Constant Freezing... Is this normal?

[MetalPhilosopher]

First off, I love the guide! It's made New Vegas a lot more fun. But there's one problem. I can't run the game for more than an hour, usually even thirty minutes, without the game freezing. It does it most frequently on load screens, fast travel, or in combat, but sometimes just randomly.

 

I've followed the guide mostly to the letter with a few exceptions:

 

1) I've removed a few mods that don't fit my play style, or don't work well with gamepads (I play with a 360 controller except to use the console or Project Nevada's implants):

• Weapon Wheel
• Ambient Temperature
• Powered Power Armor
• Realistic Weapon Overheating
• Selective Fire
• Enhanced Camera

2) In an attempt to deal with the problems I was facing I removed ENBoost and have only been using the 4GB loader. This hasn't made the game any more stable.

 

3) I optimized my mod textures according to the F&L Instructions, even Poco Bueno (though the guide says they don't respond well to reduction). But I've tried it without Poco Bueno and with no optimization at all and the game is still unstable.

 

4) In another attempt to fix the problems, I've added two mods: PCB Hotkey and OneTweak. I added OneTweak so I could run the game windowed without ENBoost. I've been using PCB hotkey often immediately before fast travel and I think it helps a little with fast travel crashes, but I can't be sure. The game is still ridiculously unstable.

 

Now I've never played New Vegas on PC before this (only on 360, where it wasn't especially stable to begin with), but I was hoping that some of the mods in the F&L Order would help with stability. Is it supposed to be this flaky? Do I just have to get used to crashes every 30 minutes or less? Is there any way to generate logs so that I can even begin bug checking this? Where should I even begin?

 

[MetalPhilosopher]

I believe the problem is solved! Looks like I was having the same problem as Neurovore in this thread.

 

The issue seems to be NVSR (New Vegas Stutter Remover). It's not extremely clear in the install instructions unless you read carefully that users of the 4GB NV loader need to modify the following values in NVSR.ini:

 

bReplaceHeap = 1
iHeapSize = 450

 

With these changes my game runs as smoothly as the day it was born, load times are ridiculously fast and it hasn't crashed once.

 

Thanks to everyone on this forum for being so awesome and helpful!

[MetalPhilosopher]

Just read through this thread: https://forum.step-project.com/topic/8267-game-freezing-after-30-seconds-of-being-in/

 

My problems are not exactly the same as his, mainly my freezes don't seem to happen as quickly as his. But he also reports erratic, unpredictable freezing, and like him I'm using an AMD on Windows 8.1 (though I ditched ENBoost). Not sure if our issues are related.

Edited January 12, 2016 by MetalPhilosopher

[MonoAccipiter]

It's not by any means supposed to freeze that often. It does in part rely on hardware, but not to the extent of causing the problems you describe. Would you mind sharing your hardware specs anyways?

 

Sounds to me like your game might be having issue with CASM (the autosave manager). Have you tried disabling it to see if it makes any difference? Also, did you install the mods onto a new game or an existing save?

[MetalPhilosopher]

First of all, thank you so much for responding so quickly! I really appreciate you taking the time to help me with this, and will try to provide you with any info possible to diagnose the problem.

 

I disabled CASM, and just for good measure I disabled the game's own auto save mechanism in the settings menu. Unfortunately the game still crashes within 10-20 minutes.

 

1st try: The game gave me an infinite loading screen when I tried to fast travel. I restarted.

2nd try: Fast travel went fine this time, but shortly after the game froze while fading up out of a load screen when I went outside through a door. I restarted.

3rd try: Went through the door fine, but shortly after the game froze when I killed an enemy in combat.

 

When I installed the mods I did a fresh install of FNV, new game, all clean. When I disabled CASM I used my old save and got the expected "This save depends on assets that are no longer present" warning, saved, quit, then reloaded the game (no warning this time).

 

Here are my hardware specs in case there are any red flags:

 

Model: Lenovo Y-50 Touch Laptop
Processor: Intel Core i7-4710HQ CPU @2.50 GHz
RAM: 16 GB
OS: Windows 8.1 64 bit with touch screen
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 860M (2GB)
HD: SSD

Controller: Razer Sabertooth gamepad (wired 360 Controller)

[Kelmych]

I've had the most frequent problems with ILS when the number of plugins used is close to the limit for what Fallout NV can handle with the particular system being used.You might try temporarily removing 5-10 plugins and see if this affects the ILS and CTD problems. If you use Fast Travel frequently users have reported problems with ILS/CTD, by the way.

