Computer issues, Viruses, trojans, crashes, install problems etc Options

[Lena Wolf]

I have a new puzzle for you, wizkids. I've been observing some baffling behaviour on my PC. It's a straight up Intel i5, 8GB RAM, NVIDIA 1060 4GB graphics card, running Windows 10 and Oblivion. With this hardware, when I enter an open-plan city with lots of NPCs walking around, I get a momentary dip in FPS for about 15 seconds. If I stand still and let the game work through it, it all settles down to reasonable levels and I proceed as normal.

But here comes the puzzle. In Windows settings you can go System -> Display -> Graphics settings (on the bottom of the screen). This opens a new page "Graphics settings" and on there you've got section "Graphics performance preference" where you can set up prefereces per application (per EXE file). So I decided to see what the effect would be, picked Oblivion.exe and set it to High Performance. Also did the same for the OBSE loader, just to be on the safe side.

Now when I start Oblivion and go to an open-plan city, I don't get a noticeable FPS dip (well, may be I do for about a second, passes very quickly), but what I notice is that bunches of NPCs are just standing around instead of going places and also some of the doors don't work. That is, I activate it and it doesn't teleport me to the interior. These problems go away after about 10 minutes.

First I thought it was a bug, but then I realised why this happens. The interiors behind the doors have not been loaded yet! It's a big place, lots of NPCs and interiors to process, and the game takes a lot longer now processing it all. Namely, some 10 minutes. As soon as the interior cells are loaded, the NPCs start walking. The reason that they were standing still initially, was that their destination was in the cells not yet loaded, so there was no path to there yet.

Question: has anyone seen this before? What kind of weirdness is this???? I can't even reproduce it 100% of the time, seems to depend on what else is going on in the PC. Is there a way to tell Oblivion NOT to do this? I mean, tell it to go ahead and load those cells straight away, otherwise it's just too weird?

Seeking opinions and stories here, if no actual advice is available.

[ghastley]

You didn’t mention whether the game data was being loaded from SSD or regular spinning rust. The rate of mesh, texture and other game data loads is a big factor at that phase. Oblivion being single-threaded on the CPU also adds a bottleneck to the initial draw.

When ESO runs into this problem, it gives lower priority to textures, as they are larger units to load, and the selection of which one to display is on the server. Other players sometimes appear as silhouettes (that move) before their textures arrive. They may also have generic body shape etc., as these details have to be fetched from the server database. I often see my companion load naked and their armor arrives later. The numbers involved in an online game are different, but the considerations about how to get everything in place at the same time stay the same.

At some point, the trade-off between loading a smaller compressed archive and the time needed to extract from it comes into play. Running from loose files forces the issue, but it may not be the best choice.

[Lena Wolf]

Ok! Finding out things about Windows has become much harder than it used to be. But here we are. I have two hard drives: one has Windows on it, the other has games:

Windows: SAMSUNG MZ7LN128HCHP-000H1

Games: SEAGATE ST500DM002

The games drive definitely looks like a traditional HDD since it's got rotational speed...

I often see my companion load naked and their armor arrives later.

I load everything from BSAs - no other way when you're also making mods in the same folder.

This post has been edited by Lena Wolf: Mar 5 2024, 03:37 PM

[Decrepit]

This morning I solved an issue with my secondary computer, discovered during my bro's visit this past Sunday. That PC's monitor speakers no longer produced sound. After several fruitless attempts, it finally dawned on me to check and see if Nvidia's audio driver was enabled. It wasn't. It wasn't even installed! I reinstalled the most recent drivers for the GPU. Problem solved. My question is, why did this issue crop up in the first place? I haven't messed with that computer's Nvidia drivers in ages, no new ones having been issued for the GTX 670 in several years. Yet up until recently sounds played just fine. It's beyond me. In any case, it's fixed now.

[mirocu]

Things stop working for no reason - yep, that's computers for you.


Good you got it sorted

[mirocu]

Decrepit, can you tell me how to place an image on imgur in the correct album? As it is, I can upload a picture but to find it I have to select "All images" in order to find it. I cannot find it in any particular album.

[Decrepit]

Decrepit, can you tell me how to place an image on imgur in the correct album? As it is, I can upload a picture but to find it I have to select "All images" in order to find it. I cannot find it in any particular album.

Alas, I can not help you with this. To the best of my recollection, I have never used Imgur Albums, unless it was very early on.

[macole]

Decrepit, can you tell me how to place an image on imgur in the correct album? As it is, I can upload a picture but to find it I have to select "All images" in order to find it. I cannot find it in any particular album.

Do you want to know how to add a new photo to an existing Imgur album?

[mirocu]

Decrepit, can you tell me how to place an image on imgur in the correct album? As it is, I can upload a picture but to find it I have to select "All images" in order to find it. I cannot find it in any particular album.

Do you want to know how to add a new photo to an existing Imgur album?

Yes. It used to be so easy before the "improvement"...

