Strange engine behavior with default gamefiles or at the limits of gamefiles

[Farlo]

As the title says, when I run BOSS through MO it puts everything in the correct order but Skyrim.esm at the top is left blank.  If I manually check it off, save, and re-boot MO it stays checked, but if I try BOSS again, it goes away.  I'm having some other issues figuring out which mod is giving me random CTDs, but besides that the game still loads and most mods seem to be working even with the ESM left un-checked.  

 

All my mods are updated and I'm using MO v0.11.2, but I'm still wondering if the empty checkbox is something more than just a visual bug.  Anyone have any ideas?

[stoppingby4now]

Skyrim.esm is always loaded, regardless of whether or not it is checked in any mod manager. As for CTD's, sorry can't help there. Haven't played the game in weeks now. :(

[Farlo]

Skyrim.esm is always loaded regardless of whether or not it is checked in any mod manager. As for CTD's, sorry can't help there. Haven't played the game in weeks now. :(

Ah, ok, good to know.  I haven't played in a couple months now, since I went inactive for school.  I'm pretty sure it's not a STEP mod, but I'm doing some checks anyways.  My next step (ha! get it?... boy that's gonna get old around here...) is to extract everything from the BSAs and run the texture optimizer/compressor tools over them.  Then I actually get to start a new game!  I'm thinking of being an evil battlemage dude this time.

[stoppingby4now]

 

Skyrim.esm is always loaded regardless of whether or not it is checked in any mod manager. As for CTD's, sorry can't help there. Haven't played the game in weeks now. :(

Ah, ok, good to know.  I haven't played in a couple months now, since I went inactive for school.  I'm pretty sure it's not a STEP mod, but I'm doing some checks anyways.  My next step (ha! get it?... boy that's gonna get old around here...) is to extract everything from the BSAs and run the texture optimizer/compressor tools over them.  Then I actually get to start a new game!  I'm thinking of being an evil battlemage dude this time.

 

Slow down on the chocolate!

[Farlo]

Slow down on the chocolate!

Neva!  It usually doesn't get to me, guess it's been a while.

[frihyland]

Yeah the game engine is now hardcoded to load skyrim.esm and update.esm at 00 and 01 on the mod list and as always the savegame is loaded last as FF. There are also new files at C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Skyrim that hold your loadorder information, plugins.txt is the one the engine uses to load all mods assigning each one a hex value as it goes down the list (with the inclusion of the hardcoded stuff above that allows for 252 mods). Now you are up to date on the tech stuff :D

[stoppingby4now]

Didn't realize that the save game was included in the count against loaded resources. Good to know. Though it does make sense to ensure all resources are loaded before actually loading the save game, and I'm guessing their treating is any other loaded resource was the easiest way to ensure that happens.

 

So that then begs the question, what happens when you have 255 resources loaded before the save game? Does the game bump the last one off automatically to make room?

[frihyland]

Sigh, just tested that and the behavior is a little disappointing but not unexpected. CTD before the main screen loads with 257 mods marked active, 256 works just fine.

 

It could be that you are right and they are just overwriting slots 00, 01, and FF with no error. I'll see if I can get a log of loaded mods.

 

That could also mean they have again changed how skyrim, update, and savegame are loaded as they aren't using the same hardcoded hex to load them they used to. I would guess they wrote a special function to load those three resources instead of just treating them as mods.  That might increase stability a bit so it would be nice.

[stoppingby4now]

That's 256 dummy ESM's right?

[frihyland]

I just used the dummy esp included with the dlc to load the bsa, renamed and copied 256 times. Can't find any way to get a listing of mods that actually loaded :P

[stoppingby4now]

You could add a small ESP that provides something in game that is easy to test and make it the last ESP to load.

[torminater]

sry, this is off-topic but this reminds me of a question: is there any limitation as how big the skyrim-folder can be that the game's software runs smoothly (no hardware limitations included in this scenario of course)? I'm not sure whether anyone tested it out (at some point vram will always hit it's limit I guess). I just want to know how reliable and stable the papyrus scripting and creation engine are if they are forced to process tons of files at the same moment (guess I'm actually asking for engine bottlenecks if I remember that term correctly). As far as I know Skyrim can only use up to 4 GB RAM but will most likely not do it most times, even if one throws a whole lot of things at it. But does that mean, that the scripts fail and the game crashes if the going gets tough, or the game will just slow down automatically causing lags or that sort of things?

I will actually try to only include files in my skyrim folder that are used by my current playthrough, which might help game stability with e.g. higher uGrids-values. Using the new Skyrim Install thingy that might be a very good and clean option to achieve this!

I had a dozen of bsa's in my data folder which were not activated by esps. Are they searched through by the engine anyways or does it ignore it completely?

 

(oops, long off-topic...)

[frihyland]

Every single file under your skyrim folder is scanned repeatedly and often by the engine, there is a hard limit to the number of game files you can have before the engine chokes even if none of them are active, iirc its 448.

 

As far as the 256 esp/esm limit, after much testing with files at begining and end of load order with dummies in the middle it appears that all 256 files were loaded and working correctly.

[torminater]

Thanks for the Info! Back to topic! ;-)

[stoppingby4now]

Every single file under your skyrim folder is scanned repeatedly and often by the engine, there is a hard limit to the number of game files you can have before the engine chokes even if none of them are active, iirc its 448.

 

As far as the 256 esp/esm limit, after much testing with files at begining and end of load order with dummies in the middle it appears that all 256 files were loaded and working correctly.

That's great to hear! Should report it on the Bethesda forums, as I haven't seen information that answers this there.

[frihyland]

Hmm need to do more testing there is definitely some weird behavior going on when using 256 active mods, internally 00 and 01 and FF are still being used for the default files, so although loaded the extra 3 mods are not correctly referenced by the games system, I have no idea how they are working at all. I'll need to design some mods for specific testing.

 

Another fun fact if there are already 256 or more esp/esm in the data directory Skyrim Workshop will not download or update any mods, doesn't matter if they are active or not.