Certain Sexlab animations take a very long time to start or don't at all

[mastga]

I've been struggling with this issue recently and have been trying to fix it myself to no avail. I've noticed that Sexlab usually works well for me, setting up and animation and starting it generally only takes about 10 seconds or so. However, some animations will take forever to start, and the actors will just stand on top of each other for multiple minutes without moving, sometimes while making Sexlab noises, or for group animations, some actors will not join the animation at all. One of these I noticed with was Billyy's Skeever CCF animations. This always occurs with that animation, even though I have other animations from that exact pack that will run perfectly fine. Another thing to note is that I recently started a new playthrough, and have also switched from FNIS to Pandora. Could this be causing that issue? That'd be my first thought, but in that case I don't understand why certain animations work well and others are delayed

Edited June 25, 2024 by mastga

[Seijin8]

1 hour ago, mastga said:

I've been struggling with this issue recently and have been trying to fix it myself to no avail. I've noticed that Sexlab usually works well for me, setting up and animation and starting it generally only takes about 10 seconds or so. However, some animations will take forever to start, and the actors will just stand on top of each other for multiple minutes without moving, sometimes while making Sexlab noises, or for group animations, some actors will not join the animation at all. One of these I noticed with was Billyy's Skeever CCF animations. This always occurs with that animation, even though I have other animations from that exact pack that will run perfectly fine. Another thing to note is that I recently started a new playthrough, and have also switched from FNIS to Pandora. Could this be causing that issue? That'd be my first thought, but in that case I don't understand why certain animations work well and others are delayed

 

Lots of things can cause this.  What are you using to start the animations?  Are you in a small indoor space, dungeon, or outdoors with a lot of things going on?  What other mods are you using that would try to filter or adjust animation lists when Sexlab starts up?  Is Sexlab set up to clear high heel adjustments?

[KoolHndLuke]

4 hours ago, mastga said:

Another thing to note is that I recently started a new playthrough, and have also switched from FNIS to Pandora. Could this be causing that issue?

It could be, yes. I've read from other posts that people have experienced glitches in animations made for FNIS while using either Pandora or Nemesis. Will mention that even while using FNIS, some animations will "hang" and not play. Sometimes I can fix this by just pulling up the console and closing it again right after the animation is selected and Sexlab is setting up the scene. 

[traison]

5 hours ago, mastga said:

Sexlab usually works well for me, setting up and animation and starting it generally only takes about 10 seconds

 

This is normal in Skyrim SE. In Skyrim LE, Papyrus was ~400 times faster than it is in SE.

 

5 hours ago, mastga said:

However, some animations will take forever to start, and the actors will just stand on top of each other for multiple minutes without moving, sometimes while making Sexlab noises, or for group animations, some actors will not join the animation at all. One of these I noticed with was Billyy's Skeever CCF animations.

 

There's sort of a bug in the Skyrim SE version of SL where the first stage of creature animations sometimes does not work. Advancing to the next stage fixes it. I believe its a race condition, because whether it happens or not is very much bound to your Papyrus performance and the various delays in SL's script.

 

So what can you do about this?

• Measure your Papyrus performance. Get rid of bloated scripts/mods or adjust their settings to lessen their load. This probably won't get you below 10 second scene startup times, nor is it likely to fix the stage 1 issue.
• Get Papyrus Tweaks. Disable fixes you don't need. Increase the iMaxOpsPerFrame value to somewhere in the range of 400 to 1,000. This should half the animation startup time and reduce the risk of a stuck stage 1. A bonus side-effect is that everything Papyrus related is now going to be 4 to 10 times faster than it used to be: MCM, quests, scripted spells, etc. I have mine currently set to 10,000, for no particular reason. The caveat here is that, sure, you can keep increasing this number to make room for badly made or script-heavy mods but eventually it will cost you - this value should not be increased to make room for inefficient practices. If your game is running fine and you know what increasing this value means, then this is one "high payoff for little effort" way to just make it run even better.
• Get SL Tools, and use it to re-select stage 1. This gets the animation going again. I recall this is a problematic mod to find, so if you can't find it here on LL I can upload the version I have archived. It may use one of the following names: "Patched SE SL TOOLS Updated" and/or "Sexlab tools for SE (Patched)".
• Edit: The newest version of SL has altered the delays related to the stage 1 issue and its possible its for the better. If you're not already running the latest version, consider updating or (like me) transfer the changes over yourself. The function you'd be looking for is sslActorAlias.SendDefaultAnimEvent (and there may be others involved as well). There is also something called SexLab Utility Plus that seems to make even more radical changes to the delays, but it most likely also changes a whole bunch of other things.

Edited June 25, 2024 by traison

[mastga]

Thank you all for the pointers, I did eventually find the answer, but it was not at all what I expected. Apparently the animations just didn't work on very specific creatures added by Snoipeh's creature overhaul. For me, a skeever in the ragged flagon didn't respond to any sexlab inputs, however, once I used skeevers spawned by Hentai Creatures, the animations worked just fine. What's odd is that most creatures from CO worked too, so something about that one skeever was off, as well as the few other bugged creatures I encountered. I can't imagine it has anything to do with the CO mod itself considering it just places creatures in locations, so I'll just chalk it up to skyrim being weird and disable those specific creatures.

 

The tip about Papyrus tweaks is interesting though. I have mine set to 1000, is 10,000 better for you? I was hesitant to increase it above 1k but wasn't sure if there was a tradeoff to be considered.

[traison]

4 minutes ago, mastga said:

I have mine set to 1000, is 10,000 better for you?

 

For me, yes in a very minor way.

 

The ops limit is basically how many instructions the papyrus engine is allowed to perform on each frame. Its essentially a budget question - how much spare time do you have between frames. If you're already under your ideal fps, you can assume this number is 0ms. If you got idle time and your CPU can crank out 10,000 papyrus instructions while waiting for the next frame then fine, do that.

 

So why did I set mine to the arbitrary number of 10k? No particular reason. I'm way past the point where I get any benefit from it, but I do like the fact that the MCM menus respond instantly now, and SL scenes usually start immediately. Does this affect my fps? Possibly, however as long as I don't have scripts that use up that ops limit every frame, at worst I'm going to see 2-3 delayed frames when some intensive script operation is happening. Since I use mostly self-made scripts, I'm reasonably aware of what's going on in my game in terms of this.