» Sat Aug 16, 2014 7:27 am Hello.
I've been playing Skyrim for so long,and there was one thing that prevented me from enjoying the game. And that was what some people call 'hiccups' or a kind of 'stuttering'.
I tried multiple suggestions I found on the internet to fix that problem,but none of them worked and I had almost give up hope,and was ready to make a 'big' upgrade on my PC, because I thought that it was because of the performance of my hardware,yet it wasn't. The problem might have been addressed by others,and to some it might be old news,but personally I discovered what it was only yesterday,and thinking that others might still don't know how to fix that, I decided to share the way to make this annoying thing disappear.
Here is a description of the problem: No matter what is your average frame rate,even if you have it always on 60 frames per second,at random times as you play,the game stops responding for some moments or even several seconds, and then resumes. Sometimes it happens way often and makes the game unplayable. It might happen often or not that much. It's competely unrelated to the power or memory of your graphics card.
Here are tried suggestions that didn't worked: Lowering graphics settings, removing texture packs, optimizing textures with Texture Optimizer, adding or removing ENB, altering ENB settings, getting a graphics card with more vRam, getting a Solid State Drive,getting more RAM,getting RAM with higher bandwidth.
And here is what the real problem is: What causes this ridiculous stuttering is the way script files from mods are handled,and the bloated save files phenomenon. Even after you have deactivated a mod through the DATA FILES option,the mod might not work,but its script files are still loaded to the game. That means if you tried lets say 200 different mods with their own script files,and only kept 30 of them,the script files of the rest 170 mods are still going to load when you load the game,even if the mod itself is deactivated,or its .esp files completely deleted from your computer. All these files somehow bloat your saves. I had only heard before about bloated saves early on when Skyrim released, and everyone talked about how this was a problem for PS3,so I never cared to check the size of my save files on PC. Until yesterday. What I discovered shocked me: The latest save file I had,was 400+ megabytes large !!!! That's almost half a GIGABYTE !!!! Clearly it was problematic, normal save files range between 3 to 8 mb.
And here is the solution to the problem: What you have to do is navigate to your Data folder,and DELETE the Scripts folder. If you are patient and you remember what are the script files of each different mod you added,you might want to only delete the script files of the mods you are not using. What I did was to completely delete the folder. I can't run 2 mods that I liked now,but if that means that I'll be able to play the game without sudden freezes that take way too long and happen quite often,I'm willing to sacrifice the content of the mods. My personal suggestion is to avoid mods that contain scripts the more you can. If there are 2 mods that do the same thing and one uses script files while the other doesn't,choose the one that doesn't. If you do want to add mods with scripts do it very wisely. More scripts = more stuttering. In any case after deleting scripts use Steam's file authentication for Skyrim to make sure that there aren't any default Skyrim files deleted.
Doing the above made the game playable again to me,and saved me from an unnecessary hardware upgrade that would cost me several hundreds of Euros / Dollars.
