriors_Core.esm
0F  NVInteriors_ComboEdition.esm
10  Interior Lighting Overhaul - Core.esm  [Version 6.9.0]
11  Interior Lighting Overhaul - L38PS.esm  [Version 1.1]
12  ELECTRO-CITY - CompletedWorkorders.esm
13  ELECTRO-CITY - Highways and Byways.esm
14  NVStripOpen.esm
15  Project Nevada - Core.esm
16  Project Nevada - Equipment.esm
17  Project Nevada - Extra Options.esm
18  Project Nevada - Cyberware.esp
19  Project Nevada - Rebalance.esp
1A  WMR.esm
1B  JokerineBigRescue.esm
1C  JokerineStripMall.esm
1D  Novac Public Library.esm
1E  Afterschool Special.esm  [Version 2.01]
1F  The New Bison Steve Hotel.esm  [Version 107]
20  SomeguySeries.esm
21  Th3OverseerCore.esm
22  D.E.I.M.O.S..esm  [Version 1.05]
23  TheDeterrent.esm
24  SaxxonsQuestPack.esm
25  SaltLakeStories.esm
26  NVWillow.esp
27  FCOMaster.esm
28  New Vegas Redesigned 3.esm
29  YUP - NPC Fixes (Base Game + All DLC).esp
2A  DarNifiedUINV.esp
2B  FOVSlider.esp
++  BlurKiller+DLC.esp
2C  Immersive Hit Reactions.esp
2D  The Mod Configuration Menu.esp  [Version 1.5]
2E  The Weapon Mod Menu.esp  [Version 1.2]
2F  Asterra's Many Fixes.esp
30  Unofficial Patch NVSE.esp
++  Unofficial Patch NVSE - Pyromaniac.esp
31  Unofficial Patch Plus.esp
32  Unofficial Patch Plus - Addendum.esp
33  Empty or Not Empty.esp
34  DJW_QuestItems_fix.esp
35  Ultimate Invisible Wall Remover.esp
36  Mojave Wildlife (FO3-Style).esp
37  TypeNMerged.esp
38  Book of Steel.esp
39  Project Nevada - Cyberware Additions.esp
3A  Project Nevada - Rebalance Complete.esp
3B  Project Nevada - All DLC.esp
++  Unofficial Patch Plus - Project Nevada Patch.esp
++  Unofficial Patch Plus - PN Cyberware Patch.esp
++  Unofficial Patch Plus - PN Rebalance Patch.esp
3C  YUP-PN-PNEO Patch.esp  [Version 1.0]
++  YUP - AutumnLeaves Patch.esp
++  NVWillow - Project Nevada Rebalance.esp
++  WeightlessRebalancePN.esp
3D  RadPackRadio.esp
3E  CONELRAD 640-1240.esp
3F  FreesideMerge.esp
40  FNVD_Ritas_Cafe.esp  [Version 1.11]
41  NVInteriors - FLVJOD Freeside Patch.esp
42  Cal-Nev-Ari.esp
43  TheCollector.esp
44  The Law Won.esp
45  More enemy at final battle.esp
46  Area 51 - Project Roswell.esp
47  AutumnLeaves.esp
48  NorthRoad.esp
49  KingOfTheRing.esp
4A  NewVegasBounties.esp
4B  NewVegasBountiesII.esp
4C  Russell.esp
4D  TheInheritance.esp
4E  Cut_Content_merge.esp
4F  StripOpenMain.esp
50  Freeside and The Strip Map Markers.esp
51  WCP.esp
52  FNVArmorRevamped.esp
53  ManualReload.esp
++  ManualReload-OldWorldBlues.esp
54  Delay DLC - DM + HH + OWB + LR + GRA.esp
++  FiendsWithoutEnergyWeapons.esp
55  Couriers Stash - Package Selection Menu.esp
56  Fallout 4 SPECIAL Perks.esp
57  Kobu's Free Wild Wasteland Trait.esp  [Version 1.2.]
58  NV_STTraitsandPerks - NVSE.esp
59  Color Me Evil.esp
5A  Buy or Steal.esp
5B  Hacking 4x Words (Firmly) NV.esp
5C  ArmourRepairKits.esp
5D  Cheaper Repair Vendors 25%.esp
5E  JIP Companions Command & Control.esp
5F  Windows of the Mojave v1.2.esp
60  OWB_L_Merge.esp
61  Dynamic Pipboy Light.esp
62  Interior Lighting Overhaul - Ultimate Edition.esp  [Version 6.9.0]
63  ILO_Merge.esp
64  nu_women_of_the_wasteland.esp
++  PM_IKIWFA.esp
++  NoPreGloves.esp
++  RussellTestPatch.esp
65  Bashed Patch, 0.esp
66  tmzLODadditions.esp
67  FNVLODGen.esp
68  FNV Realistic Wasteland Lighting - All DLC.esp  [Version v5.52]
69  FNV RWL All DLC - Brighter Nights.esp
6A  New Vegas Redesigned 3.esp
6B  NVR3merged.esp
6C  SaveCass.esp
 

