Normally I just figure out the trouble causing mod and delete it, but what do I do if unchecking my merged patch eliminates the Repeatable CTD I'm experiencing? How do I figure out what conflict inside of it is causing the problem?

What kind of crash?

Is it upon loading the game?

If not and in the game world then Where? What is happening?

all these kinds of answers will help you narrow down what is causing the crash.

Oh, I know that -- but it's just harder narrowing it down with a merged patch. It's a best guess. What if you're just walkin around an exterior cell not really near anything at all ya know. Meh.

The devil is in the details.

Taken as is stated the question in your title of this thread could lead to the answer: "yeah that would svck."

I guess I'm used to people who want to actually solve problems. I know I never posted about an issue like that unless I wanted to solve the issue. And if in the meantime I did - I would then post and say 'nevermind, figured it out - here's why."

Having actually used this forum to learn - I personally find threads that have key words and little information useless. People will post an issue then never report back how they fixed it or anything - basically contributing nothing to the general fund of knowledge that could be taking place here.

Your character walking around what looks like nowhere actually could be related to mods that you don't realize are touching those areas OR are related to triggers or scripts that are not happening right. http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1033875-tracking-down-a-corrupt-spawn-point/ might be worth reading. As are several other links I've put up in about the last 5 help me threads that are still on the first page of this forum.

And no with a merged patch it is not a best guess. Something is being imported that it does not like.

But as I've stated numerous times I've found the bashed patch to be far more informative.

As it stands there's no problem to solve. It's more of a hypothetical. It was a probe to see if there's a quick process that can be taken. I was hoping for something like "Open up the merged patch in such and such program and look at whatever is such and such color".

If I had a crash that only happened next to ants, and I had "New Ants" as a master in my merged patch, of course I'd look there. If I had a crash that only happened near Arefu, and I had "Arefu expanded" as a master in my merged patch, I'd check for things there. Then again, arefu expanded is such a large mod I'd just as soon delete it as try and hunt down a needle in a haystack.


Also, I don't like the wrye flash readme. Same way I don't like some teachers and I like others. I learn better from different forms of instruction. The instructions contained there aren't to my liking, neither the organization or the details. When I read a readme I want to feel like the author thinks I'm a 3 year old child, but still understand exactly what to do and why at the end of it. I also want nice organization like "Here is a section the most used features that you should focus on" "Here is a Mod author section"

Basically I read through parts of the readme that I wanted to try, like actually creating a bashed patch, which I'm sure is one of the main features of Wrye bash... and even that section was inadequate. I had to assume/figure stuff out myself as I went along. I just find it offensive to my nature lol. If you want to see how I write out a read-me you can check my message out that I wrote on this forum a couple days ago about how to create a merged patch.

Simple process but I took up probably more than a page detailing exactly how, pretty much click for click. It's under a thread entitled "Question". (And I took that effort to help only one person, it's even more important if a readme is meant to help thousands)

It's not perfect I'm sure, but then again that's how I naturally write things when explaining how to do something ------- if I knew it was for an official read-me it would have been even more detailed, helpful, easier to understand, and just generally better.

I don't think it's wrong how they did their readme, and I'm aware that it's incredibly long even given its rather concise nature which means it would have been much more difficult to do it any other way. I'm just saying it's not for me and that I'd use it if it were more suited to my personal taste.

I agree the readme does bite for first timers and I had to ask a lot questions as well. Really it is only helpful after you know how to do the basics - then use the readme for details.

Since Wrye Flash is a port of Wrye Bash - much of the tutorials that can be used for Oblivion can likewise be used for F3.

So a great site for Oblivion is http://tesivpositive.animolious.com/ and it has a page on http://tesivpositive.animolious.com/?page=bashed_patch. The main instructions are: Right-click on the Bashed Patch and choose 'Rebuild'.

Or for the visual learners there is http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=35230

For the use of the BAIN installer on Wrye Flash there is a section at TES4POSItive and the pictorial ... or the (I'm told) very wordy and exhaustive tutorial I wrote called http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1084204-bain-mod-installation-projects/.

Now keep in mind that these guides might have instructions that are much more particular to Oblivion and that Wrye Bash has a few editions out that have surpassed the last edition of Wrye Flash, but that Wrye Flash is by no means outdated.

And of course asking questions. Feel free.

There are things to do to debug whether it is the merged/bashed patch, but again more info would be necessary. Think about it like this ... other than a a few tweaks that can be implemented by the bashed patch MOST of what is in the bashed patch and ALL of what is in the merged patch already exists in the mods loading before it, so if there is an issue it is to be found in the mods not the Merged/Bashed patches. These patches just inherent those issues. There are times though when merging that there is a wrong order to the merge or other factors that MAY not show up without the patch and that would be stuff to report for certain.

