Exterior CTDs

[TopCat1181]

Hello.

 

My game is crashing every now again when I’m in exterior locations. For example the latest crash is happening on the bridge outside Windhelm, I've just left Windhelm and just as I get to the end of the bridge the game will instantly CTD without any error messages. This crash and all others like it are 9/10 reproducible, the only way to avoid it is to take a different route to my destination (Although this doesn’t always work either), in this case the Windhelm Stables. I wouldn't say these crashes are common but they’re not rare either, sometimes I can get well over 2 hours straight then CTD, other times It happens within a few minutes.

 

Here’s the details:

 

This play through is fairly fresh, I've only been playing on it for 24hrs or less and I've only really done a few minor quests plus I’m currently going through the thief quest line. I haven't changed and/or added any new mods since starting and I believe the only .ini tweaks I have are those recommend for the HDT mod.

 

My PC specs, Papyrus logs and my Boss log can be find in the attachment.

 

Info.rar

 

A note about my Papyrus logs. The Papyrus.2 log is the first instance of this crash, the .1 log I tried quick traveling from the Windhelm entrance on the bridge to the stables (Only for it to CTD within a minute of successfully loading) and .0 log I did exactly the same as I did for the .2 log.

 

Any help with this would be immensely appreciated as it has been an ongoing problem for a very long time now and its driven me to the brink of insanity since I can't get to the bottom of it (Despite my previous experience in dealing with mods and the problems they can bring).

 

Cheers

TC

[xxsleepyxx]

i had this at one point too, not sure what caused it and it doesnt happen anymore.  My guess is it has something to do with random events being bugged,  I would try uninstalling organized bandits or changing load order and see if that fixes.

[TopCat1181]

Thanks xxsleepyxx I will try your suggestions on my latest save and on a new game in a bit and see what happens. Just to note though I have only recently installed organized bandits (Within the last month or so) and this type of crash has been going on for a lot longer than that, I have also tried playing with my load order in the past to no avail although not with the current collection of mods I have so maybe it will help.

 

Just a thought but could this crash be caused by faulty scripts (Perhaps scripts failing to load/load fast enough) and/or scripts clashing?

[Kaz Aanh]

It probably crashes becouse it wants to spawn npc and that npc causes errors, which ends up with the game crashing. Always check mods that add more enemies/travellers/wandering npcs etc.

 

If you want to test stabillity of your game it would be good to do the following:

 

• go to exterior, type player.setav. speedmult 100 ; 100 is a default variable
• tcl and fly around the world for a few minutes, it will force the game engine to the limit becouse its gonna load lots of stuff
• if you get crash after few seconds then something is wrong,begin disabling mods. Starting from HQ/HD packs.
• if you don't get crash after few mins then its stable

Heh thats from my experience.

[TopCat1181]

Thanks Dagren. I remember a crash that happened earlier and the last thing in the Papryus log was something about a Critter spawn script (Maybe critterspawn.psc or something along those lines), I did a quick google search about it at the time and the only link I could find was a bug with one of the Unoffical Patches which has apperently been fixed. I have noticed it in the past though so you might be on to something there. I will test it as per your instructions and post the results.

[TopCat1181]

Quick update. I did as Dagren suggested and flew down the bridge and past the stables, I made it as far as the path in front of the stables before it crashed. Papyrus logged attached. There's lots of Organized Bandit errors in there so im going to uninstall it and try it again.

 

Papyrus.0.rar

[Dubhorizon]

Do you have the skyrim memory patch? Have you tweaked your ini files? Have you uninstalled mods mid-game and if you have, have you cleaned it's orphan scripts? Many reasons why you'd crash. Also papyrus logs aren't really crash reports. They only show what scripts were running which sometimes if there's a big spam (pages and pages of a script spam) could lead to the problem. Your papyrus, to my untrained eye still seems okey-ish.

[TopCat1181]

Dubhorizon, most of the answers to your questions are in my first post except for the memory patch one. As I understand it Skyrim has been officially patched to be Large Address Aware so the memory patch would be unnecessary and from what I hear potentially harmful if it was to be applied now, please correct me if I’m wrong on that though. 

 

I have tried Dagren's method with OB uninstalled and this time I almost reached that village not far from Windhelm before it crashed. Admittedly this crash could have been caused by OB scripts left over in the save so I will have to try a new game at some point. 

 

Papyrus.0.rar

[Dubhorizon]

Sorry i missed the ini part. So you added the:

[HAVOK]
iNumThreads=4
bHavokDebug=0
fMaxTime=0.0157
bDebugMultithreaded=0

 

lines in the inis? Remove them. They caused crashes in my pc too. Also about the memory patch i can tell you from personal experience has eliminated freezes for me. I have used ssme and now skse alpha's intergrated one. Without it I got freezes every two hours. At it's default I got freezes every four hours. When I improved it's memory even more they are completely eliminated.

[TopCat1181]

Dubhorizon, I did as you suggested and this time I made it to the Riften Watchtowers before it crashed.

 

Papyrus.0.rar

 

 

EDIT: When you say freezes do you mean the game locks up but continues running but is unresponsive or do you mean an actual Crash to Desktop?

 

2nd EDIT: I usally moniter how much RAM Skyrim is using and off the top of my head It rarely goes over 1.6gb, if the memory was the problem then It would have to be hitting 2gb or slightly less for any crashes to happen but thats only if Skyrim wasn't LAA. I used to have a problem with VRAM usage but I solved that sometime ago by scaling back the amount of HD mods I was using.

[Dubhorizon]

I'm not sure it's related the amount of ram the game uses. From what I read the memory patch is about two memories used by the game engine. Gopher explains it better in his youtube video about the memory patch. By freezes I mean the game just locks up into a non moving screenshot. no movement at all, no sound. Just a plain still picture. By experience the only times I used to CTD mid game was with bad ini tweaks and the previous version of nvidia graphics drivers would cause a black screen followed by a probable CTD.

[TopCat1181]

Based upon what you've just said Dub I am 100% sure the memory isn't the problem, I've experienced what you've described and that was before I or Bethasda made Skyrim LAA. I imagine the 2 types of memory Gopher is talking about are RAM and VRAM although I havn't seen the video so I couldn't say for sure.

 

Anyway I started a new game and spawned in not far from Falkreath and I followed Dagren's advice and managed to fly all the way to Windhelm without any issues. I've checked the Papyrus log and all seems to be fine compared to the previous logs. It is worth noting however that I did not activate any of the mods that require some sort of ingame activation. The only changes I have made were to uninstall Organized Bandits, Jaysus Weapon mod and remove the HDT .ini Havok lines. Since its quite late (Or early depending on how you look at it haha) where I am im going to get some sleep and pick up on this later, hopefully the problem has been solved and I can finally get at least one day's worth of Skyrim without a crash.

 

Thanks to everyone thats helped so far, its much appreciated.

[TopCat1181]

So apart from 2 graphical errors that caused a CTD I have been able to play Skyrim throughout today without any issues and thanks to a save cleaning tool I found on Nexus I was able to continue playing on my current save which was a major plus. The culprit it seems was Organized Bandits.

 

Again a big thank you to everyone that chimed in with their advice, I doubt I would have gotten to the bottom of this anytime soon without your help.