4GB memory mode for Fallout 3?

[vometia]

Does anybody know if anyone's succeeded in getting FO3 to run using some form of large address aware thingy?

I've revisited it again lately and would love to do some serious playing, but I'd forgotten how horribly crashy it is: it's the worst of all Bethesda's games for CTDs in my experience, in spite of the competition.

Both of the main problems seem to be memory related; a frequent random crash bug that I get in the wilderness seems to be the same one that afflicted both Oblivion and Skyrim, and was resolved in the latter (kind of) by enabling the 4GB memory mode; the other really long-standing problem is the "dead cell bug" where the presence of an object with coordinates that are out of range (typically a formerly spaghettified corpse) causes a crash presumably by making the game try to allocate more memory than it has available. A similar bug was caused by the unofficial patch, where placing several objects with extreme coordinates e.g. -30,000 on the Z axis does the same thing.

Not everybody has these problems so I'm guessing it must come down to available memory, which may also be dependent on things like how many mods they have installed, the length of gameplay, additional textures, graphics resolution and so on. Which also suggests I may be able to alleviate the crashes by uninstalling stuff... but I'd rather not.

I tried enabling the "> 2GB memory" setting using CFF explorer, as well as using the GFWL remover in case that was wasting memory, but it appears that neither has had any effect. Since it's hard to play in outdoor areas for more than 10-15 minutes without a crash I'd love to find a solution, but I'm stumped!

[HeyYou]

Monitor memory usage while playing, and see if it is indeed a memory related crash. Might be something else going on there...... CFF explorer 'should' allow the game to use more than the 2Gb it is normally restricted to. Not sure if there are any other tweaks that need to be done to make it actually work.

[vometia]

I guess that would be a good start; I'm not entirely sure what figure I should be looking for, though: with Oblivion, it would tend to crash when it got to around 1.4GB rather than 2GB, which may be something to do with memory mapping (I'm never too sure how video memory is factored into the equation) or it could be the memory tables being corrupted after a certain point, since I've heard some horror stories about how badly hacked around the memory management routines are.

Windows' low-level stuff remains something of a mystery to me, though. Unix I can (just about) understand, but Windows makes my head hurt!

I guess the best way to monitor it is perhaps to put it into windowed mode so I can see the Task Manager window...?

[Jac]

I use the 4G patch for my games and haven't had that many crashes that weren't heat related. It sounds like CFF explorer will do the same thing though, but I've never used it so I'm not sure.

[vometia]

I'm never sure that just checking that one flag is all that's required, so that's a handy link to have.

Just tried it again and it crashed after just a minute with under 800MB of memory in use so I guess there's another problem somewhere. Could be a bad mod, I suppose, I found one where the format of the plugin was a complete mess, but as far as I know there's no useful information provided to track down problems so it's all trial and error until I stumble across the actual cause...

[HeyYou]

Yeah, sounds like you got something else going on there..... Just try disabling a few mods at a time, and see what happens.

[_echo]

how much system ram do you have?

[vometia]

6GB of memory; should be plenty, it's not getting close to using it up.

One thing I wonder about (with some caution, as I came to the same incorrect conclusion with Oblivion) might be something to do with levelled lists and bad spawns, since another thing that could cause random CTDs is spawning something it doesn't like. Seems unlikely it'd be something like Mart's Mutant Mod, but that's the main thing that changes wilderness beasties so I'll try to disable that; disentangling it from other subsequent mods (some "glueware" that I added myself) has proven to be an interesting challenge, though...

[_echo]

Yeah, doesnt sound like a memory issue.

[vometia]

It's looking that way. I was convinced it was as I think my Oblivion crashes were an out of memory problem (and I spent absolutely ages trying to hunt down an alternative cause!) but I'm guessing this is a mod doing something wonky. Found a few errors here and there using FO3Edit's checker, but it won't unearth some of the more subtle stuff like e.g. scripting problems (though I don't think FO3 is as crash prone as Oblivion when it comes to bad scripts, that was just an example.)

What I still think is a memory management bug is the dead cell stuff that I've had with FO3 almost since its release, which is more annoying as it makes the area unusable for the remainder of the game unless I'm prepared to put in potentially hours trying to find and disable the offending reference, and hopefully the 4GB flag will alleviate that particular problem...

[HeyYou]

Yeah, it's really unfortunate that we haven't had a save game editor since Morrowind. That saved my bacon on more than one occasion.....

[vometia]

Yeah, it's really unfortunate that we haven't had a save game editor since Morrowind. That saved my bacon on more than one occasion.....

About every six months I have a look to see if anybody has made one. I keep on being disappointed, but remain oddly optimistic. It's a shame Bethesda don't just release the file format specifications and say "do what you want with this".

I think I may just need to accept that FO3 is very wobbly and press F5 frequently. Some people seem to be a lot better at that than I am.

[vometia]

Hmm. I've disabled and reenabled a number of mods without anything interesting happening, but it appears that disabling the one that runs a periodic pcb might have done the trick: it's too early to say for certain because the crash is extremely erratic, but it did seem to run for longer this time and only stopped because I was starting to get motion sickness and quit!

The memory usage had crept up to about 1.5GB since there was no pcb being done, but I have a memory of pcb being problematic on Oblivion too: if you ran it at the wrong time (possibly the same time as it was loading another cell, though my memory is hazy) it would also ctd. Given that FO3 seems to be constantly loading stuff as you wander around, and I've now got even more of it with the BA Wasteland Restoration mod (lots of trees!) I guess the risk of pcb occurring at the same time as something being loaded into memory was quite high.

That's the theory, anyway, but with no real supporting evidence that this has been my problem: now all I need is another unexpected ctd to demolish my theory!