Super Mutant armor texture/mesh disappears randomly

[Faldaani]

Hi

First off, great work with the guide!

I've got an issue I can't seem to pin down due to lack of Fallout modding knowledge.
I've poked around in FO3Edit trying to find obvious conflicts related to specified textures and/or meshes, but no luck.

Basically, Super Mutant Heavy Gunner (and maybe others) have armor that disappears totally (leaving them naked) when viewed from certain angles OR distances.
I have noticed that sometimes there is what appears to be a super mutant armor, tilted 90 degrees, slightly squashed, walking vertically in the sky... I'm unsure if this occurs when the armor "disappears" since I only saw it when there was 2 super mutant heavy gunners in the area and I'm guessing the sky-armor was from the one I wasn't looking at.
 

My guess is that the coordinates for where the mesh is supposed to be are messed up somewhere, but I've got no idea where to even start looking.
I tried to figure out which armor they were wearing by looking at their inventory (showInventory) but all they had were:
Super Token 4C09B94C
PiggyBack Token 0A000FA8

 

EDIT: I managed to find that particular dude in GECK by comparing his armor to the screenshots, I think he is called CrSuperMutant2MinigunA (00092C4F), named Super Mutant Brute
When viewing him in the preview window in GECK he looks absolutely fine, no texture / model messups.  The entry in FO3Edit with and without bashed patch is not conflicted when it comes to model names, the only interesting entry is the SCRI-Script one that is merged by the Blackened FWE-MMM-EVE-Project Beauty patch... Do note that I have no idea what I'm doing, this is just an info-dump with what i found so far, hoping someone smarter than me has more ideas :D

 

I've got a savegame right infront of it, I'm not sure if any changes I make to attempt to fix this will be visible since its already spawned? Would I have to reset everything by going to an interior cell for a while and then try to locate some new super mutants?
 

I don't have any apparent issues with anything else that I've noticed.
I've used LOOT to sort the mods and I've manually copied ALL the bash tags from LOOT into Wrye Flash (took forever, any way to automate that?) before generating the bashed patch.
EDIT: I've also run FO3LodGen on pretty much every mod I've got + vanilla..

 

Armor in the sky

 

Screenshots of a corpse with armor on and off (captured from a video of the problem), archives, loadorder, lockedorder, modlist and plugins, list of bash tag from Wrye and the "report" of the bashed patch generation are attached to this post.

Thanks in advance for any help :)

archives.txt

loadorder.txt

lockedorder.txt

modlist.txt

plugins.txt

Bashed Patch, 0.txt

bash_tags.txt

Edited July 8, 2015 by Faldaani

[Faldaani]

Hmm, so, that happened.

Windows 8.1 bug-checked out with unrecoverable hardware error, computer rebooted, graphic card was no longer showing up (default 800x600 only).
Decided to re-install drivers, picked drivers from 2015-06-17 instead of ~2015-02-22, graphics started working again.

 

Super Mutant Heavy Gunner armor missing problem ... disappeared.
It makes no sense to me. What are the odds that 3 month old drivers for a ... very very old game would magically cause a super mutants underwear to disappear from some angles in a repeatable fashion?

I guess we can close this, but if anyone has any other input other than "magic good luck" it'd be very appreciated for next time this happens :)

EDIT: Restart of game, problem came back. Sigh.
 

Edited July 8, 2015 by Faldaani

[Kelmych]

It's possible it is a game engine problem. I've had items flying in the air at times; fortunately not very often. There are problems viewing some items at certain angles. Perhaps other users who have seen this can offer more insight. Searching on Google I found some posts that suggest AA, anisotropic filtering and some ENB settings might affect this.

[Faldaani]

I've disabled AA, AF and ENB as well. You may be right about the engine being broken, too bad, its a bit hard to shoot them when i can only see half. Guess I'll have to mini-nuke them instead :d
It doesn't seem to happen to the other super mutants, maybe I should edit the spawn lists so these don't appear?

 

A slight thread hi-jack, I've also got issues with some creature-type NPC's, mireluks, (very rarely) super mutants, abominations.
Sometimes their animations do strange things, like, they're supposed to be walking towards me but they're going sideways in place or other weird things.
I can't shoot them, shots don't connect, and if I take up the terminal, select them and type 'kill' their corpse usually appears 10-15 meters away from where the NPC appeared.

 

Do you think there's anything in the clear and present danger mod list that could cause this? First I thought fallout reanimated, but I don't think it touches these, mostly weapons..

[Kelmych]

The only time I had a problem with invulnerable NPCs/Creatures was when I was using CASM. Perhaps others have had this problem in other cases?

[Faldaani]

Hmmmm, thats very interesting.. now that I know what to google for, it appears that the CASM invul NPC bug is avoided by always loading your savegame from the menu, not by using F8.
I guess my savegame is permanently messed up now since I've saved over it many times since loading.

I've disabled CASM and started using Extended Save Manager instead, it seems to work fine and its F8 load does go into the menu (it flashes, so you can see it), probably to work around the same issue as above. Unforunately, it doesn't save reliably, some quicksaves just simple aren't done. I'm not sure if there's a lockout timer or something, or an X amount of saves per area..

Either way, I will reset all cells via the "wait" function and play with Extended Save Manager for a while and see if I get any more random errors :)

[Faldaani]

Just an update to this post.

 

I switched to Extended Save Manager and have used it for a few days now. When performing a quickload it does it via the menu (as is suggested to be the fix for CASM).
I have only noticed one instance of weird-model-in-the-sky since then, and that was the roaches that are spawned with The Roach King.

However, I cannot recommend Extended Save Manager instead of CASM because I have issues with its quicksaving functionality.
Sometimes when hitting quick-save the game freezes for a while like if it saves, but no save is produced and no "Quicksaving" message is produced.
Holding the save key down seems to alleviate this a bit, but it is not consistent. It is possible it is related to one of my settings, but I've been unable to figure out which one.

That being said, I will continue to use Extended Save Manager instead of CASM.