 

[dongding]

Do you have FNVEdit?

 

Can you check if something is overwriting the REPCONEnterScript or REPCONEntranceIntercomScript?

 

If not, try disabling New Vegas Redesigned 3, and all the other big quests mods step by step. I feel like that one quest mod might be interfering with the Repcon quest.

[Swanky]

Good idea. Unfortunately, neither script is being touched by any of the mods I currently have in my LO. A few other Repconn scripts were touched by YUP, but that's about it. I also only moderately changed my LO from my previous playthrough when it was stable. All newly installed mods, I already deactivated for testing purposes.

Deselecting all mods does solve the issue. Urgh... going through all of them is going to be fun, even though I already checked a boat load of them...

 

€ I did find something curious. TheDeterrent.esm is causing the issue. However, the cleaning report is nil, nothing found. There are a couple of entries regarding various blocks, but they look the same as NewVegas.esm. Deleting those, the issue goes away. I'm curious whether this'll break anything in the mod itself... This is even more curious since I've played through the mod several times, and at least once through the whole game with the mod, without issue.

I'm going to check the rest of the mods and monitor this closely

[dongding]

Could be a dialogue script as well. But that's harder to find.

[Swanky]

After checking the rest of the mods, this one is the definitive culprit. There are a number of cell blocks used, deleting the repconn one makes the area playable again. I've deactivated the mod for now and informed the author. There's been an update after five years, so maybe he'll fix it. Thanks for the help, much appreciated.

[dongding]

Hmh, I checked the mod myself, and it just deletes one leveled ghoul spawn and a broken door.

 

Strange indeed.

[Swanky]

Yupp, and now all of a sudden I'm getting an issue where the game wouldn't load all files upon entering new zones. Results in flickering, red exclamation marks, textures not being loaded etc. Funny thing is, saving and reloading solves that issue, but I don't want to do it each time I load into a cell. Vegas and Win10 is a darned combination.

[dongding]

2 hours ago, Swanky said:

Yupp, and now all of a sudden I'm getting an issue where the game wouldn't load all files upon entering new zones. Results in flickering, red exclamation marks, textures not being loaded etc. Funny thing is, saving and reloading solves that issue, but I don't want to do it each time I load into a cell. Vegas and Win10 is a darned combination.

That's 100% a "too many plugins" issue though. So I'd assume that your other problem is linked to this issue as well.

[Swanky]

Just had a 3 hour playing session without issues, though. Gonna merge a few plugins, should be good then.

€ Brought down the plugin count to 135, with 4 plugins not activated (because New Vegas Bounties. Grmpf.). That is including all plugins merged into the bashed patch. I think those aren't being counted by the engine anyways, right? That would lower the count by another 13 plugins.

[A.J.]

