Kane is off in the Wasteland!

Yeah, that's pretty exciting Kane, that you'll be playing FO3. I found a few good mods during my summer / fall 2017 playthrough that I can include in those lists.

Just as a word of warning, I stopped using EVE - Energy Visuals Enhanced because I was getting unexplained CTDs after I started using it. Removing it seemed to stop the CTDs. So be careful with that one.

I also stopped using A World of Pain, because the enemies it puts in the new locations are too overpowered. I just found it very unbalanced.

Renee; I'm looking forward to it! I'm already shocked at how many more dialogue options there are.

'Rosa; I'll nix them from consideration. Thanks for the tip!

I really like the way they handled dialog for this game, between NPCs. In Oblivion they sound corny a lot of times (which I like, but a lot of people don't like them). In Skyrim the conversations sound top-notch and make so much sense. But then they repeat the exact same conversation over again... literally every three minutes.

Fallout 3 is very laid-back in this regard. Often you'll hear "Hey Jenny" ... "How's it going?" .. which is more the way how actual people talk. And the more-extensive conversations are rare. There are a few moments when they repeat too often (similar to Skyrim) but this is pretty much limited to Moriarty's tavern, from what I've heard.

Yeah I'm off-topic. I'm trying to get on Nexus so I can lay some mods on you, Kane. It's not booting up for some reason. Check back here later in the day though, I should have a few goodies.

Will do!

I did a little soul-searching and decided not to lay a whole bunch of mods out there for you, Kane. Because I think it's better if you just play the game, and discover for yourself what you might want. I mean, with a game like Fallout, anything you think of has probably been done. Me? I wanted more diverse weather patterns (rain and snow). *Bam* found a mod which does this well. That was probably my very first mod, because it's something I wanted during my Xbox days more than anything else!

So I will just show you some very simple mods which add so much.

So for instance, if you want to sleep anywhere, Blanket is a great one.

And I'm also going to shoe you Binoculars, because that one (to me) is sort of a must-have. It's just good to know what's out there sometimes, before they know you're out there. I predict you'll thank me some day for this one! !

My final selection is Pipboy Lighting Pack. This one contains several .esp files, and you only choose one of them. Each one gives you progressively more light as you're exploring underground.

What are you using for a mod manager?

No worries! I always do a vanilla playthrough first. Mods will come later, if I end up enjoying it.

I will likely be using whatever Wrye Bash option there is for the game. Possibly Fallout Mod Manager.

Okay, I have not used Wrye Bash for Fallout 3, but I have used Fallout Mod Manager. It works great for simply copy/pasting stuff into the Data folder, and then activating as usual. But making FOMODs is not as easy as it is for Oblivion.

But thankfully you know Renee. Renee takes notes on everything, when it comes to PC gaming. I will copy/paste my notes for How to make FOMODs with FOMM.



Copy/paste that somewhere safe, if you like. The Fallout version of Mart's Monster Mod and a few other such biggies works best if you structure them into FOMODs.

Oh yeah, and it's a good idea to use LOOT (rather than BOSS) for organizing your load order. BOSS works better for Oblivion, though. Hope this helps.

Whew, that is one heck of a process! Thank you kindly for it, I haven't seen anything that comprehensive since I've started looking at mods. I'm glad I know Renee!

LOOT is good for me - I already have it for Skyrim and FO4. I didn't know that about BOSS being better for Oblivion, though. But I only used about 10 mods so far in OB.

That's called "arrgh, how do I figure this out?!?" And then I go on Google, and then usually wind up watching something on You Tube, some tutorial or whatever ..... that's another thing: any problem you come up in this game ... somebody has probably figured it out already, and made their "fix" into a YouTube video. And if you can't find something on YT, somebody probably has written up their solution on some forums somewhere, some obscure website with a community we've never even heard of.

All good points. I actually had to hit up the Google machine just to get the game running out of Steam. Windows Live Games or some such shenanigans.

Yup yup, me too. Countless other gamers out there, I'm sure. I think when I hit the GFWL wall, I had no idea what was going on, and nobody here did either. I was on my own. "My game installed fine!" I heard. I remember that whole deal being really super-frustrating.

I think Bethesda does include a few words of warning (or maybe Steam does) about needing to disable GFWL, but I did not manage to read these words, because... who would expect such a ridiculous setback?

TBH, I didn't see a single mention of it during install.

It was ready to go, and my settings were maxed, but when I clicked launch....nothing happened.

Try Games for Windows LIVE Disabler. I have always used it with Fallout 3.

