WARNING: Do not disable V-Sync

[ThomasKaira]

I recently had to restart my Skyrim game due to finding out that my game calendar was about 10 hours out of sync with the clock. This has been confirmed to be caused by disabling Skyrim's native V-Sync, and can potentially cripple the game's AI for day-specific packages.

Other bugs that can result from disabling V-Sync include flashing water and the physics going haywire if your framerates get too high, but those can be alleviated by using an external FPS capper. The de-synched calendar, unfortunately, cannot be fixed, so you will need to keep the V-Sync on in order to prevent this one from happening.

Of course, this means you are going to need to deal with mouse lag because of this, but I feel that that is the lesser of the two evils at this point (between a bit of control difficulty and a potentially crippling engine bug, I'll take the former every time). You can help alleviate this by using an FPS Capper to cap your framerates at wherever your average framerate is located (I set mine to 45) and enabling Triple Buffering in your GPU control panel.

But please, do not disable the V-Sync, it can really screw your game up if you do.

Edited November 20, 2011 by ThomasKaira

[vometia]

That's one of the more creative bugs I've heard of lately. I mean, how on earth did they... how can... The mind boggles.

[Arthmoor]

Keep in mind. Without hacking the ini file, you can't turn vsync off. There's no option for it. It's incredibly amusing that they can't seem to get this stupid Gamebryo stuff to work and won't wake up to the fact that they need an ACTUAL new engine instead of a frankensteined modification of a broken system. There's a reason nobody else in the industry still uses it.

Er, ok. So it's also come to light that doing this via your graphics driver will ALSO cause the bug to manifest. Gah. I sure hope my game hasn't been screwed over by that because that IS one thing I have the driver override as a hard setting.

Edited November 20, 2011 by Arthmoor

[ThomasKaira]

This was just posted on the BGSF boards by SomeWelshGuy, so I'm reposting it here:

How to fix your time of day being out of sync

1. Set iPresentInterval in SkyrimPrefs.ini to 1
   
2. Load the save, use the wait command and observe what hour the game will change to a new day, mine was sometime within 7PM.
   
3. Once you know within what hour the day change occurs, use the wait command to get as close as possible before the day changes (I waited until 5:48PM, another hour and the day changed). Without using the wait command, sit and watch time go by until you know what exact minute the borked day change takes place (for me it was 6:44PM).
   
4. Once you know what exact time it happens at, convert that time to a 24 hour clock. So I changed 6:44PM to 18:44.
   
5. Now for some maths. See how far from 00:00 the next day the time updates. So mine was 5 hours, 16 minutes early (24 - 18.44).
   
6. Get the number of minutes you have, in my case 16, and multiply that by 0.6. I got 9.6.
   
7. Replace the old value you had for minutes with the new value, taking the decimal point out. So I had 5.16 before, my new value is now 5.96 (replacing .16 with the new .96).
   
8. Open the console and type "Set GameHour to GameHour + VALUE", where value is the number you just worked out. In my case, 5.96.
   

This will get your day to update normally at exactly 12AM.

Here's hoping the eventual Skyrim Stutter Remover might have a fix for the horrendous V-Sync issues. I can't believe Beth did not forsee anyone turning it off, I mean, it's right there in your GPU control panel.

Either that or they got incredibly lazy with the PC port.

Edited November 20, 2011 by ThomasKaira

[Arthmoor]

Yeah, mine is uber-screwed right now too and all I did was turn vsync off in CCC. It's been off since the card was installed. I don't like how it jacks frame rates, but this Skyrim thing has come completely out of nowhere. Someone seriously needs to get fired for this one.

[vometia]

Oh, bugger. I've just noticed mine is also 5-6 hours out of synch and I didn't even play with the vsync settings. Nice coding, Bethesda. Again.

Edit: actually I may have fiddled with it, now that I think about it. And shouldn't the minutes calculation be done by dividing by 0.6...?

Edited November 22, 2011 by vometia

[vometia]

Now it's 22 hours out of synch; this is rather depressing. Not sure if the fix has had unintended consequences, if this is one of those "bugs that never go away", or if there's some other problem behind it...

Edit: actually, I wonder if it's something to do with changing the timescale variable: this has always been safe enough in the past and is nice for those of us who think the default game day is much too short, but I guess it's not unlikely that it could have a bearing on this problem.

Edited November 22, 2011 by vometia

[vometia]

... and again. I'm finding the time and date won't stay in synch for more than a few game hours. I guess I'll just have to live with it; for all I know, it's been this way all the time I've been playing anyway...

[Arthmoor]

For what it's worth, I haven't touched the timescale and my calendar is still getting whacked, and that's with vsync allowed to operate in the driver now too. Something else is afoot here.

[vometia]

I suspect it's probably been that way from the outset (the odd times when the vendors' funds replenish may be evidence of this) but I'm only noticing now because my it's caught my attention. It's hard to say how much effect it'll have on things like packages, but even if it's not catastrophic, it can't be helping especially.

[Arthmoor]

Well it cost me a bonus during the DB quest but other than that it only seems to be causing people to be up and about at ridiculous times of the day. Which is the weird thing. The TIME (ie 5pm, 8am, etc) is correct. Sunrise and sunset still happen at the correct moments. It's just the day name that flips, but that's one of the global variables so messing with it in weird ways can break stuff.

[vometia]

I suppose it's possible that the package scheduler uses a combination of gamehour and gamedayspassed (I assume the latter is used to derive the game date and day of the week, anyway) to work out when something should run so depending on how the calculation is done, I suppose that could potentially explain why things are running at the wrong time of day. But the mind boggles that two important time variables are apparently calculated using two completely different and unsynchronised mechanisms...

[vometia]

Just had a look at those variables, seems a potentially easier way of getting them in synch is to divide gamehour by 24 and replacing the fraction of gamedayspassed with that value, and probably incrementing the number of days if it otherwise causes it to go backwards. But I'm not totally convinced that tampering with either variable is completely safe.

Edit: it may also be a coincidence, but I noticed on one occasions when they really didn't agree, I had a CTD whenever I tried to enter an interior cell. Very persistent and the usual Oblivion tricks like turning off AI didn't fix it, though fast travelling did. But there may be no connection at all.

Edited November 23, 2011 by vometia

[vometia]

Hmm, it occurs to me that it's just as easy to do it the other way round and derive gamehour from gamedayspassed by multiplying its fractional part by 24, which may be safer.