I am, however, the one that is confusing me the most.



I am running a fairly conservative load order, by any measure (This one is barebones, as I've been trying to figure out this crashing issue), and I can't see anything wrong with it myself. However, Fallout 3 disagrees.
Now, if crashes were consistent, I'd just keep on removing mods until there was nothing left, however... they aren't. If I crash, and reload, it won't crash in the same place. Crashes don't happen on any particular action, I've had crashes walking, standing, shooting, opening my pipboy, closing my pipboy, sitting down on a chair, going through doors, attempting to save (But not, notably, creating a corrupt savefile), and I simply cannot figure it out. I'm not running any OBSE plugins (at least, while I debug this), I'm running a few texture replacers and Type 3, but that's it. Bashed Patch, 0 is my merged patch (Because what else could I call it!), but crashes occur whether it's there or not.

So, knowing my knowledge of the often arcane bethesda games is somewhat limited, I plead for assistance: Why the heck am I crashing, and if you don't know, what's the best way to find out?

edit: Well, as a "Eh, I may as well", I deleted my fallout.ini and played fine for 15 minutes. Nowhere near conclusive, but still better than average - only problem is, the only change I've manually made was to disable vsync!

While I'm no expert in these things, Mart's Mutant Mod - Zones Respawn.esp, Mart's Mutant Mod - Tougher Traders.esp and Mart's Mutant Mod - Master Menu Module.esp are all merged into the fwe foip and shouldn't be loaded.

Also, when you say you aren't running any OBSE mods (I assume you meant FOSE ), you are still launching through FOSE aren't you? Because Craft, FWE, Readius, MMM, WMK all require it.

Whoops, yes, did mean FOSE, and yeah, launching the launcher. I didn't realise those three were duplicated, I'll drop them and continue playtesting tomorrow.

That!

Also, one thing to keep in mind is that FO can be crash prone at times. I myself have what I consider to be a very stable game running with good performance and I will still experience the very occasional CTD (almost non-existent now), as well as the occasional stuttering. There are some possible things we can look into if you are still experiencing issues with CTDs after taking care of the measures that Watto mentioned in his post.

Yea, I think it`s almost impossible to guarantee no crashes at all once you start installing a lot of Mods. I tend to randomly save every 30 mins or so just to avoid the obligatory random crash.

I'm not questing for absolute stability, one can hardly get that vanilla - I'm questing for more than 5 minutes playtime with a barebones modlist.

This should be more than doable, but more specifics are going to be needed, primarily in regards to your system specs.

I myself play with a pretty hefty mod list and can play most of the time with no crashes over sessions of play that last a few hours. To do this, I had to tweak my system, and I had to tweak some of my game specs as well before I achieved this level of stability (as well as a healthy use of the pcb console command in game as I notice lag starting to pick up - I do this manually rather than relying on a mod to handle it). Toss out some system specs to give us an idea what you are working with and help will be forthcoming I am sure.

As for me, I have to work in a few hours, so time to get a little sleep before then.

Specifics? Sure, latest patch with all the DLCs running on a GTS 450 (1GB VRAM), Phenom II X2 555 BE (2@3.2GHz) and 4GB RAM. I ran a similar mod list on my old box with much weaker hardware without issue, my temperatures are staying low, RAM usage is high but comfortably below crashpoint, hard drive is never saturated and even so crashes often occur when there should be no loading, there's no difference between absolute minimum settings and absolute maximum.

Comprehension is at an all time low!

I take it that changing the heap settings on FSR didn't help?

Have your tried the old fashion method of disabling a few mods at a time and testing for stabilty? Just make test saves and disable until you you find stabilty.

If not stable after all mods removed then it comes down to either replacers being faulty or a save game issue.
A simple and fast way to test that is to rename the textures folder then run the game -yes you will get pink everywhere, but if it is a problem there then there should be no crashing.
Next rename the meshes folder - you will see a lot of triangles but again if the problem is there then the game should not crash.

If it crashes after those two attempts then perhaps it is the save game and while the game does not read the save game file as corrupt it is enough so that it just isn't stable. Test that by creating a new character and see if there is crashing.

Do you have a 64 bit OS? Have you tried the enable large address on the exe?

FSR is currently disabled, was the first thing I turned off, so it's not that. My current list is very much stripped down, the problem is that I used these exact mods before without issue - and they're all either things I'd really rather not play without, or minor/self contained enough that I felt able to reactivate them after making sure it wasn't them without them polluting testing. I haven't tried attacking the textures or meshes, that's a good idea, I'll do that.

And yeah, 64bit OS with LAA on the fallout executable, but not the fose one - is it advised to run it on both, or neither, or what?

Well there were recent discussions about applying the LAA flag to the OBSE launcher - you could try that -or- try removing the LAA flag altogether.

Really to solve this you have to think about reducing and minimizing until you can play crash free. That means sacrificing what does not work - even if it did before. And if it is mod you like then at least you know what the problem is and can go about fixing it yourself if you have it in you.