When assets start not loading, there's too many records. An easy test is exactly what you did: you save in front of the issue, you reload and the issue is "solved". Problem is, you can easily see if a mesh or a texture are not loaded, it's not easy to understand when the issue is more subtle (like the one you describe in the OP). It's not about not reaching 135, because 135 is not a limit but more of a suggestion, afaik the only "magic number" when it comes to plugin limit is 165. If you're having troubles like these, my suggestion is removing 1-2 dozens of plugins.

[Swanky]

Not sure I follow regarding the explanation of records. Basically what I understand is not the amount of plugins but the amount of records within those plugins may cause issues? So when I use many complex things, stuff may break earlier?

[KoolHndLuke]

No, it's the number of plugins she means. I play TTW on Win10 and can only run about 125-126 active plugins at a time before I start seeing the issues you have. Some people have said the inactive plugins count as well, but idk. Trim your plugins # down a bit more and you should see that stuff stop. Like A.J. said, there is no "hard" limit since it varies from setup to setup for FNV. Some people can run a few more than others it seems.

 

You can have a helluva lot of records in any one esm./esp. and it won't matter. It's the actual plugin count that does.

[A.J.]

6 hours ago, KoolHndLuke said:

No, it's the number of plugins she means

I dug a lot in the past, to understand better, but I've never read something that really convinced me.

 

So I can only make assumptions based by personal experiences. I can for sure tell about your issue, and I can for sure tell that you are lucky if you have a visual consequence like missing textures or some weird UI etc. because it can have more subtle consequences. That's something I experienced in many cases. But the rest is more assumptions, I actually think all the factors are important (plugins, records they contain, assets that need to be loaded), I think it's why the limit is different for different group of people.

 

Years ago we made few tests here with other people, I loaded 254 plugis with one record and it worked, however after a certain limit there were downsides, that limit was (165 - number of mods with at least 1 bsa). Now, 5 are already the DLC, then add few more mods and it's easy to reach an average of 25-30, which means "around 130", to experience that something's off.

 

I always felt that BSAs per se didn't make much sense in considering a limit, but it would require someone technical to put this in words, I can only give my feeling. My feeling is that both loose files and bsa occupy some space to some limit, but while loose files do it progressively a bsa reserves a "chunk", hence why it always happens that the savegame is corrupted loading about 30 of them. And then there's number of records too, I can't think that a small mod has the same impact like a big mod on a total limit, just because there's an index and usually it allows 254 indexes.

 

Now if I think that most mods installed are often the same ones, coming from the same lists, guides and Top 100, I can understand why there are some common factors in troubles people usually experience (i.e. a dozen will tell you "I crash after 135", while another dozen will tell you "I crash after 140" etc.)

 

But as I said, it's my own assumptions. Anyway, sorry for excessive blabbering.

[dongding]

1 hour ago, A.J. said:

I dug a lot in the past, to understand better, but I've never read something that really convinced me.

 

So I can only make assumptions based by personal experiences. I can for sure tell about your issue, and I can for sure tell that you are lucky if you have a visual consequence like missing textures or some weird UI etc. because it can have more subtle consequences. That's something I experienced in many cases. But the rest is more assumptions, I actually think all the factors are important (plugins, records they contain, assets that need to be loaded), I think it's why the limit is different for different group of people.

 

Years ago we made few tests here with other people, I loaded 254 plugis with one record and it worked, however after a certain limit there were downsides, that limit was (165 - number of mods with at least 1 bsa). Now, 5 are already the DLC, then add few more mods and it's easy to reach an average of 25-30, which means "around 130", to experience that something's off.

 

I always felt that BSAs per se didn't make much sense in considering a limit, but it would require someone technical to put this in words, I can only give my feeling. My feeling is that both loose files and bsa occupy some space to some limit, but while loose files do it progressively a bsa reserves a "chunk", hence why it always happens that the savegame is corrupted loading about 30 of them. And then there's number of records too, I can't think that a small mod has the same impact like a big mod on a total limit, just because there's an index and usually it allows 254 indexes.

