One of the mods I have installed is Oblivion Crash Prevention mod. The only time I have ever heard the crash prevention sound is after I have been killed and exit to the main menu to load my last save. While the OCPS text file provides a bunch of info on the crash prevented, the same info each time, I have no idea what any of it means. Does anyone know how to interpret this?
Code as follows:

Fri Nov 12 18:02:20 2010 OCPS build 2009-03-28 prevented crash at offset 0x000dfa7f (eip: 0x004dfa7f, TESObjectREFR::DoPostFixup). Link to 0x00000004 is faulty!
eax=00000000 ebx=76e47d01 ecx=2098c8e0 edx=004d9b40 esi=2098c8e0 edi=0001e366 esp=0018f71c ebp=2098c924

The game was trying to load a reference (TESObjectREFR) with an invalid base form. I'm not sure what caused that, but I would guess that it's a bug somewhere in the bowels of the loading system.

My recommendation is that anytime you hear a *ding* sound from OCPS, just quit the game WITHOUT SAVING.

I think OCPS (or WeOCPS as it should be called) does not prevent crashes, just delays them. Anytime you save after OCPS has rescued your game, it will eventually crash and that save is *sorta* corrupt.

My advice is to go back to a previous save before the rescue. That's my 2 cents on it.

There are some crashes that happen for no reason that WeOCPS does fix.

Whenever I hear a *ding* sound, usually it only served as a signal to me that something's not right in the location and/or at the precise time (curse GameBryo?). Most of the time, I just kept playing and save later and haven't really noticed any corrupt save. There's one occurrence which I meticulously examined, I discovered the problem to be mod-related and the game could proceed after I remove that particular mod.

Edit: Having mentioned that. Does anyone have interest in maintaining weOCPS? There are probably still over a dozen of crashes type in Oblivion which have not yet been *cured*.

And they never will be "cured" without a proper patch to the game itself. weOCPS is a band-aid at best, placebo at worst, and you're gambling every time you hear the ding that corrupt data will leak into your save.

Am I one of the few who think WeOCPS is pointless? I would rather my game crash when an error happens. Arthmoor mentioned what I think of this system, it's a band-aid. If you are having enough crashes where you find it necessary to use a "Crash Prevention" system then I suggest you reevaluate your installation. Something more serious is happening.

I've had many different setups and most of the time they are very stable. I can go for hours without a crash on 9 out of 10 days. Then I'll get a random day or two where the game crashes a couple of times then all is well for another 20-30 hours of gameplay. If I start having any significant amount of crashes I start examining my setup and try to figure out why it's happening, not implement something that ignores it. Usually it's something I can find a workaround for, sometimes I simply have to remove certain mods when they don't mesh well with others for whatever unknown reason.

Here's something to think about... If you're driving down the road and your car starts overheating are you going to unplug the warning light or disable the temperature gauge? Or would you pull over and add some water to the radiator and then head to the shop to find out why it overheated? I would certainly want to know why my car is losing water/antifreeze and get that fixed then just ignore it and blow the engine. Right?

I have a funny story about something like this that ends with the car catching fire on the motorway.

I do use weOCPS, but I can't say I've ever heard the sound. I could probably remove it and not see a difference, I think I'll try it.

Ever since I cleanly re-installed my game to get FCOM running and tes4edit cleaned all my mods, the only time I ever hear the sounds from the crash shield going into action now are when either loading up a save from anywhere other than the main menu or exiting a game to the main menu. When it does this it stops the crashes and doesn't corrupt anything.

Prior to that, WeOCPS would go off quite a bit. Sometimes it would just delay the crashes, sometimes it would stop them (particularly in Elsweyr). Other times it would on occasions deal with persistent crashes (the primary cause of which turned out to be cats and rats, which I disabled and watched 90% of my crashes dissipate). Likewise, this never caused any problems with save game corruption (I've never had any problems with save game corruption).

Based on my experiences, WeOCPS is not pointless. Some of the time its a highly useful method of stopping crashes that are annoying but otherwise harmless, the rest of time, it is a band-aid, like Arthmoor put it. I might allow you to escape the worst of some problems, but it won't provide a solution; you need to solve mod related crashes at their root rather than use WeOCPS to cover them up.

