Issues after Reloading a Save Game

[MalekBrood]

Got my game modded and everything is looking and working great........or so I thought.

 

I've reached a point with the game where I have had to reload the game a few times (getting killed by a room full of ghouls or getting blown up by an exploding car after forgetting about the sniper in Minefield in never fun  ).

 

Anyway, I have noticed that after reloading a save game (never the first one when I start the game), I start to get missing texture exclamation marks and invisible bodies on people when I go back to Megaton or if I reload whilst in Megaton.  If I save the game, quit to desktop (usually I have no choice on this, even if I try to quit to main menu the game crashes) then restart the game everything is fine until I have to reload a save game again.  I know the FO3 engine is old and buggy but I've modded it a few times now using this guide and I've never had this problem before so I'm a bit confused as to whats happening.

 

So, any help figuring this out would be great.

 

Thanks everyone.

 

[MalekBrood]

Well strangely enough, now I have moved away from Megaton things are starting to seem a little more robust.  No crashes for a good couple of hours even after a few reloads.  I do still crash but not as often as before it seems.  I do have another issue however, but I will make another post regarding that one.

 

Thanks for your replies, very informative as always

[MalekBrood]

Think I may have solved the missing texture issues after reloading a saved game in and around Megaton....plugins...I had 207 active plugins, and after reading a post similar to mine on the forums, I decided to merge a few plugins (the ones recommended in the guide) and so far so good.  I hadn't merged them previously because I've never had to in the past but I guess the guide as grown a bit since I last modded FO3 (got bored after playing FO4 for a while! ).

 

I am, however, still experiencing crashes after reloading a save game.  Strangely, I can tell when this is about to happen as I seem to get sudden frame drops and stuttering then it will crash either by freezing on screen or when using doors between areas (exiting or entering Megaton, Super Duper Mart etc.)  It seems, at the moment, my only safe bet to reload a save game is to quit the game and reload using the save I want to reload.  A bit laborious I know, especially when reloading from dying, but until I've played around a bit more and found a solution, I guess I'll live with it for the time being.

 

Any help from anyone regarding this would be much appreciated.

[Greg]

I really don't know the answer but I've seen much the same behavior in my playthroughs. I can reproduce this in specific areas of downtown in which 15 or 20 super mutants attack all at once. As the battle rages on the frame rate begins to drop then gets really stuttery (yeah, I made up that word) and finally it'll stop rendering everything. In my case, I suspect it may be a combination of script lag with all the spawns and weapon animations combined with memory pressure (meaning the game is starting to run out of memory). I'm using the GOG version of Fallout 3 that already has the 4GB patch applied and I've never seen this behavior at Super Duper Mart. As I recall, there's not much at Super Duper Mart.

 

I also experienced this behavior when I was initially setting up the guide. I started with a pure vanilla game in which I started the game, went to Megaton, and created a hard save. I'd then add a few mods from the guide, load the save, roam around, and save again. Rinse and repeat for the next section of the guide. As I got toward the end of the guide, the game started showing red triangles everywhere so I had to delete the saves and start a new game. I probably should have just kept that one save at Megaton to use as a base in hindsight, but I was trying to scour the entire map and didn't want to keep starting from scratch. Yeah, I'm lazy.

[Kelmych]

At the beginning of the game leaving the Vault produced problems for me until I slowed down a little to let the game engine "catch up". Playing with MMM active I avoided downtown DC and avoided the Metro as much as possible near the beginning of the game mostly because the Super Mutants were too tough, but also to avoid overloading the engine and reducing the frame rate to low value as Greg mentions. I avoided fast travel almost entirely to avoid breaking the game scripts which aren't very robust. When I got above level 20 I started having more of these problems, but I avoided the places that caused the most problems and was able to proceed. I didn't see red triangles but I did see low frame rate and game stuttering when there were problems. Interestingly I didn't see high CPU or GPU usage or even RAM usage when this was happening. Of course, the game was designed for Windows XP vs. Windows 10...