You can inspect either patches content in FO3edit just like any other esp.

Yah, there have been many times where simply disabling my merged patch has solved a repeatable crash for me. It's really rather annoying when that happens because if the troubleshooting for it isn't easy, like I mentioned at one point such as the crash happens to be occurring only in fights against ants and one happens to have a mod that changes ants... anyway, if it isn't easy like that then it tends to be pretty hard, especially when you're running 250 mods or so, (hard to keep track when there are some that are "bashed" together. I use a different utility than wrye bash or foredit for that though.


All that being said, I have a fairly stable build given the fact that I probably have the largest texture pack possible for fallout running on the highest video settings possible. Well, scratch that, because I could use ini tweaks to increase some things I suppose... but aside from that I don't think the game could be pushed harder than I'm pushing it. (Most people sort of stop after getting the initial NMC texture pack, but I sort of went and got his additional rock tweak pack @ 8096 resolution and then browsed through every last mod on Nexus for extra textures, including those uncompressed body textures and what-not... all while running with Anti-aliasing at 32x and blah blah blah)

I pretty much don't crash unless it's related to a bug in a mod that I just haven't tested out yet. Like I still haven't done CUBE yet even though I've had it installed for months. Hrmm, and occasional combat crashes that seem completely arbitrary. They only happen in combat, but it doesn't matter who I'm fighting or how many of them I'm fighting, just sometimes I get a CTD. It's rare enough to not make me bang my head against a wall over it though.

First question ... what tool do you use other than edit or bash to create a merged patch? What secret are you hiding there? That is the most mysterious, begging for a clarification statement yet. How can that not be the cause.

If crashes happen during combat then it is a sure bet that it is something related to combat or damage - it could be that the mods work fine when the merged/bash patch is deactivated because they are winning some conflict but that this gets undone or has more conflcits when the merged/bashed is active because things are being overwritten that shouldn't/

So then if possible test by deactivating such combat tweaks and keeping the merged patch (made without the combat tweaks). If the tweaks are in an overhaul then test by deactivating the tweaks via ingame menus (as in FWE) or make test saves and remove everything but the overhaul and the merged patch (made with just the overhaul active).

Just think about how to narrow down factors and what could be happening to trigger things. And be ready for the work of debugging 250+ mods.

Could be a memory crash too but debugging that depends on your rig as much as any advice on what to do. I find F3 able to handle much more than Oblivion too - good prospects for Skyrim.

My Crashes in combat are too arbitrary and rare to bother troubleshooting.

See http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=5104 review the Contextual meaning of "merged patch" in my prior post.

Thanks!

Oh isn't that the tool that is like Gecko for F3?

I didn't know it could make a merged patch.

Still I can't recommend bash highly enough - the most sophisticated merging around. Read http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1117083-merged-patch-or-bashed-patch-or-both/page__view__findpost__p__16416804 for why.

I take care to keep track of what my mods do to prevent conflicts. It's rare I have to worry about winners or loser. But I do this by choosing the mod I want and sticking with it and maybe throwing in mods to change certain aspects of it later on by loading them further down in the load order. Like, I use FWE but still felt that I killed enemies too easily and I got too much exp, and so I got a mod that changed those global values and just put it last in my load order, problem solved.

The only "conflicts" I really have to worry about are World conflicts, and I search out those as well, but quest mods often change loads of things throughout a world and it would be too difficult to figure it all out.

Thankfully, most of the *Insert cuss word due to annoyance at peoples incompetence* quest makers for fallout 3 give such unfinished and/or buggy quests that I honestly have very few any more that I deal with. The ones that aren't unfinished or buggy are generally super small and confined to one small area or a new area so I don't have to worry about conflicts. I'd say at the moment I have around 10 quest mods and 5 of them are from Puce moose so no worries there, one of them centers around megaton, one of them makes a new area called UNDcity, one of them is ZetaCrew, etc.

