*official* Oblivion Thread - Technical issues

[apoppin]

Originally posted by: Imp
Been getting A LOT of CTDs since installing my first mod (saddlebags). Tack that onto my complete system freeze when loading and ideas start popping up. Something screwy going on with mod system?

Also, more of a bug, but don't think this has been mentioned yet. Watch out when fighting near your horse, I got "expelled" from the Fighter's Guild for "stealing" by hitting my horse (accidentally). Search the official forums, wide-spread problem:|. Now I have to go murder 20 bears...

i killed my own Black Stallion - just after i bought it

fortunately, i made a "save" just before the fight.

Also got kicked out of the Mages Guild for accidently clicking on a "hot" item . . . went back to an earlier save [after seeing what i had to do to get re-instated].

the morale: save often

 

[professor1942]

Originally posted by: morkus64

Got a question... i just got a 7900 GT CO... since it doesn't seem to detect well, what settings would you all recommend... i am using the [Grass] .ini mod

I use the shorter grass tweak too, other settings are:

1280x1024
Texture Size: large
Tree fade: 50%
Actor fade: 60%
Item fade: 50%
Object fade: 50%
Grass Distance: 100%
View Distance: 100%
Distant Stuff: all on
Int. shadows: 50%
Ext. shadows: 10%
Self Shadows: off
Shadows on grass: off
Tree canopy shadows: on
Shadow Filtering: low
Specular Dist: 50%
HDR: on
Water: all High/on
Window reflections: on
Blood decals: High


I could probably tweak some more for better quality but I've been too busy enjoying the game. BTW I don't use AF, couldn't stand the crawling...

 

[morkus64]

oh I prolly should've mentioned i'm on a 2005fpw, so i've been running it at 1600x900 (should i just run at 1680x1050? will either make a difference)... so, with a 7900GT CO, and running the reduced grass tweak, what sort of settings should i use?

 

[Powermoloch]

Originally posted by: morkus64

Originally posted by: apoppin
any word of *when* a patch is expcted?

most of my issues are minor . . . but the crashes are irritating [i have ~500 saves in 130 hours]

I dunno, but the Orrery is availiable now... If they're releasing paid content, they damn well better be working hard on that patch!

Their studios are in rockville (not bethesda, those liars!), which is about 20 minutes away... i'm tempted to just go over and start knocking some skulls together.

:Q

 

[imported_Imp]

Originally posted by: apoppin

Originally posted by: Imp
Been getting A LOT of CTDs since installing my first mod (saddlebags). Tack that onto my complete system freeze when loading and ideas start popping up. Something screwy going on with mod system?

Also, more of a bug, but don't think this has been mentioned yet. Watch out when fighting near your horse, I got "expelled" from the Fighter's Guild for "stealing" by hitting my horse (accidentally). Search the official forums, wide-spread problem:|. Now I have to go murder 20 bears...

i killed my own Black Stallion - just after i bought it

fortunately, i made a "save" just before the fight.

Also got kicked out of the Mages Guild for accidently clicking on a "hot" item . . . went back to an earlier save [after seeing what i had to do to get re-instated].

the morale: save often

I save often, but only keep about 7 non quicks that I overwrite in a cycle. Think I still have a save before the booting, but ah, rather "buy" my punishment than redo 4 Gates and 3-ish dungeons. I better start paying more attention to my faction screen after I turn in my "bought" lesson.

 

[Lucu]

Anyone got graphic glitches when some npc uses chameleon or invisibility ?

I get that a lot in mages guilds, first time i got it i thought my gfx card was overheating and giving me artifacts.

 

[Looney]

Anybody used the MS controller on their PC for Oblivion? If so, how was it?

 

[CalvinHobbes]

Their studios are in rockville (not bethesda, those liars!), which is about 20 minutes away... i'm tempted to just go over and start knocking some skulls together.

I used to work right across the street from them. I would go over after work and check out the games they were working on. You could just walk right in (at the time).

 

[zerocool1]

When I play I get the CTD. I can deal with that, but I get a popping noise out of my speakers. I've updated my onboard sound drivers. Any ideas?