Samesis™

Simply Uncut = adds a bunch of npcs and unique items that were cut back into the game. Looks pretty neat.

Khajiit cannot seem to get this game running smoothly with even a handful of mods. When we go into combat it’s about a 75% chance of CTD. Guessing this one doesn’t really understand what he’s doing since he is accustomed to how mods work on F4.

It is probably one of the mods you are using. I have found a few that caused CTDs, like EVE (Energy Visuals Enhanced).

Not sure, but I was only using the unofficial patch, Fallout 3 Redesigned (which enhances player and NPC appearances), the popular Iron Sights mod, the popular animation overhaul (forget its name), stutter remover, and the invalidation (validation?) thing because one of those other mods required it. We do have FOSE installed too.

Try disabling each one at a time and seeing if the CTDs continue. Stutter Remover is good, if you have the right settings. But if you have the settings wrong for your computer, I believe it can cause CTDs. That is one you have to experiment with until you get the settings right. It took me a lot of trial and error.

Stutter remover has settings? Khajiit has never seen a menu for it.

There is no in game menu for it. You have to do all the setup for it in its .ini files. The Readme should have notes about the recommended settings and what they do. The Oblivion version was a lot more complicated, and took me hours of changing settings and trying them out in the game to see what worked for me. I am looking through my settings for Fallout 3, and it looks like all I changed from the default settings was to set MaximumFPS = 60

Khajiit forgot about the readme! Using the the mod organizer to download these things makes it easy to forget about the readmes. This one will check it out later.

Something else you should try is this. I forgot about it until now.

Fallout 3 crashes when loading interiors

If you have a multi-core CPU, like the Quad, and you experience a Fallout 3 crash when loading interiors (the PC version of Fallout 3, specially in closed spaces). It seems that this crash is caused by a bug in Fallout which doesn't adapt multi-threading well, and this PC game stops responding in small areas.
Fallout 3 crash fix

The fix for this Fallout 3 bug is very easy: just copy and paste and you are ready to go:

* Open the folder My documents / My Games / Fallout3
* Edit the file FALLOUT.ini.
* Inside FALLOUT.ini look for a group called [general].
* Inside the general group, after all the configuration parameters, just copy and paste the following 2 lines:

bUseThreadedAI=1
iNumHWThreads=2

Now close and save the Fallout 3 configuration file.

Thanks! Khajiit will go ahead and put this in just to “dot the i’s”.

Let me know how it works out! I tried a little modding after I beat the game in vanilla, but never could get it right.

Well, Khajiit re-downloaded everything he had except the stutter remover and Iron Sights and everything seems to be working fine. Got into several fights with no CTDs. This one feels he must note that he is using Nexus Mod Manager since he already uses it for F4.

That's typically all I use, but one of these days I may become a permanent Wrye Basher.

Stutter Remover was causing problems for me as well until I got the settings right, as SubRosa suggests. In my case it weren't CTDs but the game would often freeze for a few seconds, not necessarily while in combat. But no matter how I tweaked settings, the freezing never completely stopped, it only got less frequent so in the end I got used to playing without it, and didn't miss it.

Good to know. Khajiit may just do without it.

Yesterday I installed Fallout 3 for the first time on my new laptop- I expected some problems regarding the game and Windows 10 but there weren't any. The only issue I had was that the G.E.C.K. would crash instantly as I tried to edit an interior cell, but I read online that it should be run with Nvidia instead of the default integrated video card and this solved the problem.

Then I set up games of my eldest characters (creation-wise), namely the Hobo and Ally "Gator". With the Hobo there weren't any problems, but with Ally there was because when porting mods from my previous laptop to an external HDD and then to the new laptop, I obviously forgot to port my own custom mod which I used for editing some things in her game, most notable being her private quarters on the steamboat. With this custom mod lost, the quarters reverted to the default state so most of Ally's loot and containers were lost. Fortunately I had an old save from 2016 when I haven't yet created my mod so I had some of her loot stored in vanilla containers. I tried to re-create my mod as best as I could based on my memories of how it had been, and I also restored some of the lost loot. Some things were definitely lost in the process but I think I recovered most of the stuff.

Each criminal you pursue in the mod is based on some character, whether real-life, from movies, from mythology etc. Most references are from American history so I don't recognize them all but you're right about Uncle Chuckles being inspired by Gacy, the mod author confirmed it on the forums, when the mod was released, he was giving out kudos for every correct reference. For instance, there's a bounty on a super mutant named Prometheus and he's a behemoth obsessed with collecting flamer fuel.