[macole]

Decrepit, can you tell me how to place an image on imgur in the correct album? As it is, I can upload a picture but to find it I have to select "All images" in order to find it. I cannot find it in any particular album.

Do you want to know how to add a new photo to an existing Imgur album?

Yes. It used to be so easy before the "improvement"...

I don’t know if it will help but this is what I do.
Open your album so that pictures are in single column file https://imgur.com/hVSHDqL.jpg
Use the scroll bar to scroll down to the bottom, depending on size of album you may have to wait a minute are two for this to work properly.
At the bottom click on Add Image button. https://imgur.com/RzXLnZT.jpg

Hope that helps.

[Renee]

Yes. It used to be so easy before the "improvement"...

RIGHT??? This, so much this.

I've decided these past few days I'm done with Imgur. It's become so annoying to use, plus half the time the links don't work with 1-click, without pulling up the entire background of the site along with the picture, and that's IF the link actually works without a 404 showing up.

I'm switching back to Photobucket. I pay for both sites, and have used PB for images which get embedded into my stories, but for years I've been using Imgur for links. Well that's gonna change.

Anyway, to answer your question mirocu (or try to). What I've been doing is clicking a bookmark on my toolbar which leads directly to the Imgur website. Then I click New Post. Then I find the image I want to display. Once that's done I have to return to the very first step: clicking the bookmark to Imgur. I don't see any way to simply add a new image INTO the actual album with one step.

Edit: I'm not sure what you're doing there, macole. I'm not seeing an Add Image button at all.

This post has been edited by Renee: Mar 14 2024, 06:41 PM

[mirocu]

Thanks to both of you for trying to help me, much appreciated


Using macole's post and a bit of sleuthing I managed to find another way to add images to the correct album using the Edit this album option. It was very easy and if anyone wants me to walk you through it I'd be happy to

[macole]

Yes. It used to be so easy before the "improvement"...

RIGHT??? This, so much this.

Do you have an option to return to old design? I don't know if it works but shows up in the lower righthand portion of the screen?

Edit: I'm not sure what you're doing there, macole. I'm not seeing an Add Image button at all.

When you open an album is there an 'IMG TOOLS' section on the righthand side of the screen? One option is '+Add More Images'. If so then click on it. If not then I'm at a loss as to why they are different.

Using macole's post and a bit of sleuthing I managed to find another way to add images to the correct album using the Edit this album option. It was very easy and if anyone wants me to walk you through it I'd be happy to

I'd be interested in knowing how it is done.

[Lena Wolf]

My cat threw a cup of coffee over my phone!! The phone is dead! The cat is no where to be seen... (not surprising).

So now the phone is sitting in rice in the hope that it'll recover. If not, that'll be expensive.

[Acadian]

Yikes! Was it an older phone - maybe getting close to needing a new one anyway? Regardless, I hope the rice works and that the phone works after it dries all out.

[Lena Wolf]

Yikes! Was it an older phone - maybe getting close to needing a new one anyway? Regardless, I hope the rice works and that the phone works after it dries all out.

Unfortunately, it wasn't such an old phone... I am in fact looking at replacing it with exactly the same model. I am very particular about my phones because they are PDAs rather than phones to me - I barely use the phone function. And now that I found one I like... There is a newer model but it's too expensive, and my current one was actually still perfectly good for me. Until someone bathed it in coffee, that is!

But how long can you stay angry with a cat? Five minutes at most...

[mirocu]

Using macole's post and a bit of sleuthing I managed to find another way to add images to the correct album using the Edit this album option. It was very easy and if anyone wants me to walk you through it I'd be happy to

I'd be interested in knowing how it is done.

First I just upload the picture and then I go to the specific album I want it to be in. Then I choose Edit this album ->Add or remove images. Now you see all the pictures in that album with a checkmark and to the left you have three options. Click All images and then simply click on any image you want to add to that specific album. When you're done selecting, click Save in the downright corner and presto - job's a good'un!

[Renee]

Those darn cats. 🐈 I think the bigger issue here is your cat's trying to drink coffee! (kidding)

Do you have an option to return to old design? I don't know if it works but shows up in the lower righthand portion of the screen?

I've seen this option before, and I even wrote up how to "fix" Imgur in one of my modding pages. But now I'm not even seeing Use Old Design as an option anymore.

When you open an album is there an 'IMG TOOLS' section on the righthand side of the screen? One option is '+Add More Images'. If so then click on it. If not then I'm at a loss as to why they are different.

I just tried this initiating process, but got the dreaded ZOINKS! message once again. sigh. Like I said though, I'm pretty much done with Imgur. Graci for trying to assist, though.



This post has been edited by Renee: Mar 17 2024, 07:27 PM

[mirocu]

Tried to upload some Simcity 3000 pics but even though I've uploaded many to imgur before, for some reason now it seems the file type is alluvasudden unsupported.


*sigh*

[Lena Wolf]

You will be all glad to hear, I'm sure that my phone survived its coffee dunking! And there's a lesson to learn from this... err... I'm sure... just can't quite figure out what it is...