Hey guys, I've got this game-breaking bug that I'm certain isn't in the default oblivion.

As for as I can tell the only thing modifing AI would be MMM and OOO. And the bug is that, I was at place A. I fast travel to place B. There are tons of enemies at place B but they are not attacking me. I even have the icon to initiate dialogue with them. If I press the use button during this time (to initiate dialogue) they will just draw a weapon and SEEM like they want to attack me (and the battle music starts) but they aren't doing anything. They will just run up to me, infront of my face without doing anything or will keep running in circles around me.

Help please! I will take a video if I have to, but it's gonna take some time.

My mods are as follows:

-OOO
-MMM
-Trade and Commerce
-Midas Magic Spells of Aurum
-Enhanced Economy (I uninstalled Living Economy)
-Unofficial Oblivion Patch

For the aesthetics part:

-Alive Waters
-Book Jackets
-Darnified UI
-Natural Environments
-Qarl's Texture Pack 3
-Sounds of Cyrodiil
-Enhanced Magical Effects (soon)

And lastly for the utilities:

-Fast Exit
-Streamline (soon)

Thanks for any help and input you can give.

I seem to get this once in a while too. I just live with it. Seems the problem becomes more noticeable as the bashed patch progressed and more tags were added to mods, but it could be a wrong perception on my part, just seems so.

It could also be AI overload, game processing things and not catching up. This is most noticeable for me in my FCOM game with the Alyeid Steps, sometimes popping in on a group of enemies, especially in a camp. Nothing much has changed in the FCOM mods in years, only some optimizations and updates. So the only other major change is bash and tags.

Not saying that is the real problem, just a starting point to troubleshoot. If you have a version ob bash back in the 270 versions you can start there just to prove the point.

When you suddenly appear in the midst of a bunch of npc's what your experiencing is AI overload.
Being honest there's nothing that can be done from a modders angle.
Fast travel can cause all sorts of weirdness to AI, even in the vanilla game.
Only three solutions that I'm aware of:

1. Leave the area immediately after fast travel, returning after several minutes, which allows the game engine to recover.
2. Save and exit after fast traveling. On reload prepare for battle.
3. Don't use fast travel. It's not a solution, but it is one way to avoid the issue.

The console command PCB will help. Use it just before or after you fast travel and it will flush all of the not so important NPCs out of memory making space for those that are near you.

If you fast travel often or just move around the game world from one populated place to another a regular PCB is almost required. Doesn't Streamline or one of the other OBSE plugins do it automatically for you?

(I like to play a mage that teleports around, so I built the PCB command into the teleport spell which fixes the problem for me.)

Thanks everyone, for your replies.

Yes, I thnk it's caused by AI overload.

PCB didn't help much. What I did, though, was fast travel to a nearby location where enemies don't spawn (e.g. weye)

and then I walked to the place. The AI fought me, and it was fun. How do I ensure that this doesn't happen often, though? It's really annoying.

As Shikishima said, not using fast travel is the surest way. I never fast travel and I have only experienced this problem once in six years. If you're determined to use fast travel I think you're just going to have to put up with it.

I am not sure if there are different ways to fast travel, but if you use a travel service or do the Aylied Steps, how can you avoid it?

Kuertee's Autosave & Time makes saves at regular intervals and has a purge cell buffer function as well, though I don't know the specifics of its operation.

I use RedDelPCB, that allows me to purge cell buffers any time by pressing delete. Of course, I could open up the console to type "pcb", but where's the fun in that?

What gets me is that I get the issue mentioned in the OP even after I moved from a 2.6Ghz to a 3.6Ghz processor. Same mods. Figure I would see a difference.

You can't. There's no real difference between the mechanics of fast travel and the methods used by travel mods and Ayleid Steps.

Well, unless you're using my travel mod which issues a pcb command before moving the player to the target.


I ran into a similar situation when going from a 2.5GHz to a 3.2GHz. Zero improvement to Oblivion. The game is bound to a single core, which is sadly its biggest limitation on processing power. Fallout and Skyrim resolved all of the CPU specific issues by being optimized for multi-core processors. I've never once encountered AI lag in FO3 or Skyrim, and Skyrim has a few rather large battles in the vanilla game if you follow the Civil War plot.

You could use one from NASA and you'd still suffer. :brokencomputer:
This one all comes down to the limitations of the game engine.

LOL. Game engine is one thing but you figure faster processor would process the scripts faster. Like running Windows 3.1 on the latest machine. So speed of processor has to have impact on the speed of processing scripts and AI packages. If a faster hard drive makes the game stutter less, a faster processor should handle the actors better. Hate to leave Oblivion for Skyrim but evantually I will have to.

Chalk it up to the engine defying logic. Since scripts are already a miniscule amount of spent time, there's not much else for a CPU to help with other than AI and the way things are done it doesn't help. Or if it does, it's diminishing returns the faster your CPU gets. It probably isn't helping that most of us have 150+ mods tacked on