For a while there, before dead money, I was playing vegas for hours without stutter, crashes, etc. I had the memory at 2.2gb and above. And everything was flawless. Besides some of the natural bugs the core game had. Yet, ever since installing the last few patches, everything feels broken, at least with my favorite mods. I am used to playing a heavily modded oblivion and fallout 3, both of which are 30gb installs, and I have managed to get them to be 6+ hour stable. Both have more than 200 mods. Yet vegas, I have about 50-80. And it just crumbles. Taking compatibility into consideration like I always do. Perhaps I just need to forsake wyre flash/creating a bashed patch. It just seems like the two are at ends these days.

I would post my load order, but I just deleted my fnv install for the 10th time this week. The game was stuttering on my raided corsair 60gb ssds, and crashing every few minutes. (stutter remover set to good settings, etc etc)Few questions I guess, are other people suffering from major stability issues since the introduction of dead money, and what steps have people taken to try and find a way around the new incredibly unstable new vegas.

I am seriously considering going back to an earlier patch before dead money, and just playing the game like that, and then switching a vanilla install with dead money, when i am ready for dead money, and just hope the save does not bug out. Or perhaps just selecting a few simple mods. Which will simply have to do. The game breaks itself for me at about the 50 mark. And there is no specific mod that does this (i troubleshooted oblivion, and always found the cause of something, and was able to fix it, however in vegas, there is no specific mod, just the fact that there is more than 10 mods.)

What I am going to do when I try this again, is run everything through OBMM. Although I always have preferred bash patching, since that has always meant stability to me. In this case, it seems to mean the precise opposite.

Hate to break it to you, but you can't really do a fresh install of New Vegas/going back to an earlier patch.

It's Steam, y'see. Steam won't let you. You Uninstall it, and when you reinstall it, Steam will automatically download the latest patches for you. One of the few drawbacks of Steam.

Unless, of course, you know of a 3rd-party-program that tricks or disables Steam like the one for FO3 that disabled GFWL.

I have revisions of fallout new vegas, rar files that i backed up once at a certain patch. I can swap a new one in that way. Problem is that the old mods are gonna need updating (from when I backed that version up). (I have 200gb worth of oblivion installs, for instance, each at a certain point, so that I can just revert to a perfect install and keep making further revisions from that, same goes for vegas, except it's only about 50gb worth of installs)

This method is absolutely the best, assuming you have lots of hdd space, although the drawback in that you need to update older mods, which might cause some lose files from the older mods that might use slightly different file names or something. Although this has yet to affect anything, since it's usually fixable via uninstalling of the mod via bain and then installing the newer mod.

However, even some overwritten and a few lose files is probably going to be 100,000,000% more stable than the current vegas state.


I guess, part of my question is, are other people having stability issues since vegas as well. I want to feel less alone in this. I find it hard to play vegas without mods.I consider myself well versed in mods and their logic, and regardless, vegas defies this. And it seems that If i let it update to dead money, or the previous installs, that it's the least stable open world game in existence with a large range of mods. Is dead money really worth that sacrifice..... No.... it's not.

(oh, and I block auto updating and play vegas strait once I do revert to a backup install, i rarely use steam online mode anyway, I just use steam as the updater, nothing else)

I certainly won't speak for everybody, but I have not been having any issues with New Vegas post patch. I can't say that it's running smoother, but it is no worse either.

FYI: I just looked at my New Vegas folder and discovered it is up to 21.4 GB. Fallout 3 is sitting at 18.5 after the purge of some large mods that I felt were no longer necessary (at one point it was up to 28 GB)

The issues you have been experiencing are very likely unrelated to the latest patch. it is very likely either mod conflicts, load order issues, or even your hardware causing your problems. Since you have already stated that you've uninstalled the game, then requesting your load order would be a bit pointless, But perhaps posting you DXDIAG could be of assistance.

Your crashes may be stemming from the fact the last patch changed FormID's on some things and your mods need to be updated by their makers or you have to go through them with FNVEdit then fix them your self with the check for errors feature. I had to open one of them in the geck to recompile one of their scripts as well. I was crashing every time legion assassins showed up till I fixed it.

