Can having too many follower mods make the game crash?

[Brokedown]

I got a long list of mods now, about 170 active.

The final 23 of them are all followers, all standalone.

I have more follower mods that are higher priority in the load order, but for some reason if I make skyrim generate( go in to the cell where they are supposed to be) any of the last 23 of them; I get a CTD to desktop if they are outside or infinite loading if they are inside. This issue is solved by disabling the said "lower priority" 23 followers. Is there a way to solve this? Or am I simply overexerting Skyrim's memory?

[Guest]

IF they use HDT, whether it's hair or body, it's going to slow down your performance the more followers you have. And even CTD.

[27X]

43 minutes ago, endgame † addiction said:

IF they use HDT, whether it's hair or body, it's going to slow down your performance the more followers you have. And even CTD.

 

Nope. There are fixes for this.

[Andy14]

Let me put it in numbers:

276 additional textures.
If only the normal map and the diffuse map are 2k, then more than 1.4 GB of VRAM.

With 4k textures there is 2.9 GB of VRAM.
But only if the textures are compressed. 11.8 GB for uncompressed normal and diffuse in 4k.

In addition, 138 meshes for body, hands and feet.

I don't even want to talk about (the presumably) additional hair.

This is the disadvantage of "so-called" standalone followers.
With "Not Standalone", no additional (unnecessary) textures or meshes are required.

 

 

You can use the numbers to answer your question yourself

 

[Guest]

20 minutes ago, 27X said:

 

Nope. There are fixes for this.

 

Would that be Crash Fixes?

[Grey Cloud]

2 hours ago, endgame † addiction said:

 

Would that be Crash Fixes?

Crash fixes
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/72725/

SKSE Plugin Preloader
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/75795/?

ENBoost (If you are using an ENB preset then you should already have this but it can be used without a preset).
https://wiki.step-project.com/ENBoost

Bethini (This will set your Skyrim.ini and SkyrimPrefs.ini files)
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/69787

Load Game CTD Fix (Stops Infinite Loading Screen (ILS)
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/85443/

 

 

All using various different 2K skin textures. Either 70 or 72 of them, I can't remember. I stopped there as the game was getting laggy - still playable but the writing was on the wall at that point.

Obviously, if your game is not stable in the first place then you aren't going to get far with several dozen followers . . .

 

 . . . whether human or not.

[Grey Cloud]

4 hours ago, Brokedown said:

I got a long list of mods now, about 170 active.

The final 23 of them are all followers, all standalone.

I have more follower mods that are higher priority in the load order,

None of that is really relevant. I've currently got 230 plug-ins, 450 mods and 100 followers on a test game. LOOT sorts things and that's that.

 

Some of these have already been mentioned above but common problems with followers are:

4K or above textures - body, armour, weapons.

Dodgy custom meshes - body, armour, weapons.

Dodgy skeletons.

 

 

[Andy14]

Just now, Grey Cloud said:

None of that is really relevant. I've currently got 230 plug-ins, 450 mods and 100 followers on a test game. LOOT sorts things and that's that.

 

Some of these have already been mentioned above but common problems with followers are:

4K or above textures - body, armour, weapons.

Dodgy custom meshes - body, armour, weapons.

Dodgy skeletons.

 

 

 

all standalone -> this is relevant

[Arizona_Steve]

23 followers? Pretty much nothing. I've run over 500 follower mods (all converted to .esl) without problems for many hours. Although I did finally start running into issues after playing the same game for over a year, so am down to around 300 at this point.

[woodsman30]

9 hours ago, Grey Cloud said:

Some of these have already been mentioned above but common problems with followers are:

4K or above textures - body, armour, weapons.

Dodgy custom meshes - body, armour, weapons.

Dodgy skeletons.

 

This is the real issue with followers as @Grey Cloud said bad texture or crazy meshes will all cause issues. However, 23 is no worries as long they are within the limits of what your rig can handle and done well.

[27X]

8 hours ago, Arizona_Steve said:

all converted to .esl

 

no comment.

[Arizona_Steve]

1 minute ago, 27X said:

 

no comment.

 

Is this a bad thing?

[27X]

You're comparing 64 bit adressability to 32 bit addressability.

[Arizona_Steve]

I guess I should've said .esp files with the esl flag set in the header (and corresponding compression of form IDs into the 0x800-0xFFF range). Works for anything that doesn't have custom sound files (although I may write some Java code to get around that too at some point). Just need to make sure FaceGen files are adjusted correspondingly.

[Andy14]

It really doesn't matter how many follower mods someone has installed. This is not a competition.
The only thing that matters is whether there are standalone followers and how much of them I want to render at the same time.
And with 23 followers - all standalone - the addressability of 32bit is exceeded if all 23 followers are to be rendered at the same time. The bottleneck is not the NIF for these 0815 bodies (CBBE, UNP etc.), but the textures.
Meshes have a limit of 64k triangles - and even with that there is hardly any loss of performance to be measured. By the way, my body-nif is 32 Mb.
And with this mesh all female NPCs from all over Skyrim work.
Because the Nif is only loaded once (my body is not part of the armor / clothes) - I dress my body and do not exchange it with clothes + body.
All textures are uncompressed as I am still working with them.

 

So again as a summary for the questioner:

The number of followers is irrelevant if there are no standalone followers and no more followers should be rendered than memory is addressable.
How many follower mods you have installed or activated is completely irrelevant - maybe to show off, nothing more.
In your case, 23 standalone followers - is simply out of memory.

 

Can you fix the problem, yes you can.
If you want to know how - ask your question.

[Scrab]

3 hours ago, Andy14 said:

how much of them I want to render at the same time.

 

Thats actually the only important thing

 

At the end of the day, a Follower is just an additional NPC added to the game. It doesnt matter if they require 42 other fancy mods or not, as long as youre not in the cell with them, theyre impact on performance cost is somewhere between 0 and none

The proper Question to ask here would be "How many NPCs can my game handle to render at once" and that heavily depends on your setup and how exactly those NPCs look like (resolution of the texture, physics, etc)