I dunno -=- to sum it up I guess I'm saying that I'm very selective with the mods I use and I don't really need to worry about conflicts, and if I do get something that causes me to crash repeatedly I assume it's probably caused by a dumb mod maker and I delete the mod instead of worrying about cleaning up his mistakes. Not my job! I've got plenty enough left over to enjoy my game:P

I'm actually not even at 250+ mods anymore that was a figure from a while back ~ I was running stable but there were mods that just shouldn't have really been there. House mods and the like, mods that didn't matter.... I trimmed down to sort of get back to the basics. I'm now at ~180 mods and I think most people would love my game set-up if they were to play it. I don't use crosshairs but if I did I'd probably go for the dynamic crosshair that changes size depending upon your accuracy. I prefer the immersion of not having a crosshair though, and sticking with every weapon having ironsights instead (cept for like... flame throwers)

I also have gone through tons of time creating my own sound packs, and gone through many texture packs trying to decide which looked to best. Generally I simply chose the larger file as the better one for terms of image quality itself, because it's difficult to tell in a dds viewer and it's nearly impossible to test out every texture in a pack with side by side comparisons without loading up the game time after time to find the texture and compare it. Not going to do that for hundreds of textures haha. But there were obvious ones, like my medkit -- it's really nice and it's smaller than an alternative given by a texture pack so I had to go change it back.

Sounds were a lot easier to compare since I could just play them in windows and choose which one I liked the most.

Yup, I'm pretty damn selective. I didn't just go pick the first weather overhaul that I saw had the most endorsemants, I went and tried every last one available. Why so many people like Fellout? Because they see it's the most popular and figure it's for a good reason, so they grab it and don't try anything else and espouse its many virtues from then on out.

Talk about a digression. Rambling on and on.

Then there are are mods that I've had that I would have kept if they weren't buggy... Arefu expanded is an example of this. I'd have told anyone to try it out because it gives more content than a DLC, but it also caused crashes and was incredibly unoptimized. It caused major lag. Then the patches that were supposed to fix it caused even more crashes. I can actually deal with crashes, I just can't abide with a constant repeatable crash. If I'm walking and I crash in the exact same spot over and over again, then whatever mod causes it has to go, just a rule I have. . . I honestly don't get why this game is so bug ridden anyway. Probably the same reason as a lot of things, people just don't do things right. If you're putting out something that other people have to depend on, then you should do it right imo. It might be considered wrong that I don't take the time to carefully clean every mod I get before deleting it, but then again, it's *my* load order and no one else depends on me to have the mods fixed. But if I was putting out something that a bunch of people depended upon, it would be something I did.

Tick tock. More coffee time! I just got tired of writing:P

Well I've found Puce Moose mods to be very dirty with regard to edits and to be very crashy with mods that even come near the things it touches.

Cleaning them is mandatory for me.

Actually Mod cleaning is a mandatory period, but yeah I've done most of what you describe (compile replacers, sounds, edit radio, etc).

I dunno. I like his quests, I feel they add something to the game it was lacking in, and they manage to do so in a way that's non-immersion breaking. They seem to exude quality and effort on his part, and I enjoy the non-linear progression that is inherent in them--as opposed to just another dungeon crawl. I really wish there were some decent quest mods around, but when you browse through the nexus (and I've browsed through every category several times, on last check the quest section had 381 mods) most of what's available is either pure crap, or unfinished potential and thus crap because of that very issue.

It's only natural for me to long for more good mods I suppose, just as it's only natural that there's always a the hint of a question that anyone reading a complaint has to think of subconsciously; "Well then, why don't you do something about it"?

Am I simply lazier than those who decided to at least try to make a good mod, or am I being more realistic in my approach to the idea than they were? I've no experience with modding, I know I'd either be too busy to finish or would realize mid-way through that the enormity of the endeavor I'd decided to try my hand at had been underestimated.

Ok, tired of writing.

I've been considering trying to do some voice acting for someones mod though. I do have a professorial quality USB microphone. Well, it's not "Professional" but it's 200 dollars so it's better than what most of the people around probably have.

Plus I spent a large amount of my time listening to audiobooks, so I'm bound to have picked up something.

I'm not trying to dis his mods or the work he does.

He just doesn't clean them even though it has been common knowledge that leaving duplicate records in mods and having deletions of master records are fairly solidly linked to higher ctds and all around problems that get exponentially so with more mods used.

He does do great mods and I especially like the minimal hints and figure the puzzles out yourself kind of approach (even though stumbling on yet another package is weak).

Yeah quest mods are lacking in F3 and in Oblivion that tend toward stereotypes.

Still cleaning bad edits out of mods takes 1 minute tops to do, so no great harm. Several times I had issues with load order and compatibility and removing Puce Moose mods got rid of the issue and cleaning them minimized the issue.

Fo shizzle -- if only modders could be paid for their work. But it would cost a fortune for some of us haha. But donations would be acceptable. Then if you had a really great mod, people would feel compelled to give you at least a little something for your effort. I think nexus should set up a donation system.