Black Screen and Game Freeze on Cell Change

[Anunya]

Coming back after a bit of a break and redoing my load order. Updating some of my favourite mods, adding some new stuff. You know the drill.

 

Usually the game runs fine for a bit, until at some point I go from one cell to another. The game fades to black (as usual), the sounds of the new location start up, but instead of gameplay fading in the game just stays on the black screen with the audio looping infinitely.

 

I haven't been able to isolate the mod (or combination of mods) that triggers it and I don't see anything particularly suspicious in the papyrus logs (though I don't know much anything about papyrus so that probably doesn't mean much).

 

Does anyone...

 

1. What the underlying cause is?
2. Good ways to troubleshoot this?
3. What type of mods are most likely to contribute to the problem?

[117xxx]

I see you use wartimes and i have same question.When i go back to father's home,here are 15%~30% I will meet the bug you said.When I restart the game,it may become normal,if not,I will try again until it become normal

[anjenthedog]

idk, from my experience, I'd give a good look at anything that fiddles with FNIS or related "mechanisms".

 

I used to run into this back in 1.5.80 and even into 1.5.97. I think I had to address it two or three times.

 

While debugging, I figured out how to override the fade, and in each case I discovered that all npcs and the player were t-posed and all game animations were frozen

 

I think the first was due to an LE mod I had installed, the second and third were something else I don't remember but both resulted in bad FNIS processing (I do that bit in the background so a fatal flaw isn't directly apparent when it happens)

 

Quote

Coming back after a bit of a break and redoing my load order.

This too >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

 

Fiddling with the load order in a well established game is bad mojo imo/ime.

 

Edited May 13, 2023 by anjenthedog
wording

[traison]

On 5/8/2023 at 7:57 PM, Anunya said:

Does anyone...

 

1. What the underlying cause is?
2. Good ways to troubleshoot this?
3. What type of mods are most likely to contribute to the problem?

 

1. Code stuck in an endless loop. (Edit: or a thread deadlock.)
2. A debugger with bypassers for the various anti-tamper methods used in SkyrimSE.exe.
3. Any. But personally I'd start by assuming its caused by a mod that has a dll.

Simplify your setup, you don't need floppy dongs, fancy hair or a visible body in 1st person while debugging a problem like this. Any dll you can remove with ease should be the first to go regardless of how irrelevant it seems to be - cbpc, smp, enb, camera mods, combat animation mods, dar, .... Do not attempt to maintain a playable game while doing this. It is irrelevant if your screen turned purple after removing a mod as long as you can continue working on the freezing issue. Keep backups so that once you find the source of the freezing, you can make notes of the changes you've made, restore, and tackle the problem directly. Remember that mods containing scripts get baked into the save. Ideally you should find a way to freeze the game reliably (on demand) starting from a new game.

Edited May 13, 2023 by traison

[Anunya]

Thank you all 

 

In the end I just relied on the old-fashioned "go back to last stable configuration and add the new mods one by one" to identify the likely culprit. It's just I'd added a lot (in a fit of ambition) in one go so it got a bit tedious... I guess that'll learn me  

 

Seems like it was the SE version of Failure Mode and Effects Analysis that was the culprit in my load order. Which is too bad, because it's a pretty fun mod. Maybe it has an adverse interaction with something else, because in the past it's worked for me. But removing it this time around seemed to do the trick.

Edited May 14, 2023 by Anunya