Then there's Paul Potts, a reference to Pol Pot, and Freddie the child killer whose main weapon is a deathclaw hand, then there's the Burns clan led by Ma Burns (by Ma Baker)...These are just to name a few, there are tons of others, maybe you should play out the mod to see if you can get them all.

Those are indeed Regulators that came this far in search of a gold stash. They weren't exactly the friendliest guys around but then again, neither was Blondie.

Marko is the "big bad boss" of the New Vegas Bounties trilogy mod, in case you'll ever try out the mod, I'll avoid writing more about him because the author pulled such a great twist in the 3rd installment regarding Marko that I was speechless. In fact I'd say that quests are more interesting than most vanilla ones.

Wow. Rea-life references. That sounds like I'm going to have to check that out some day.

Since yesterday I've been using Realistic Wasteland Lighting for FNV, which makes the game look more vivid and crisp. I use its optional Brighter nights plugin else nights are too dark which I could cope with but only if enemies too would have troubles seeing in the night, not just my character.

Then I tried ILO - Interior Lighting Overhaul but found that it darkens interior areas way too much and not even fiddling with brightness and contrast setting of my computer didn't help much.

So instead I installed Natural ReShade, which also affects interiors but I had to increase its FilmicPass contrast setting to make the game brighter because nights would once again get too dark. Now I'll try and play with this setting, see how I like it.

Okay. I've been using Darkened Interiors, because that was one of my main things I wanted to change.

Don't forget about Pipboy Lighting Pack though. It comes with several different .esps which make for greater lighting distances. We can even make it so that our Pipboy lights up an entire mile!!! That would be too much for me though. I prefer the 30 meter version.

I use this mod for PipBoy in New Vegas.

Darkened interiors look really dark but ILO made some interiors like common rooms totally dark, so I uninstalled it.

I really like the new looks of New Vegas, nights are still quite dark and resemble visuals from Dead Money DLC but they're not too dark.

My FO3 has lately become unstable, no new mods / fixes installed whatsoever, but the game would sometimes crash immediately after loading, sometimes it would be smooth for 5-10 minutes, but then it'd crash. I've never had serious problems with CTDs in FO3 before and despite using the 4GB patcher, which is said to solve such issues, the CTDs continued. Then I read about the pcb command and surprisingly, it seems to eliminate CTDs completely if I type it in the console on the start of every session. However, on some forums I read that it's not recommended to use it too often, can anyone that's more familiar with this command than me, tell me if this is true and that I should avoid it or is it safe to use?

EDIT: I also tried searching for the so called FOSE crashdump / crash log but can't find any, it's supposed to be in the FOMM folder. Any ideas?

EDIT 2: Oops, I used the wrong thread, can one of the mods / admins please move it to the appropriate one? Thanks.

EDIT 3 by Acadian: Moved to FO3 thread.

EDIT 4: Lopov thanks Acadian.

I think PCB is short for Purge Cell Buffer. I think using it was practically a necessity in heavily modded Morrowind games, back in the day, because the mods would use so much memory the game would crash.

It has been a long time since I have looked at it and exactly what it does, so I can't so much more.

Whew! Found it! I am interested in hearing the responses on your questions, Lopov!

Thanks anyway, SubRosa. As it turned out, the PCB command helped for a little while, meaning that CTDs weren't happening as quick upon loading the game, but they did come back after a while.

Well, I may have found the culprit behind them but I'll need to do some more extensive and prolonged play-testing to see if this was the issue. In the end it looks like to be the good old mod conflict, but it took me ages (hours) to figure out what was the reason, because as I said, I've no installed new mods whatsoever in the past year or so. But I figured out that two mods that haven't been actively conflicting each other until lately, may have started to do so - namely the Bryan Wilks mod and the SCC Companion mod, on a top of it Ally is also traveling with vanilla Sergeant RL-3. I did some extensive play testing the other night and noticed that when Ally was traveling alone, no CTDs. If she was traveling with Bryan and / or RL-3, the CTDs would get more common. I disabled the SCC mod and CTDs seemed to be gone but as I said above - only time will tell if this was a real issue or not.

Huh, I think I'll have to give up, I have no idea what's causing CTDs in Ally's game. I was dubious that the SCC was behind it in the first place, but I tried to be optimistic. Today I tried disabling mods one by one, I uninstalled potentially problematic mods, I made a clean save, a fresh install --> all in vain. I think her savegame got corrupted. The game is playable for 5-10 minutes, then it freezes and CTDs. It only happens in her game, not in the Hobo's or Barlow's, so it must be something related to her save file, I assume. It never CTDs if some menu like PipBoy or waiting menu are opened, I can have them opened for an hour(tested) but if no menus are opened, it'll eventually freeze, then CTD.

