CTD in whiterun only - out of ideas

[Jensen010]

Hi there, I've got an issue

I did search through the forums to see if this had been posted about before, but couldn't find anything. So here goes.

  I have a very stable game going with 100 or so mods. They're installed properly on a new save, and all of them are high quality. All of the plug ins have been cleaned with TESVedit, And im running a bashed patch through Wrye Bash with the proper bash tags in place. Oh and the load order is sorted by BOSS. I think I finally nailed everything I was supposed to do, because my game is really stable and I get good FPS pretty much everywhere.......Except for one thing.

  Whiterun. I cannot, for some reason, walk around the town for more than a minute without a CTD, and I wanted to ask if this is a common issue. I found an old post on another website that talked about unpacking the meshes or voice files in the official BSA's, which seemed to fix the issue for some people, but I'm a little leary of trying that without someone who knows what they're talking about weighing in. I have BSAopt, but am not sure if this is an ok thing to do? Another thread seemed to think body or skeleton mods were the culprit, but I have no clear answers, only vague ideas of where to look.

If anyone knows about or has experienced this issue, or needs me to post more specific info, let me know and i will humbly be in your debt.

 

Thanks!

[Jensen010]

I put in some .ini tweaks that i found on this page, about 3 quarters of the way down, and my problem is fixed somehow. Anyone know if these suggestions are legit? I made backups of my original files just in case.

[PlanetExp]

Whiterun seems to be quite a resource hog. I got my first and only CTD there which has since magically disappeared. I still don't know what caused it. I have even added new mods in after it which is supposed to be a big nono if you want a stable game.

 

I would check if I was running out of memory first then perhaps fast travel around a bit and see if it persists after that. After that perhaps painstakingly unchecking mods one after the other to try to find the culprit. Sometimes a combination of two mods cause a conflict.

[phazer11]

Yeah you could possibly use something like Skyrim Performance Monitor or maybe Process Hacker to see how much of your System Ram is being used. SPM also shows VRAM usage so it'd probably a bit more help. Are you using ENB/ENBoost and/or the Mempatch/SKSE Alpha?

[Kuldebar]

 Are you using ENB/ENBoost and/or the Mempatch/SKSE Alpha?

Phazer asks the most pertinent of questions and it's the key to either solving your problem, or identifying other related issues to it.

 

And while that Skyrim Tweak site is impressive, I would stay away from any ini tweaking recommendations set forth there.

There really are only a handful of tweaks that make any verifiable, positive impact on game performance. The majority of them are snake-oil and placebo driven. At best they do nothing, at worst, they compromise game integrity and stability.

I have come to the conclusion that four things are key, the rest is window dressing:

• ENBoost, properly configured for your PC
• Sheson's Memory Patch properly configured and applied via a proper method ( I use SSME )
• Proper Mod Management: load ordering with BOSS, cleaning with TESSEdit and using Mod Organizer
• Discarding problematic mods and avoiding certain mods that are overly script intense, using common sense on texture sizes...

Edited March 2, 2014 by Kuldebar

[Jensen010]

im using the 2.5.6 enb, with enbboost, and I use SSME for the memory patching. Whatever I did seems to have fixed my problem, I did re-verify the load order and rebuild my bashed patch and a skyproc patch I have running, so maybe I had just missed that before. Although I can say that after I put those ini tweaks in the ENB overlay reports me getting about 10-15 better FPS, which is awesome. So far everything there is stable on my system, with 125 or so mods running.

[Kuldebar]

@Jensen010

 

Great to hear you got things going. It's a nice feeling when you get to that Skyrim Nirvana where everything is working and you can just play the game.

[Glanzer]

I know you got it fixed already, but another idea for similar situations is to optimize the textures.  I had a persistent CTD near the bridge SE of Whiterun and I fixed it by optimizing the textures using DDSOpt. And no I didn't reduce the texture size, I just used the max 8192x8192 setting. DDSOpt will correct issues with your textures and that's what it did for me.