Occasional screen freeze

[Jotasran]

So my CTD's have been taken care of.. at least for the past two days.  I'd say I"m complete stable except for freeze every so often (maybe every 2 to 4 hours of play).  No crash log is generated.  The last of my CTDs went away when I updated the .dll for faster hdt to the one on their discord server.  In any case, how to I go about dealing with freezes?

[traison]

Attaching a debugger is the only way I know of. Knowledge of the assembly language, compilers, debuggers and x64 registers and conventions is required.

 

Only automated way that I haven't had much luck with in the past is giving windbg a memory dump from a frozen app and having it analyze it. If I'm not mistaken it's only looking for thread deadlocks and the like. Something you'd probably be more likely to run into during development, rather than in production software.

[Jotasran]

Ug.  Ok.  Way beyond my skill set but thanks for the answer.

[traison]

It might be easier to poke and prod at this instead of going at it with a debugger. If you can reduce that 2-4 hours to 5 minutes or even on-demand you're half way to the solution already. Try outdoors, try indoors, try near Riften, try outside Markarth. Try with lots of npcs and no npcs. With water, with no water. Physics and without.

 

Edit: Also don't take that too literally, I don't mean stand in a waterless cell for 4 hours and hope it doesn't freeze. I mean, if your freezes so far are happening in cities, go on a dungeon rampage. Spend the next 4 hours jumping from cave to cave. Or if the issue seems to happen during normal gameplay and you're always in combat, spend the next 4 hours enchanting swords, drinking beer and harassing Mikael in the Bannered Mare. Switch it up.

 

Also, make sure it doesn't just appear frozen: Does the sound continue playing? Is the grass moving? Is there a hidden error dialog under the game window? Move your mouse around (even if it may be invisible) and try to get it to move over the center of the screen, does the cursor appear suddenly then disappear again as it does so? What about alt-tabbing?

 

You can also look at it with other diagnostics tools such as Process Explorer from Sysinternals (Microsoft), focus on Skyrim's threads in this case. Is one thread using up all the time of a cpu core (usage is 100% divided by your logical cpu count, ie. for 8 cores maximum thread cpu usage is 12.5%)? Are context switches happening? If any thread is looking suspicious, what's its start address?

Edited March 19, 2023 by traison

[anjenthedog]

If this is a general lag, install Elephant's Script Latency Tester. Monitor your lag in game for a bit. It should idle in the 80ms area. If it's lower, yay...if it's much higher, start looking for script bottlenecking. (Make sure not to set all your MCM loop times to the lowest value for instance)

 

If this is one of those every 30-60 interval, 3-5 second game freezes, I'm not sure what the true reason is, but personally I find the only way to solve them when they happen, is to reload from a save prior to the first even suspected occurrence. I've never solved one by screwing with my mod list or plugins. Once broke it's broke.

 

if this is intermittent game lockup freezes (ie, kill game through task manager), idk... roll with the punches? make sure to make periodic saves, try to balance interior and exterior play (I suspect that some indoor locations favor game housekeeping or something.  a nice long dungeon crawl often shakes out lag and other glitchy issues for me)

[Jotasran]

It doesn't have a pattern that I can see, other than perhaps being outside.  I don't get enough to really have a good bead on that.  The last one happened just after combat with a bear.  The previous one happened just running with no combat.  I'll check out that latency tester, though.  Thanks.

[traison]

Next time it happens, have Process Explorer ready to go and don't close the game, let it stay frozen. Look at its threads like I mentioned in my previous post.

[Jotasran]

OK, thanks.  I'll set up Process Explorer as well.

[Jotasran]

On 3/19/2023 at 2:39 PM, anjenthedog said:

Monitor your lag in game for a bit. It should idle in the 80ms area. If it's lower, yay...if it's much higher, start looking for script bottlenecking. (Make sure not to set all your MCM loop times to the lowest value for instance)

 

 

It's idling around 80ms.  One time it spike to 560ms in combat on the high end, but still had "expected" at around 80 or so.

[anjenthedog]

Ok, so Elephant's script lag tool says you're ok on general lag. Good. Now for the other two. (they're independent possibilities)

[Jotasran]

1 hour ago, anjenthedog said:

Ok, so Elephant's script lag tool says you're ok on general lag. Good. Now for the other two. (they're independent possibilities)

I don't think it's a corrupted save.  I definitely don't add or remove mods during a play-through any more.  I can go quite a bit of time without locking up.  I can deal with it by saving before going through doors, saving periodically in the wilderness, etc.  Not a huge deal... but I 'd like to fix it, obviously.  Next lock up I'll run that program that Traison mentioned and see what shakes loose.

[Jotasran]

I wanted to come back to this thread and provide what seems to have fixed this issue.  It seems (unless time makes a liar of me) that the issue was solved by turning of VSync in ENB, GPU, and the game's .ini... leaving a 60 FPS game cap on the GPU.  Very occasionally, I see a slightly goofy visual effect like long eye glow in drauger or weird spell effects, but well worth it.

[cloudin16]

On 5/26/2023 at 8:30 PM, Jotasran said:

I wanted to come back to this thread and provide what seems to have fixed this issue.  It seems (unless time makes a liar of me) that the issue was solved by turning of VSync in ENB, GPU, and the game's .ini... leaving a 60 FPS game cap on the GPU.  Very occasionally, I see a slightly goofy visual effect like long eye glow in drauger or weird spell effects, but well worth it.

Большое спасибо, помогло, недавно столкнулся с этой же проблемой и после сотни часов в наконец приобретенной в стиме игрой с модами, когда сделал три четверти ачивок откатывать игру и начинать все заново еще то удовольствие, перепробовал все возможное, изменял порядок модов, отключал недавно установленные, откатывался на более старое сохранение, ничего не помогало, а потом вспомнил что недавно обновлял ENB и открыв ини файл, а там вертикальная синхронизация отключена, включил ее и фризы прекратились, надо закрепить это решение со включением вертикальной синхронизации в ини файле для всех кто сталкивается в игре с рандомными фризами с замиранием картинки и продолжающимися звуками из-за чего приходится перезапускать игру, и вот сейчас когда столкнулся с этим багои вспомнил что и раньше такое бывало на других сборках и так и не находил как вылечить это

 

Thank you very much, it helped, I recently encountered the same problem and after hundreds of hours in a game with mods that I finally bought on Steam, when I had done three quarters of the achievements, it was still a pleasure to roll back the game and start all over again, I tried everything possible, changed the order of mods, disabled recently installed ones, rolled back to an older save, nothing helped, and then I remembered that I had recently updated ENB and opened the ini file, and vertical sync was disabled there, I turned it on and the freezes stopped, I need to pin this solution with turning on vertical sync in the ini file for everyone who encounters random freezes in the game with freezing images and continuing sounds, because of which you have to restart the game, and now when I encountered this bug I remembered that this happened before on other builds and I never found how to cure it