Some of what FormID's have been changed can be found http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Fallout:_New_Vegas_patch_1.3.0.452.

Hmmm. I'll look into that. But god, I don't remember having to do any of this with oblivion/fallout 3 as new patches came out, a little bit, but never to this extent.

True I just hope none of the next DLC's have one of its references to FalloutNV.esm don't get messed up due to a patch. It seems sloppy to have inconsistent FormID numbers between patches.

Then again when 2/3 platforms for the game don't have modding, this concern isn't at the top of the list to fix.
Also Obsidian seem to be doing more with their patches. I can't off the top of my head pinpoint a specific fix for most Fallout 3 patches, just adding more achievements for DLC's.

Lot's of references have been changed, no doubt. Even the fact that nmc's dressers came through on the first few patches, and then suddenly stopped being the nmc version and went back to vanilla, many things like this tell me that there is a lot of internal switching going on at the patch end. I wonder how much of thing is actually improving the engine, and how much is fiddling for the sake of it.

Hmmm... Don't know if this will help anyone, i remember something like this being true for fallout 3 actually. When you set ipresentinterval to 0 in the ini, since update 6. It crashes a whole lot more. I was thinking it would run smoother, with stutter remover taking control of the excess frames. Seems that the current-engine hates that.

I did a run through of exactly the same steps with it enabled and disabled. And when there is combat and gunshots and activity in the distance, the presetinterval=0 crashes within 20 seconds. (this is with low-spawns iws + monster mod + compatibility patch) when disabled, it has no problems.

Still get the occasional freeze. Also setting the threaded options in any way, or grass point lighting, or higher quality lighting, or basically anything, in the ini file, causes a huge drop in performance and a huge increase in crashes. This was the complete opposite for the previous patches where it increased the stability and flow dramatically.

Haven't really been active on this forum much in quite some time but the so called 1.3 update does a number of tweaks to the ESM (Which can be identified.) and then a number of adjustments to the exe (Which I have no way to check.) so one possibility is that some conflicts or mods now causes greater problems than before, the above about the so called FormID numbers updated can be problematic though from what I've checked it's not done to that many "objects" at least.

There's a number of AI adjustments to the ESM or rather the so called "packages" they get that dictates what they do and how but I don't know if that's serious enough to cause problems, also a more problematic issue is that several scripts got changed again such as the global companion data so any mods altering that would need to be made compatible but as I don't have the Geck installed and instead use FNVEdit I can't see any specifics or get a good comparison of what was tweaked.

Oh right the patch process for Steam is to replace updated files, this means FalloutNV.esm is loaded later than other earlier ESM files (ESP's are fine technically as ESM's always load first.) so you might need to fine tune the load order again as you should never have any other ESM loading before FalloutNV.esm

You can see some of what was changed in this image, was done by backing up FalloutNV.esm a day before the update was set to be released and then filtering out and removing identical changes between that file and the updated one, thus theoretically leaving only the updated data, it's a bit buggy (FNVEdit is a great utility but has some drawbacks.) but it gives a good basic overview of what exactly changed, as said though I don't have the means to check the exe related changes to the game engine and what else has been done.

http://img641.imageshack.us/img641/2285/12345fj.jpg

Should anyone want it though it's likely not that useful the ESM itself can be downloaded from.
http://www.multiupload.com/U72M7G3LYJ

Just some ideas, be aware the game is pretty buggy and a bit rushed (The terrain update mod fixing holes and mis-alignments shows this pretty well as does both the patch mods merging a large number of fan made fixes.) though it should be fairly stable at least, texture mods kinda push the cache capabilities over the edge though so it'll likely crash eventually if a number of those are used, stutter remover NVSE plugin and the 4GB LAA flag patch might help a little.

EDIT: Oh right I forgot about update.bsa, I guess it's hard-coded to launch via the exe file as there's no ESP or ini update to specify it.
http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/8360/1234xe.jpg

Again I haven't compared these to see what was altered, perhaps collision data, perhaps fixing holes or missing segments or anything, that DLC like file is interesting as well, DLC4 should be the Ulysses related one shouldn't it?