[MetalPhilosopher]

The number of plugins is probably not the problem. I am running 118 plugins at present, but I've rebuilt my mod order several times from scratch (fresh install every time), sometimes with several additional plugins and sometimes with far, far fewer plugins just in case that was the issue. But the crashes are just as bad each time. I've even tried removing almost all texture mods just in case they were killing my RAM, but that still didn't help. And as said above, I've optimized using DDSOpt as much as possible (1k textures outside, 2k textures inside).

 

Good thinking though!

Edited January 13, 2016 by MetalPhilosopher

[MetalPhilosopher]

And I'm aware that fast travel is dicey. I was hoping the PCB Hotkey would help with that, but even if it doesn't, I don't mind just saving before a fast travel. But random hard freezes every 15 minutes is not something I'm willing to live with.

[MonoAccipiter]

And you shouldn't be.

 

Just for the record, do you have any way of verifying this doesn't happen if you copy your MO profile, disable all mods and launch the game through the 4GB loader (could isolate it to being the ini files, 4GB loader or NVSE).

 

A few other pointers that might have impacted stability:

• Have you rememberd to set DefaultHeapInitialAllocMB=400 in the NVSE.ini? Might also be worth attempting to tweak that a bit, but I'd postpone that until we've verified whether it's stable when using the method I described above.
• Have you got NVAC installed? That's the mod to help with stability in the guide, and it also generates an NVAC.log that might be worth checking out in the main install folder.

Edited January 13, 2016 by MonoAccipiter

[MetalPhilosopher]

The DefaultHeapInitialAllocMB is set to 400 in NVSE.ini.

 

I do have NVAC installed, and was unaware until now that it generated a log! It didn't look to have anything too suspicious in it from my last playthrough (17 minutes before freezing). A lot of lines indicating a handled exception, almost all from FalloutNV.exe. No "U" or "V" lines indicating crashes. But I'll make sure to check it from now on, just in case anything strange does show up.

 

I copied my profile, right clicked and disabled all visible mods. Made sure all of the official plugins and bsas were checked. Launched it through the 4GB loader through MO. The "Please Stand By" screen appeared for a second or two, then a hard CTD. I tried it windowed and full screened (it was still set to run windowed from OneTweak), same result. That doesn't seem normal...

 

Then I tried running the game through NVSE through MO, same insta-crash. Also insta-crash using "New Vegas" in MO. Didn't try Fallout Launcher because I didn't want to accidentally nuke my ini tweaks.

 

I'm going to try and run through my old profile for now and see if NVAC generates anything more helpful. Please let me know if you have any more suggestions...

[MonoAccipiter]

Try deleting the inis in your documents folder (My Games/FalloutNV) relaunching it from steam to regenerate them (not MO) and then copying their contents over to the inis in new "vanilla" profile you made in MO (using MO's .ini editor). MO has separate INIs for its profiles, so that could be the culprit. This also means that if you run the launcher from MO in a separate profile it can't touch your default inis or other profile's inis.

 

Also make sure the archiveinvalidation.bsa is sorted first in your bsa list in MO's right pane.

[MetalPhilosopher]

Ok, that worked! So running the 4GB loader through MO with zero mods enabled seems to be much more stable. I've only played for about 2 hrs so far, but there have been no crashes and everything loads and runs more quickly and smoothly (well I suppose it would with no mods eh?)

 

I'll test it some more later, since it the problems seemed to get progressively worse as I played, growing unplayable around Novac.

[GrantSP]

I believe the problem is solved! Looks like I was having the same problem as Neurovore in this thread.

 

The issue seems to be NVSR (New Vegas Stutter Remover). It's not extremely clear in the install instructions unless you read carefully that users of the 4GB NV loader need to modify the following values in NVSR.ini:

 

With these changes my game runs as smoothly as the day it was born, load times are ridiculously fast and it hasn't crashed once.

 

Thanks to everyone on this forum for being so awesome and helpful!

I've made note of this and changed the instructions to match those most users will need, ie. the ones you have now.

(Curiously the default settings in the guide are not those from the readme and I also changed the text to reflect that.)