Broken Loadscreen NIF in Vivid Landscapes

[Taverius]

17 Jul 14:21:43 Game has crashed while reading binary data stream! This could indicate a corrupt NIF file. Here are the last opened files starting from most recent:

E:\Games\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim\DATA\MESHES\loadscreenart\loadscreendsritual01.nif" 0.000000 seconds ago.

NIF Healer says its corrupt, here's the fixed file.

[Pretendeavor]

Interesting, in this post I assumed those were false positives. Apparently they were not

[Taverius]

Seems to be a non-critical NIF bug that doesn't crash you 100% of the time, but I thought I'd post it anyway.

[Pretendeavor]

Yea it's good to know it can crash your game, and even better to know that it can be fixed. I just saw this reddit post as well that lists some more possible culprits:

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/comments/4t774s/psa_ive_found_some_corrupt_nifs_in_a_couple_mods/

[Taverius]

Interesting list, though I think its safe to go by one of the comments there, that is:

 

Fix the ones that crash the game according to Crash Fixes, but don't go around NIFhealing willy-nilly, or we're likely to do as much damage to our meshes as the early days of DDSOpt did to our textures :)

[Nebulous112]

Thank you for this, Taverius. :-)

 

Edit:

 

Also, to piggyback on your last comment, which makes sense: I think Arthmoor mentioned in that Reddit thread that he prefers to use Zilav's NifScan tool to scan the meshes (and he fixes them himself with NifSkope). Less false positives with NifScan apparently.

 

Also, it's been mentioned before by Pretendeavor and others, but it is important to note with NifHealer that you have to rename the files, AND delete any that come out as 0KB. It is not a 100% accurate tool.

[Taverius]

I'm certain that doing it manually would be best, but the last time I did 3D modeling was in Maya, 3 years ago, and I've never used NifSkope (except to preview meshes).

 

If someone wants to have a bash at that mesh, please do, but I think for one-offs like this and the female dwarven glove from IArmors, this should be fine.

[Nebulous112]

Oh for sure. I think the issue from what they are saying on the thread is more if you go crazy and NifHeal your whole load order. Then you might break stuff by "fixing" meshes that are already fine, and actually break them. But for known cases like these, it very likely 100% fine. And if it fixes the crash, you know it is good. :-)

 

And NIF Healer is great for guys like you and me who don't know how to manually fix meshes. Well, more so me...I have never even opened up a mesh in NifSkope, or Maya, or anything. ;-) Lol.

[Greg]

Also, to piggyback on your last comment, which makes sense: I think Arthmoor mentioned in that Reddit thread that he prefers to use Zilav's NifScan tool to scan the meshes (and he fixes them himself with NifSkope). Less false positives with NifScan apparently.

 

Also, it's been mentioned before by Pretendeavor and others, but it is important to note with NifHealer that you have to rename the files, AND delete any that come out as 0KB. It is not a 100% accurate tool.

My interpretation is that Arthmoor prefers to use NifScan because it reports potential issues without touching any of the NIFs. This seems to make perfect sense because I imagine someone with his skills would want to verify and fix any potential issues by hand rather than depending on a tool that may or may not work correctly. I can't say whether NifScan is any better or worse than NIF Healer in terms of false positives, though. A few of the comments seem to indicate NifScan catches some issues NIF Healer misses and vice versa.

 

I also noticed a few people mentioned that NIF Healer can read in a perfectly valid NIF and output a corrupt NIF in certain circumstances, so I think this is a good argument against nilly-willy "healing" every NIF on your drive.

[Taverius]

My interpretation is that Arthmoor prefers to use NifScan because it reports potential issues without touching any of the NIFs. This seems to make perfect sense because I imagine someone with his skills would want to verify and fix any potential issues by hand rather than depending on a tool that may or may not work correctly. I can't say whether NifScan is any better or worse than NIF Healer in terms of false positives, though. A few of the comments seem to indicate NifScan catches some issues NIF Healer misses and vice versa.

 

I also noticed a few people mentioned that NIF Healer can read in a perfectly valid NIF and output a corrupt NIF in certain circumstances, so I think this is a good argument against nilly-willy "healing" every NIF on your drive.

Agreed on both points - the latter especially; like I said, that kind of thing reminds me of the days after people discovered DDSOpt, and much texture tears was had by all.

 

Some of the tears were because people were not using MO widely back then, and then replacing all sorts of hard-to-reinstall textures, but there's still a great potential for grief by using automated tools like that without need.

[Neovalen]

This topic is noted, however I do not have time to review the guide today, will try and remember to do this tomorrow night.

[paul666root]

i just got a crash and reported the same loadscreenart\loadscreendsritual01.nif as corrupt even though i replaced it with the fixed one... so maybe nif healer didn't fixed it?

[Pretendeavor]

Or maybe there's something else wrong with it that nif healer doesn't fix

[paul666root]

hmm... is there a problem by deleting loadscreen nifs? so that it won't cause crashes again ? or it's integrated elsewhere too ?

[Taverius]

It can only cause a problem if its referenced directly by an ESP's 'Load Screen' record's NNAM field, so for Vivid Landscapes I think its fine to zap it :)

[Taverius]

P.S. (argh why is edit timed is doubleposting really better than editing argh argh) some discussion about the meshes going on the VL nexus thread.