I've been struggling with this issue since this morning, but so far without any result. Now I'm off to the beach to refresh myself in the waving sea, then I'll try CASM, I'll see if it'll be any better. I'll report later.

P.S.
A big Thank goes to my wife who tolerates her husband struggling with video games issue and as such spends today more time with our daughter than me.

No idea if FO is like Skyrim, but the content of the save file there means that removing mods can cause CTD's even when the mods are all OK. So trying to find a culprit that way just makes it worse. You may even have a problem because of a mod you don't have any more.

It might be a script from a deinstalled mod that is still running, and failing because the mod is no longer there. There is a tool that can find those and stop them, but I forget what it is called. I had to use it in Skyrim to kill some orphaned scripts like that. I am at work, so I cannot look it up right now.

Fallout New Vegas used to have a LOT of issues with save files becoming corrupt; even with an unmodded game.

There were certain quests that were known causers of corruptions = meeting with the Great Khan; watching the rocket ship go up to space; something about how you did the Black Mountain quest; and one that had to do with the ray gun that uses the solar energy to blast enemies.

What I started doing was making a clean save at the Doc's office before adding any mods; and keeping that save to go back to if needed. That way if that character's save files became corrupt I could just restart her on that clean save without having to reinstall the whole game.

Another thing you can try is going back before her latest save to previous saves till you find one that is stable = before the corruption took place. Delete any saves that occurred after that stable one, and just resign yourself to having to redo some things. At least that way you don't completely lose your character.

If you are in FO3; I never remember them having an issue with corrupt save files; only some issues with 64 bit computers with multiple processors = there was something you needed to do to turn off two processors or something to stabilize your game. I had to do it on mine; and it worked great after that.

So if it is FO3 then it is probably something caused by mods. But - wasn't there some built in thing in these games that your saves couldn't go past a certain number without the game becoming unstable?

(In which case; a clean reinstall and not using any higher numbered previous save files should fix the issue).


Another thing = what Ghastley said somewhere in here = if you have a mod installed that has scripts in it; removing the mod later causes instability in any of the games after Oblivion because the scripts don't remove from the save files; and those saves won't work anymore without that script still running.

So when you shut down all your mods to try and stabilize your game; you might be making the problem worse since those saves are going to continue looking for those script agendas and not finding them = they kind of frantically search repeatedly for the script in their save to the point that all the game's resources are used up in it trying to find those missing scripts and you end up with crashes. Because of the time gap from the time you start your game till it crashes = this seems like a likely candidate as your issue.

Any game after Oblivion = if you remove a mod you kind of have to start a new character to keep your game stable. Try to stay away from mods with scripts unless they are something you are not going to want to remove.

Addendum: What Ghastley and Subrosa said!

Had an odd game session now. First I was getting constant CTDs after 5-10 minutes, then I got lucky and could play for 40 minutes without problems, then again around 5 CTDs one after another.

@ghastley - yeah, I'm aware of this, but AFAIK those mods which I removed, were all minor mods, without any scripts whatsoever. I rarely use complex mods and those which are more complex, I haven't touched. Thanks anyway, I'll give it a try with the tool SubRosa suggested if she finds it.

@mALX - for me NV was rarely buggy, neither was FO3, up until now. I had occasional stutters and CTDs, but they weren't as common.

Usually I'm very careful about keeping tons of previous saves but in Ally's case my previous save is from years back and I don't feel like replaying it all again, also because of a lack of time.

I have the .ini edits required for Windows 10 but there's not any difference.

I'll make an insight into mods which I removed or deactivated.

EDIT: I'll try New Vegas Anti Crash, it has a support for FO3. According to some users', it fixed crashes that couldn't be related to anything specific. Fingers crossed.

Here is the Skyrim version of that save game cleaner. It might work on New Vegas, I do not know.

Thanks, yet I didn't manage to get it working for FO3.

Not sure if I got lucky or NVAC actually works but I played for around an hour now without any crashes, even in combat. Let's hope for the best.

So far, so good. I've been using NVAC and I also removed .ini edits that were supposed to prevent CTDs at Windows 10. The game seems to run smoother now, not sure if because of NVAC or because of removed edits. No CTDs in more than an hour.