Also, I don't think WeOCPS actually functions to delay crashes. I've gotten the impression that there are some sorts of crashes it can't completely stop and as result it seems to hold them up for a brief moment before whatever is causing the crash gets through. That's my two cents, anyway.

Oh, and, um, Smooth, isn't comparing WeOCPS to a covering up the temperature gauge in your car a bit harsh.? Its not exactly going to your computer blow up.

If I was hearing the WeOCPS tone while playing I would be more concerned. But with having a stable game build and only hearing a tone when exiting to the main menu I am not going to bust a sweat over it. And it does keep me from having to exit the game completely each time I make a fatal miscalculation. So for me it is a very useful tool. Was interested in what all that info meant in the WeOCPS dump, why include it otherwise?, but apparently it does not point to specific mods or OB malfunction.

I run this utility, and consider it an asset. Like others, my normal procedure is to exit the game UNSAVED after hearing a ding. Then why run it?

• My installation is fairly stable. The only "crashes" I normally encounter are random "black-screens" when the Oblivion.exe "stops responding". As another contributor mentioned, I can go over a week of sometimes long play-sessions without experiencing a "black-screen". Then when they occur I tend to get a series of them. Things then settle down and I can go for another long period without crashing. Best I can tell these black-screens are due to the game running out of resources rather than being mod-related. That's what I like about having this mod installed. On those rare occasions when I hear its DING, I know that my issue is NOT one of my "normal" stoppages but some fault of the game, either its engine or mod-generated. In other words, it lets me know that I might have something to investigate (though as Arthmoor points out most DINGs are engine related and beyond our control).
  
• On ONE occasion I let myself play through a DING. This occurred when trying to approach a Daedric Shrine, the one near Imperial Bridge Inn (Peryite???). I needed to go there for a quest contact, and planned to do the shrine quest at the same time. Only, every single time I neared the shrine I heard a DING. I totally exited the game between loads, and one ever rebooted the computer. After five tries I decided to play through the DING and see what happened. In this case all went well. Whatever caused the DING didn't seem to corrupt the game or my saves. (I make tons of unique saves, four DVDs worth in the past three-plus months!, so could have recovered in need-be.) I really needed that quest update (from Kragenir, if memory serves). So in this case it was a potential lesser-of-evils. I didn't like playing through the DING, but didn't see any other way to keep going.

-Decrepit-

After reading this thread - and even reading your post - I still wonder why one would run an utility that saves you from crashing and loosing your progress from last save, and THEN "kill" the game without saving when it actually does its job?

Not much point in running it then - beyond maybe the option to "see" what was behind the "ding". But I doubt that really is something you can simply see and realise.


I perfectly understand when people say it′s a band-aid - I decided not to use it myself for my new installation, cause I want to investigate every cause of crash and have a stable game. But as there ARE inevitable, uncurable CTDs present in some people′s games, I can also perfectly understand why someone would use it instead of simply suffering from the CTDs. There′s good evidence people can have a hell of a time playing the game, thanks to this utility, without any consequences.

There seems to be crashes with the engine that "shouldn′t" crash the game - it seems these are ok to "patch", it doesn′t make a difference - the problem is how can one be sure when he′s game is NOT crashing for a good reason, that CAN and SHOULD be investigated and properly fixed?

I wasn't saying it's going to blow your PC up... I was merely using an anology that you were "covering up" or ignoring the true problem. I thought folks would get that much.

I still think it's pointless regardless of whether you got the anology or not. It's a band-aid at best. Don't just pick a few words out and try to make some huge deal about it. Take it in context, as it was meant.

If you really want to be that picky, then think of the engine blowing up as the corruption of a save file, the most extreme outcome, rendering it useless.

It's definitely not useless. It prevents some crashes that used to happen and I haven't had a corrupted save file since I use it. Sometimes, although I had that very rarely, I had crash right after 'ding' and that happened maybe twice.