 

[apoppin]

Originally posted by: apoppin
i have played for 4 or 5 hours with out a crash or lockup
[or a break] :Q

otoh, i have had crashes several times in a row

can't see the pattern

i DO see a pattern . . . i usually have "Windbond Hardware Doctor" monitoring my PC's "health" . . . evidently there are tiny voltage fluctuations it reports as it is monitoring and there were regular crashes when was enabled . . . every hour or so and sometimes many times in a row . . .

otoh, i played for 10 hours today with only ONE crash and HW Doc disabled.

 

[Danywachy]

Originally posted by: morkus64
oh I prolly should've mentioned i'm on a 2005fpw, so i've been running it at 1600x900 (should i just run at 1680x1050? will either make a difference)... so, with a 7900GT CO, and running the reduced grass tweak, what sort of settings should i use?

I have the same videocard plus a amd64 4200 dualcore and 2 gigs of ram. I run the game with all settings turned to the highest, bloom on(hdr for some reason is causing the game to display all balck, or blue, gotta see whats up with that) no grass.ini mod, 2x antialising, resolution of 1600 * 1200. It runs silky smooth, the greatest graphics Ive seen in my life.

So yeah the only two things off are the hdr and grass shadows. You should download the latest drivers, before downloading the latest drivers the game was almos unplayable. But after that its been gaming paradise.

 

[morkus64]

Originally posted by: Danywachy

Originally posted by: morkus64
oh I prolly should've mentioned i'm on a 2005fpw, so i've been running it at 1600x900 (should i just run at 1680x1050? will either make a difference)... so, with a 7900GT CO, and running the reduced grass tweak, what sort of settings should i use?

I have the same videocard plus a amd64 4200 dualcore and 2 gigs of ram. I run the game with all settings turned to the highest, bloom on(hdr for some reason is causing the game to display all balck, or blue, gotta see whats up with that) no grass.ini mod, 2x antialising, resolution of 1600 * 1200. It runs silky smooth, the greatest graphics Ive seen in my life.

So yeah the only two things off are the hdr and grass shadows. You should download the latest drivers, before downloading the latest drivers the game was almos unplayable. But after that its been gaming paradise.

maybe i'll try that... i've also got 2 gigs... i tried hdr, and it was nice at 1600x900, but at 1680x1050 it was a little choppy.

 

[torpid]

This is maybe not actually a technical issue per se, but I've discovered that it is important to do a regular save often. Quicksave and autosave are not always enough, because once in a while you discover that you have to reload from several hours back because you inadvertently did something you weren't supposed to.

The biggest offender is when I accidentally killed someone in a weynon priory storyline scene and was tagged as a murderer. It was in the heat of battle and I had no idea I was even swinging at the guy.

That is really frustrating. The AI often gets right in front of you.

One actual issue that comes up once in a while is on the planes of oblivion. Often times I circumvent main roadways by jumping around on the hills / mountains. About 1/4 of the time there will be a spot where I get stuck and can't move or jump.

 

[everman]

It seems like there's some kind of memory leak. I need to restart every hour or so because my menus start going very slow and choppy, and towns will get incredibly low framerate too. But once I reload (go to the main screen and reload my save) it's fine.

 

[cadrys]

Is anybody else seeing this problem? I'm getting ~ 15 seconds "pauses" where my entire system will become unresponsive, then resume normal operation. Right now, it happens almost universally *indoors* [edit: in the game, not literally!] not outdoors. It may be heat-related, but no alarm is going off to say so [although the nvidia driver says 115 C threshhold, which seems excessive to say the least] It definitely occurs more often as time goes on, making the game almost unplayable. [World of Warcraft turned to maximum "pretty" settings doesn't do this at all]

AMD-64 3800+ dual, nVidia 7600GT SLI, 2 GB Corsair RAM

[Note that upgrading from 87.25 drivers to the 87.43 beta didn't help]

 

[Noema]

Originally posted by: electron

Originally posted by: spacelord
What Resolution and which NVidia drivers are you using?
Thanks.

I have a 7800GT and It really crawls for me sometimes when I'm outside in battle.

I also have a 7800GT and WAS getting horrible framerates outdoors.....Until I found the mother of all oblivion tweaks.

