CTD fast traveling or approaching Solitude, only with DynDOLOD enabled

[imsoenthused]

I can disable the DynDOLOD.esp file, and then I can fast travel or walk up to the gate normally, although when I enter the town, it's pretty strange, pools of water, missing objects, fire floating in the air. All I have installed is a clean STEP Extended installation, and the only issue I've come across before this was the witch in the cabin near Helgen not spawning. I disabled mods and then re-enabled them one at a time until I verified that DynDOLOD is the culprit. Anyone have any idea why this would be happening? Are there any of the other STEP Extended mods that specifically alter Solitude?

[imsoenthused]

So, re-installing DynDOLOD didn't fix it, but I decided to take one last stab at it. I already knew something involving a windmill was messed up from inside of solitude being strange, then I stumbled across a waterfall out in the middle of nowhere that was also missing. So I looked for anything involving windmills and waterfalls, found the skymills and skyfalls mod, re-installed it, then re-installed DynDOLOD again, and it's all fixed. Seems the mod didn't download correctly the first time, which can happen when you receive your internet over phone lines that have been around since JFK was in office. I'm not sure why it installed instead of giving me an error, but I'm definitely glad to have it fixed. Thank you all for trying to help.

[TechAngel85]

Could be that you need to increase your SKSE memory value. Bump it up to...

1. 1024
2. 256

...and check to see if these things are fixed.

[Greg]

If you're using 2K textures and meshes and the high quality setting in DynDOLOD instead of the baseline recommended in the guide, you'll need to bump DefaultHeapInitialAllocMB=1024.

[imsoenthused]

I'm running the recommended 1k and medium on everything, but I will try bumping that up and see if it fixes it.

 

edit: No luck, it still just crashes directly to desktop if I get too close to the city. I suppose, for now, I can just manually disable it whenever I need to be in Solitude and turn it back on the rest of the time. I can't really think of anything else to do other than re-download all of STEP, which takes a LONG time for somebody stuck on rural DSL. The only issues I get when disabling it is the area right next to the market in solitude seems to be missing some massive meshes. There's a windmill blade spinning in the air attached to nothing, and a gap underneath it where you can fall through the map, but none of the NPCs or enterable buildings seem to have an issue. It seems to be the area right where the exit from solitude down to the docks is supposed to be located. I followed the STEP guide step by step the whole way, so I'm at a loss.

Edited January 10, 2016 by imsoenthused

[Greg]

After re-reading this thread, I think you have something else going on and DynDOLOD is just the symptom. Can you verify that all of the BSA files (in the Archives tab in the right pane) are checked?

[imsoenthused]

Yes, they are all checked.

[Greg]

I didn't think that would be the problem... just a shot in the dark, but you might try to narrow down the problem a little. Disable DynDOLOD and start a new game (do not use an existing save). Travel to Solitude and check the exterior and interior to make sure it looks good.

 

If Solitude looks good, make sure you have installed the latest version of DynDOLOD, TESVEdit, and PapyrusUtil, delete DynDOLOD and the two mods you created when you ran DynDOLOD Textures and DynDOLOD Worlds, reinstall DynDOLOD, then generate DynDOLOD Textures and DynDOLOD Worlds again. Before running the scripts, DynDOLOD should be the last mod in the left pane and DynDOLOD.esp should be the last mod before Dual Sheath Redux Patch.esp in the right pane.

 

If Solitude doesn't look good or you notice other issues, you need to back through the guide to make sure you've installed all the mods properly according to the instructions. If you downloaded the mods using Mod Organizer, you should find the files in the ModOrganizer/Downloads folder so you won't have to download them again. You might even consider organizing the download folder to make it easier to find the mods in the future, especially the big monsters like Static Mesh Improvement Mod.

[imsoenthused]

Unfortunately, I removed downloads as I finished installing them, for fear of running out of space on my game drive. So, looks like I probably have 3 days of downloading to look forward to. I'll load up a new game first, but I suspect one of the many downloads got truncated at some point but installed without giving an error.

[TechAngel85]

Before doing 3 days off downloading. Delete everything from DynDOLOD and just redo that part. Sounds like you might have missed a step.

[Greg]

Glad to hear you finally managed to solve this issue.