Player "Meat Face" bug - solved

[Bluegunk]

I've a weird little thing going on in my game that I've never seen before in years of modding.

I load a save, my character's face goes weird - into a "Meat Face",  and scripts break out in masses of suspended stacks. So many, it's impossible to locate the one that triggered the cascade.

 

I'm not looking for a forensic answer. I've used my mod list for years, and it's not done this before, and I'm really familiar with the mods I use.

 

I've gone through my load order enough times, but nothing jumps to mind.

 

If anyone has seen this before and knows what's causing it, please do let me know.

 

Game = Steam v1170. On PC, away from the C drive.  Using CBBE 3BA. Bits and Pieces Skin, XPMSSE. No warpaints at all on the character - the face is plain and clean.

 

Two pics - what she looks like normally, and the Meat Face

 

 

Edited March 23 by Bluegunk

[traison]

That is a RaceMenu thing. All lipstick and eyeshadow tints load up as regular Skyrim warpaints before getting replaced by the actual tint textures a while later. If your system is overall slow enough you'll get to see it happen like in the picture above. If I'm not mistaken, that sometimes happens for a frame or 2 when I load a character preset in RM. Been a while since I saw it though. It's possible what you're seeing is not exactly the same as a preset load; perhaps yours passes through Papyrus at some point, which would explain the stack dumping.

 

I would be suspicious of the following:

1. Papyrus engine latency being tied to this problem. Maybe latency is caused by RM.
2. Huge textures and/or lots of overlay slots.

[Bluegunk]

Hi Traison. Thanks. I'll run Script Elephant over it.  I tend not to bother with overlays on the character, not being one for warpaints and tattoos.

I'm currently running the game on a brand new PC with a 5090, but I've kept the texture packs down through habit.

Edited March 19 by Bluegunk

[Bluegunk]

OK, Elephant.  I get a steady 80 indoors, and 76-80 outdoors topping at a max of 100 at a real push. This is when the game loads correctly and there's no stacking or "meat face."

 

I've been trawling logs to try and spot whatever it is that blows out. No luck so far.  xEdit doesn't show any weirdness.

[traison]

36 minutes ago, Bluegunk said:

I'm currently running the game on a brand new PC with a 5090...

 

System specs do not matter much or at all if the framerate is bound to 60hz and Papyrus ops are limited per-frame.

 

Same reason why it used to be possible to speed up game load screens by unlimiting fps - file IO operations were bound to the framerate. New CPU, new SSD, none of it matters if the hardware is already spending 99% of it's time waiting for the next frame.

 

Edit: Also 5090 is not going to help if you're using 16K face tints, 350MiB each and 8 layers of them - they still have to be loaded from your HDD/SSD/M.2.

 

22 minutes ago, Bluegunk said:

This is when the game loads correctly and there's no stacking or "meat face."

 

What's the numbers like when it's not doing so good?

Edited March 19 by traison

[Bluegunk]

Elephant. I got a broken game to try. Despite 140 suspended stacks, the latency is unchanged.

16k tints!? I've a few textures at 4k, the rest are 1-2k. I don't do tattoos, warpaints, just the odd freckle here and there.

 

The game is capped at 60FPS, and the monitor refresh is currently around 140Hz. There's no point with higher FPS because the physics blows up.

I'm using Community Shaders and 99% of my regular mods I've used for years.  I think the most scary new mod is an armour. I tend not to change the game much when I rebuild it. Perhaps add a follower to try, or a new house.

Edited March 19 by Bluegunk

[traison]

16 minutes ago, Bluegunk said:

16k tints!? I've a few textures at 4k, the rest are 1-2k.

 

16k was just a silly example. 4k is still going to be something like 30MiB per texture depending heavily on DDS compression.

 

17 minutes ago, Bluegunk said:

I don't do tattoos, warpaints...

 

I didn't suggest you do. What I said was that when you have a face tint like lipstick, that tint occupies a slot that's by default occupied by warpaint. This slot is then a bit later occupied by your lipstick tint, and it's possible for a few frames to draw between these 2 events. To put that another way, your "meatface" will change color, if you change the color of your characters makeup.

 

20 minutes ago, Bluegunk said:

The game is capped at 60FPS, and the monitor refresh is currently around 140Hz. There's no point with higher FPS because the physics blows up.

 

While there is a fix for the physics, I didn't mention this as a fix but rather as a plausible theory of what's happening. Upping the FPS to try to get around this issue is like sweeping a problem under the rug. The closest relation this had a fix would have been to up the Papyrus ops limit in Papyrus Tweaks to something silly to see if it makes the "meatface" go away quicker.