First make a backup of your current oblivion.ini file in case you want to go back to the old one.

Next open up oblivion.ini and find the [Grass] section. It's almost all the way down at the bottom, so scroll down.

Next change to these setings:
[Grass]
iMinGrassSize=130
fGrassEndDistance=8000.0000
fGrassStartFadeDistance=7000.0000
bGrassPointLighting=0
bDrawShaderGrass=1
iGrassDensityEvalSize=5
iMaxGrassTypesPerTexure=2
fWaveOffsetRange=1.7500
fGrassWindMagnitudeMax=150.0000
fGrassWindMagnitudeMin=0.0000
fTexturePctThreshold=0.3000

The grass will be less dense, and more sparse but your framerates should improve outdoors dramatically. The rig in my sig gets 20-30fps now outside whereas before I got about half that and it was almost unplayable. I'm running everything on ultra high, 1280x1024 no AA and HDR on.

Feel free to experiment and change those .ini [grass] settings higher or lower till you find a good balance between framerate and visual quality. Let us know if you find a better combination or other tweaks that work well. Hope this helps.

Dear god that tweak works fantastically!!! :Q

The game was utterly unplayable outside with my 7800gs at 1280x1024- mid high settings. My FPS would drop to less than 10 whenever I fought something near the grass.

With that tweak my FPS doesn't suffer at all outside. I get a steady 25+ FPS even when surrounded by grass. I just fought 3 bears with no problems.

Which shows that Grass is the breaking point for most cards (every card except the X1900XT suffers with it I suppose), because otherwise the game plays great on my rig. I get 50+ FPS indoors and in cities it's 30+.

That makes me wonder why there wasn't a grass density or foliage density slider included. Most people DON'T run Oblivion on FX-60s and X1900XTX...why is the foliage set the way it is by default when it is the feature that hits most mid and even high end cards the hardest?

Also...to those crashing when you leave the game...It seems to me the game has problems when dumping all the textures and such from memory. What I do is exit the game to the main menu (you'll see a short loading screen) and then exit to the desktop from the main menu. Works like a charm.

 

[apoppin]

Originally posted by: cadrys
Is anybody else seeing this problem? I'm getting ~ 15 seconds "pauses" where my entire system will become unresponsive, then resume normal operation. Right now, it happens almost universally *indoors* [edit: in the game, not literally!] not outdoors. It may be heat-related, but no alarm is going off to say so [although the nvidia driver says 115 C threshhold, which seems excessive to say the least] It definitely occurs more often as time goes on, making the game almost unplayable. [World of Warcraft turned to maximum "pretty" settings doesn't do this at all]

AMD-64 3800+ dual, nVidia 7600GT SLI, 2 GB Corsair RAM

[Note that upgrading from 87.25 drivers to the 87.43 beta didn't help]

Originally posted by: everman
It seems like there's some kind of memory leak. I need to restart every hour or so because my menus start going very slow and choppy, and towns will get incredibly low framerate too. But once I reload (go to the main screen and reload my save) it's fine.

Whatever you do - DISABLE your Windbond Hardware Doc!
PC monitoring Software interferes with Oblivion's smooth running - over time.

try it

 

[rise]

what is that you're talking about apoppin? is that in windows or an add-on program?

 

[apoppin]

Originally posted by: rise4310
what is that you're talking about apoppin? is that in windows or an add-on program?

it's "PC Health" monitoring SW [from Windows, not BIOS]

Windbond HW Doctor comes with most MB chipsets to monitor temperature, voltage, etc. . . . it is similar to [now unsupprorted] 'MB monitor'.

i get regular crashes with mine enabled - ZERO crashes with it disabled.

 

[rise]

weird.

so it reads of the same ic's as, say, ite smartguardian. like mbm5. (great mods for mbm5 and dfi boards though i still use ite).

odd that would crash you out but not implausible.

i did find my first mod that slowed me down. the "cats" mod. i thought that'd add some flavor to the enviornment but in addition to being pretty worthless (cats getting stuck on curbs) it introduced stuttering in my home city of chorrol. out go the cats.

 

[hwan]

Help!