I've kept this discipline with Fallout3 and am getting better with Oblivion - but still have my stubbornness about Oblivion - telling myself I can live with a few crashes.

Don't discount the saves - that one has hit me a few times. Also cell resets - stay in an isolated cell for however long that is (I think 3 days vanilla - 9 FWE/MMM) - allows things to reset.

Just what I was thinking.

I have a gut feeling that it's something to do with how MMM was installed. (I have vague recollections of something similar when I updated to RC6.1.) If you're still having issues, try uninstalling Mart's, travel to a safe zone (Megaton or Tenpenny house), do a zone reset and save. Reinstall Mart's, load your game and do another zone reset. (From memory I ended up doing a manual install of mart's the second time and it worked fine, just remember that the only ESPs you want are the base one and the DLC ones.)

Personally I would also move PDA, no wadsworth and the gypsy outfits so they're above FWE, although I would be surprised if they were the issue.

Well, I've done more testing, this time just stripping out mods mercilessly, and if I have FWE+WMK+MMM loaded, I get crashes, but if I have FWE+WMK loaded, I do not. Playtesting without FWE is a little difficult as I don't actually have any vanilla guns or armour on me, but running without any mods didn't crash.

So, MMM? Is the patch on the main FOIP page not up to date? I have the correct versions for both MMM and FWE, so I don't understand why it would not work. Is RC6.1 latest?

You never know sometimes - I've run into plenty of house mods that caused issues - and in F3 no less.

Faulty mods can do a lot of damage.

While I'm far from an expert on the subject, I've poked the mods with FO3Edit and can't see any changes I wouldn't expect - and in any case, still crashing if I remove them, it's just that removing the outfits leaves my character naked, removing the PDA .esp leaves me unable to use my pipboy, and I /really/ hate wadsworth

In any case, MMM would appear to be the culprit, at least from initial testing, but I'm not sure why

EDIT: Further testing with MMM enabled was crash free. Damn you, random CTDs!

Double edit: Maybe that's because I'd forgotten to load MMM's .esm. Bah, back in oblivion it'd have kicked me in the teeth for such a rookie mistake.

Oh I didn't see you post right above my last - was replying to Watto44.

Definitely do a clean install of MMM. Squeaky clean - meaning what he said:
1. Uninstall
2. Wait for cell respawn (9 days with FWE).
3. install MMM.

I don't think you need to again purge cells, but couldn't hurt.

also I definitely use http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=14886

Sounds like that's the logical next step. A little more testing with MMM /actually/ enabled crashed again, so it's looking like a likely culprit. It's getting late, so I'll tackle the uninstall tomorrow - thanks for the help so far

Check out Xephas suggestions http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1168257-this-is-the-last-straw/page__view__findpost__p__17207517 regarding MMM too.

Reducing settings sounds like a good idea, but I only have them on the first setting now - and the thing driving me to reinstall F3 was actually running increased spawns, now that I figured I could actually do it. I do hope I wasn't wrong, or that there's something else I can sacrifice instead.

You need to update Mart's Mutant Mod: He released an update (RC 6.2) - all the FOIP patches should work fine with it:

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1119869-relz-marts-mutant-mod-10-rc-61/page__view__findpost__p__16677278

Unfortunately it was a sneaky release in a post in the thread and never added to the OP and isn't on Nexus.

That may help a bit

Oh, thanks!
Changelog doesn't mention any crash problems (Apart from the somewhat surreal error of placing a live iguana inside a container...?) so I'll still clean install, just with this too

Alright, so I crashed going to find a nice small interior cell to lie down in with MMM disabled. Damnit.
Testing with the textures folder renamed crashed straight off, but meshes didn't seem to crash in initial testing.

I'm starting to think it may be a good idea to just scrap this whole thing and start over, surely I have done something wrong here.

Well textures may crash if you have Darn installed. Not sure on that though.

A safe place I've found if you don't own a house is to go to the tunnel outside the vault 101 and wait there. Fast travel is best when crashing.

best of luck - not sure what else to recommend.

Oh boy. I think I've found my issue.

So, after uninstalling MMM, waiting a week, reinstalling MMM, and going outside (CRASH), I uninstalled MMM completely (CRASH), fell back to just FWE with DLC (CRASH), fell back to just FWE (CRASH), or just DLC (CRASH), or pure vanilla (CRASH), I uninstalled, deleted fallout.ini, moved my saves, and reinstalled (CRASH), I noticed something in particular.

When I saved, the ambient occlusion flickered on and off. Then it hit me: Fallout 3 doesn't /have/ ambient occlusion. The setting in my graphics card's control panel for ambient occlusion quality is not, in fact, referring to games with ambient occlusion, it is referring to just adding AO anyway. Turning it off, my framerate has improved and I have yet to crash. So, word of warning, kids: leave that graphics panel alone unless you know what it does.

Glad to hear it worked out.