 

Now if I think that most mods installed are often the same ones, coming from the same lists, guides and Top 100, I can understand why there are some common factors in troubles people usually experience (i.e. a dozen will tell you "I crash after 135", while another dozen will tell you "I crash after 140" etc.)

 

But as I said, it's my own assumptions. Anyway, sorry for excessive blabbering.

So by your assumption, extracing all the files from a .bsa and then delete the .bsa would lower the chances of reaching the limit, because the game loads less .bsa's (reserves less chunks)?

[Swanky]

That might actually make sense. The more resources the engine has to handle, the bigger the strain. Add to that the myriad of different hardware constellations and things will go haywire in between a number of plugins. Also, there are reports that optimized .bsa and loose files have a better performance since not all files inside the .bsa files are loaded as well. Have made the same observation with XCOM 2 modding as well.

So far I've cut down to 124 plugins (with bashed and inactive plugins) through merging and sorting out, yet I'm still experiencing issues with assets not loading correctly - vanilla assets, textures on ghouls. Still using Repconn as testing ground, mostly happening after running through all 3 floors. Cutting down further I would have to disable the more complex mods, quest mods and such. Tough choice, and I dread the day that FNV Frontier is getting out. x.x

[dongding]

9 minutes ago, Swanky said:

That might actually make sense. The more resources the engine has to handle, the bigger the strain. Add to that the myriad of different hardware constellations and things will go haywire in between a number of plugins. Also, there are reports that optimized .bsa and loose files have a better performance since not all files inside the .bsa files are loaded as well. Have made the same observation with XCOM 2 modding as well.

So far I've cut down to 124 plugins (with bashed and inactive plugins) through merging and sorting out, yet I'm still experiencing issues with assets not loading correctly - vanilla assets, textures on ghouls. Still using Repconn as testing ground, mostly happening after running through all 3 floors. Cutting down further I would have to disable the more complex mods, quest mods and such. Tough choice, and I dread the day that FNV Frontier is getting out. x.x

So, how many mod .bsas do you actually have? I bet you have at least five or six.

 

You could try extracting all the files from the mod .bsas and delete them afterwards, just to see if there is a difference. It's not like that it will break anything.

[KoolHndLuke]

4 hours ago, A.J. said:

a bsa reserves a "chunk", hence why it always happens that the savegame is corrupted loading about 30 of them

Huh? I have almost 60 in my game and it runs just fine. TTW jammed with about another 5-6 large quest mods in there along with other mods with scripts and many new records/assets. My FNV folder is almost 45 GB.

[dongding]

12 minutes ago, KoolHndLuke said:

Huh? I have almost 60 in my game and it runs just fine. TTW jammed with about another 5-6 large quest mods in there along with other mods with scripts and many records. My FNV folder is almost 45 GB.

How big is your load order?

 

And are you playing the Fallout 3 or NV part of TTW? Funny thing is, that I was also running a big TTW install with 130 mods last year, and I had absolutely no problems in DC. NV however started acting up pretty badly around Nipton with all sorts of Texture, mesh missing and LOD errors. Turns out that I couldn't run 130 mods at the same time, so I had to reduce the load order to 115, and I had no problems afterwards.

 

Now that I think of it, it's kinda funny how my stable load order, including all the .bsa's in the data folder, have reached exactly the magic number AJ was talking about:

 

165 files, 52 bsa's + 113 esps / ems.s

 

COINCIDENCE?

[KoolHndLuke]

19 minutes ago, dongding said:

How big is your load order?

 

And are you playing the Fallout 3 or NV part of TTW? Funny thing is, that I was also running a big TTW install with 130 mods last year, and I had absolutely no problems in DC. NV however started acting up pretty badly around Nipton with all sorts of Texture, mesh missing and LOD errors. Turns out that I couldn't run 130 mods at the same time, so I had to reduce the load order to 115, and I had no problems afterwards.