I'm not sure what happened but my last few save files have been corrupted. What happens is when I try to load a saved game, the load bar goes through almost all the way, then I get some sounds and the screen starts flickering on that load screen and just stays there. Pressing TAB causes the game to crash to the desktop.

If I load an old save first then load up a more recent save, that way it'll load the game up but I can't move or do anything except for opening the inventory. Has anyone seen this? I've put over 40 hours into this game and this is pissing me off

 

[starwars7]

ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh, SO the game got messed up somehow after hunderds of hours of play (I'm not exagerating here, I've completed all the normal quests in the game, all thats left are the random dungeons etc...).

So I save the game, then enter a room, and it crashes (strange since its only crashed a few times before this). But I figure whatever, I'll restart and pick up where I left off. BUT it crashes every time I enter the game!

SO I try and unistall, but it won't let me uninstall either! SO I delete the OB folder and the OB "my games" folder and restart the game, but when I insert the game to play again, it says "detecting your setting" and then the only optoin I have is to "play"

SO I'm guessing that I have to delete the windows registry of this game? Or is there something else I need to delete?

Thanks!

 

[trog100]

u can move the entire oblivion folder and it still works.. all your saves and settings are stored in a seperate user documents and setting folder.. my documents/my games/oblivion..

try renaming the game folder to oblivion-X and the same in the my documents/my games/oblivion folder.. renaming the two folders disables them and the game wont find them.. it will then install some more without touching the originals..

reinstall the game.. u should have two copies of the game and settings folder.. u then rename the new settings folder and rename the old setting folder back to oblivion and the new install should pick up your old saves and settings.. hopefully it will all work..

i dont think it makes registry settings.. just what it stores in the documents and settings folder.. hide that and away u should go..

trog

 

[trog100]

my othert hread got locked i assume i should have posted in this one so i have reposted here.. i think oblivion is unstable on certain systems and am trying to find a common denominator.. the info i would like is.. mobo chipset.. cpu.. grfx card.. both from folks who have no problems and those who do have instability problems.. the odd crash once a week dosnt count.. several a night do.. he he

just what i have discovered from my own experience..

i have two similar machines

abit ax8 mobo.. amd 64 3700.. ati x19000xtx.. 2 gig memory

abit ax8 mobo.. amd 64 3000.. ati c850 xtpe.. 1 gig memory..

both running windows xp pro..

the game behaves exactly the same on both machines..

its not affected or altered by hardware speeds in the slightest..

game settings dont affect or alter the problem..

it happens with onboard sound or soundcard..

i have found three basic crash to desktop situations..

the most common by far is when moving to a new map location.. passing thru a door or simply loading a game save.. instead of seeing the little loading screen i get instant desktop.. it seems to be worse in the country than in caverns or towns.. this could be pure coincidence thow..

the second incidence is when in third person view simple trotting thru the countyside on horse back.. every so often its instant desktop..

the third and the one that seems unconnected with the other two.. is a simple single animal sword slash.. as the sword comes down to mid screen its instant desktop.. this again seems to be a country side thing and dosnt happen often in towns..

overall the game seems less stable in the country side settings than anywhere else..

the time interval between crashes seems completely random.. two hours apart or it can happen again as soon i reload the game.. system reboots do not affect things..

the fact i have it happening exactly the same on two similar machines tells me for definite its a game problem.. whilst the game might play okay on some systems its quite clearly unstable on others.. mine being among the others..

my common denominators are.. abit via chipset mobo.. amd 64 bit cpu.. ati grfx card.. none exotic memory..

both my machines are well set up.. have all the latest drivers and handle all other recent games without a problem.. they are also pretty new..

i make this post to emphasis the fact that the problem is with the game itself and needs a fix or at least an admision and promise from besthesda..

as it is the game could be considered unplayable and not worth the money payed for it.. it needs fixing and fixing fast..

having said that.. i like the game and have managed to play it by regular use of the quick save function.. i shouldnt have to be doing this thow..

trog

 

[rise]

x2 3800@ 2700
2x 1024
7800gtx sometimes stock, sometime 515/1330, drivers both beta and whql
dfi nf4 with 6.70 chipset
onboard karojen sound

no CTD's, somewhere around 150 hours of gaming.