Hey, recently I noticed when I roam around any town with Open Cities, I will get an eventual crash after 5-10 minutes but I am not sure exactly the reason. I am assuming, however, it is due to a memory problem since I never get this problem when I am near or inside the main city because it is still loaded when entering. So, is there a way to check when crashed if it is because the game has used all available memory and has ran out causing the crash? I have tried a couple 4gb mods, but I cant really tell if they work or not. (i do have at least 4gb of ram on my pc)

Thanks

In my signature is link to 50 steps to... and there you can find link to the patch and to discussion how to... for the 4 GB patch.
And some more info about this or that...

oh i looked at that before, think thats the 4gb patch i tried... thanks ill check it out again...
when it says to change the heap mode in OSR, i dont see a heap mode, i only see a iDefaultMode = 2 in criticalsections. is that it? i found iHeapSize = 1024 though.

so my game crashes every time it reaches 1.8gigs. ill try reapplying the 4gb patch again and anything else.

hmm, used the 4gb patch on my oblivion executable (am using steam version of oblivion if that matters) but still crash after 1.8gis.
crashes are definately memory related and not from mods themselves... good to finally find out, but bad since the 4gb solution isnt working. hope i did something wrong but choosing the Oblivion.exe is as simple as it gets and cant really mess up.

If you're not on a 64 bit OS, the 4g patch will be worthless to you.

hey arth, yeah im using 64bit windows 7. i figured out the problem!
i simply had to edit the obse loader too in CFF explorer and now i can go past 2gb.
your open cities mod sure likes to hog that ram huh arth, jk but totally worth it XD

on the other hand, i still havent figured out what this heap mode set to 5 is that was recommended, there is no heap mode that i can see. lol i believe this is quoted from you as well arth. i have the heap size changed, but the only mode i see is in criticalsections. mode 5 for that would be * suppressed* and it causes CTD at loading screen.

CFF explorer wats that?

CFF explorer allows you to edit program executables and let you increase how much ram it can handle... im not expert so I am just repeating what I read. You can also use the 4gb program either is just preference.

Explains CFF explorer in the pictures. 4 easy steps.
http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=32405

The 4g patch most people are using is http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?showtopic=1118450, obtained from http://www.ntcore.com/4gb_patch.php

Am I correct to assume a 4GB patch is a 4GB patch? So using CFF Explorer or the one linked by Arthmoor above won't matter?

yeah, both work fine. but you MIGHT have to do both oblivion.exe and your obse launcher.

Actually there should be no reason whatsoever to touch the obse loader. That program doesn't remain in memory past the launch screen. It likely won't hurt anything to tag the loader, but it's an entirely unnecessary gesture.

hmm, maybe its only for some people then... i most certainly had to do it to the loader before it would go past 1.7gb without crashing.

ugh i spoke too soon, now it crashes regularly at 2.1gb exactly. takes about half an hour to get there but it does crash exactly at that amount. i have seen videos and stuff of people at 3gb+ so i dont get what the problem is. i have 4gb of ram, over 1gb on my video card, and a pretty good hard drive.

Could be the fact that you only have 4gb. Windows will take some space no matter what you do, and it's certainly capable of eating up nearly 2gb by itself. The fact that you're over 2gb at all means the LAA patch worked.

One suggestion - if you've been messing with any of the buffer size values in the Oblivion.ini file it might be a good idea to let the game regenerate that with default setting. Making sure you fix the iShadowMapResolution value. 512 or 1024 usually work best, 256 and under will crash it.

For me its not working either. I usually get a crash between 1.2 and 1.6GB. :/

Gurgl, if you have at least 4gb and a 64bit OS i think then it should work. Have you tried also doing the 4gb to the obse loader too? i had to for mine.
Arth, yeah what you say makes sense lol. I forgot Windows 7 takes over a gig... I tested a few times and I usually crash around 2.6gb now ONLY when I set the oblivion priority to high or realtime for some reason.

I may have to invest in another stick or two of ram in the future... my game seems to start and load up the game and already peaks 2gb so I probably have too many mods I guess. i mostly just have FCOM and open cities and some town mods by you actually arth lol. everything else is mostly minor script mods but they do add up i know. just didnt think about 250 mods would take over 2 gigs from the get go. hmm, may have to find a way to see what ones are taking up the most ram if thats possiible without tediously checking and rebashing.

thanks

Oh yeah, 250 mods regardless of their content is going to push things to the brink. You past the "one mod could hose me" tipping point a long time back. FCOM alone is a sizeable memory user.

I don't think my problems would have been solved by merely having a 64bit OS and the LAA patch. When I upgraded to Windows 7 I also picked up an extra 4gb of ram, for a total of 8gb. Everything is happy and Oblivion only crashes now for legit issues like actual bugs in mods. Which is thankfully fairly rare now. I'm only running 180 mods. That's still a lot, and easily enough to push past the tipping point about 50 mods back if I hadn't upgraded.

Yeah, 180 is a lot. Just a few more than what I'm running.

hmm, i might try to tone it down some... seems like its hard to want to remove any mods after you add them. XD

i noticed using ~tdt, my memoryusage was around 1GB, so thats defintely pretty high. I am using Qarls Redimized pack but I removed it and it was only taking 250mb, I dont know whats taking over 600mb but I have removed every texture pack and redid TESLODGEN with no LOD stuff and its still over 500mb.

Hmm... I have reduced my mod number by merging them into patch like this vwalk mod (better walk for women.).
I don't know ATM but I may be at 200 or something. Maybe less.
I will try and add the 4GB patch to the OBSE loader. (Yes, Win 7 64bit and enough RAM.)

Arth did you mean you have about 180 mods or 180 merged mods activated? i never could figure out what kept using over 500MB memory for textures after i removed all visual mods, but i optimized one of the texture packs and reinstalled all of them so now at least i use about 700-800MB of that. So having 150+ mods including FCOM is pretty typical to peak 2gb+ when near more congested areas and around 1.5-1.8gb the rest of the time? is there a program that i can see how much memory a mod uses when running the game? XD *checks wrye bash*

Gurgl, let me know how the OBSE loader thing works out for you. Maybe well find out if im not the only one who had to do it.

thanks

Maybe you should test your new RAM by some mem-test first.

I mean Bash is telling me I have 181 mods active out of 298 plugins available. There's quite a few that have been merged into the Bashed Patch which Bash doesn't appear to count as part of the 181 active. So it's probably closer to 200 actual mods.

oh thats right haha 1 plugin doesnt = 1 mod. i doubt i have anywhere near 200 mods. does RAEVWD, OC, or All Natural take alot of memory? haha funny how most of my major mods aside from FCOM seem to be one of yours.