 

Speaking of time, how long is that problem visible for?

[Bluegunk]

The 'meat face' is permanent. It remains for as long as I play - while the scripts roll up suspended stacks.

 

The drawback is in using Resaver or the old Papyrus log to try and see which script kicked off the collapse, there's so much broken it's impossible to find the faulting mod or DLL.

 

I have tried reloading the player's preset by popping into Racemenu and reselecting the right preset. That fixes the face, but doesn't stop the flood of stacks. I use Vanity Mirror for that job.

[traison]

1 hour ago, Bluegunk said:

The 'meat face' is permanent. It remains for as long as I play - while the scripts roll up suspended stacks.

 

Oh that's something else then. Short of going through the suspended stacks I'm out of ideas. Start with the RaceMenu scripts and everything that points to them if you do decide to do that:

 

chargen.psc
nioverride.psc
racemenu.psc
racemenubase.psc
racemenuload.psc
racemenuplugin.psc

[Bluegunk]

Thank you for your time and interest in the problem!   👍   It's doing my head in, this one.

 

When I find the answer, I'll report back.

[Vortec]

1 hour ago, Bluegunk said:

Thank you for your time and interest in the problem!   👍   It's doing my head in, this one.

 

When I find the answer, I'll report back.

 Have you tried a different face preset? I have multiple copies of my character...different hairs etc. Just wondering if it's just your usual face preset (or maybe hair) that could be a problem.

[Bluegunk]

Thank you for getting in touch! Yes, I've got a number of face presets. When the game runs normally there's no problem.  But a bad start-up is broken from the start with hundreds of suspended scripts and the "meat face."

 

I'm now gritting my teeth - realising I'll have to do this the hard way:  going through the usual mod switch-out procedure!  😰

[traison]

40 minutes ago, Bluegunk said:

When the game runs normally there's no problem.  But a bad start-up is broken from the start with hundreds of suspended scripts and the "meat face."

 

How close are you to the file handle limit? Does the Papyrus log report you having a larger than usual amount of missing scripts when this happens?

[Bluegunk]

Do you mean the ESP limit? Current 229. I once ran a game on 253! Strings are 65290. Average draw calls around 9000 though they can get high in the usual "hot spots".

Edited March 19 by Bluegunk

[traison]

11 minutes ago, Bluegunk said:

Do you mean the ESP limit? Current 229. I once ran a game on 253! Strings are 65290. Average draw calls around 9000 though they can get high in the usual "hot spots".

 

No, each process in Windows has a maximum file handle limit. I believe with Engine Fixes SSE this is 8192 but it might depend on Skyrim version, Windows version and Windows registry settings - Engine Fixes only sets it to whatever is the current maximum.

 

I can't think of a way to measure this with a 3rd party right now, but Process Explorer from Sysinternals (Microsoft) can show the process handle count. There's more than just file handles though, but perhaps this could be a ballpark indicator.

 

Edit: Basically what happens when you hit this limit is that random files drop out each time you run the game.

Edited March 19 by traison

[Bluegunk]

I have Process Explorer, though it doesn't seem to recognise Skyrim.exe handles. But Task Manager does, digging down the tree.

 

Process handles are hovering around 4540 on the good, working game.  Of course, can I get the game to load up with the fault, now? Nope.

Edited March 19 by Bluegunk

[Bluegunk]

I'm thinking there's probably too much loading in at game start, causing it to fall over on some startups - depending what weather it is outside.

I'll try extending the environment by a little bit, see if that cures the issue.

 

 

[Bluegunk]

OK. Still no luck.

 

Thanks for your help and assistance, as always Traison.

 

I'm going to tear down the edifice, and rebuild the game. I don't want to waste my - and your - time on this problem any more.  Once I find the fault (if I ever do) I'll post what it is so others will know.

[Bluegunk]

And I finally found the culprit. It was a slog to find this fault, because sometimes the mod worked, and other times it would not. It was luck of the draw.

 

It is RSE Shoulder or Saddle. 

 

The mod has been updated from the version I was using, but I am not inclined to keep it in my game.

[traison]

Would be interesting to know how that mod managed to break RM face tints. Only while loop it has is safe. It does have several dll files in it though so anything is possible.

[Bluegunk]

This is a guess: on the occasions the mod failed on loading, it was about the time the player actor is being assembled, leaving the face a mess and the game scripts in a tangle.

 

I reckon the DLL was at fault, though normally they crash out. I'm not intending to experiment any further!

 

Thank you, as always, for your help.