I switch back and forth all the time. I've actually thought about making a player home in the train station. I push this thing hard. I reduced to 125 active with 6 inactive and have played around 300 hrs like that this time around + making new mod records much of the time. ONE thing I learned you can't do in TTW is use the coc command and save. It may seem to work for awhile, but it doesn't.

[A.J.]

1 hour ago, KoolHndLuke said:

Huh? I have almost 60 in my game and it runs just fine. TTW jammed with about another 5-6 large quest mods in there along with other mods with scripts and many new records/assets. My FNV folder is almost 45 GB.

you don't have to check how many bsa you have, but how many mods are using at least a BSA. I.e. if a mod has NAME - MESHES and NAME - SOUNDS, it counts as 1. Then subtract that value from 165 and it should tell you the max quantity of mods before having a downside.

 

This is what I personally tested years ago, around 2015, and I can also tell that there was a different downside with and without a certain dll installed (EDIT - to be clear, a different downside, not a solution from the downsides. I just want to prove that some things were already related each other, those days). Which means that maybe today something has changed, if someone has dug deeper and released some fix for this.

[A.J.]

4 hours ago, dongding said:

So by your assumption, extracing all the files from a .bsa and then delete the .bsa would lower the chances of reaching the limit, because the game loads less .bsa's (reserves less chunks)?

Let's say it's just the reason why me, I never package any of my mods in a BSA. But I never said that in public.

[KoolHndLuke]

14 minutes ago, A.J. said:

you don't have to check how many bsa you have, but how many mods are using at least a BSA. I.e. if a mod has NAME - MESHES and NAME - SOUNDS, it counts as 1. Then subtract that value from 165 and it should tell you the max quantity of mods before having a downside.

 

This is what I personally tested years ago, around 2015, and I can also tell that there was a different downside with and without a certain dll installed. Which means that maybe today something has changed, if someone has dug deeper and released some fix for this.

Then merging mods wouldn't help anyone that's having those troubles related to overloading the game. Evidence says otherwise...... or am I missing something here?

 

[A.J.]

8 minutes ago, KoolHndLuke said:

Then merging mods wouldn't help anyone that's having those troubles related to overloading the game. Evidence says otherwise. Or am I missing something here?

 

Actually it's the contrary:

 

ModA contains

MODA - MESHES.BSA

 

ModB contains

MODB - MESHES.BSA

MODB - SOUNDS.BSA

 

Total: 2 mods which contain at least 1 bsa. Hard limit: 165-2

 

If you merge them, you'll have ModC which contains

MODC - SOUNDSofModB.BSA

MODC - MESHESofModA+ModB.BSA

 

Total 1 mod. Hard limit 165-1

--------------------------

But, as I said, that limit is the ONLY real one I found which had a clear and repetible in-game evidence, an empyric test, this doesn't mean that the game probably will start coughing due to other factors like the number of records and the total quantity of assets loaded, reason why different people have different experiences.

[Swanky]

Hm. I have 13 mods that have a total of 15 .bsa files in that regard. So with 124 mods (15 mod bsa files by 39 bsa files total, 24 bsa files are used by base FNV) total that shouldn't be an issue, especially if the base bsa files are counted as one where each file is regarded for the corresponding .esm file. 124 mods and 24 plugins total using bsa files -> 124+24 = 148. € I counted Archive Invalidation and update.bsa as separate bsa files for this.

[Swanky]

So... Update. I've deactivated even more mods. I'm at a 115 plugins with 23 bsa files, and only now that I've also deactivated some of the more complex mods (Deterrent, Iguazu Shopping Mall, Khan Initiation AND Eliza as well as Intimacy Overhaul) I'm getting better results. This is kinda disappointing.

 

The issue returns when activating more complex mods now, as Eliza and Khan Initiation will trigger the issue again, as will Intimacy Overhaul. The rig can take it, the engine obviously not. Darn.