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Seriously, how bad is Oblivion's Engine?


Sigurð Stormhand

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OK, so running a fairly large modlist, around the 200 mark including OOO MMM and Better Cities, because I like a "busy" game I started to be plagued by crashes about a year ago, increasing instability finally culminating about six months ago in a complete inability to even glance in the direction of the Waterfront.Anyway, I lost interest in trying to fix it, assuming it was some sort of mod conflict that would require a complete reinstall, but over the last week or so I've revisited OSR and Streamline, being wiser than I was then, and have managed to get 10 minutes to crash up to 60-90 minutes.My conclusion? Oblivion crashes once it has used up 1.5-1.7 of my 3.2 gigs of available RAM, because, obviously, it leaks.Reading about Skyrim needing the equivilent of OSR/Streamline out of the box without large mods or texture packs appears to have snapped something inside, even though I can actually play its decrepid ancestor again!Please assume this post ends with an ear splitting primal scream.

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1.5-1.7G is about what's expected from a 32-bit process that's not using LAA. If you've got a 64bit operating system, you can set the LAA flag on Oblivion.exe and then make use of OSR's heap replacement flags to allow the game to use up to 4GB. No matter how you slice it, the game was never designed to handle 200+ mods without help.So far as I've been able to tell, Oblivion doesn't leak. If it did, LAA wouldn't help one bit other than to make you crash at 20 minutes instead of 10. It's mod overload, pure and simple. Of course, nobody wants to hear that cold truth.Skyrim now has official LAA support built in so on a 64bit OS it can use up to 4GB without external utilities. That will buy the modding community some time, but I predict that in 3 years time we'll be cursing the fact that it isn't a fully 64bit EXE file instead, and in that case there's nothing we could do about it.

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Aaaah.Can't a man rant without being told the cold, hard truth?It's not that it crashe4s, it's the way it crashes, having used up all available memory loading stuff that I left half an hour ago.Sadly I do not have a 64bit OS, and I'm loath to get the upgrade on a machine already three years old. Were it not for the age of the components I'd be sorely tempted, as well as doubling the RAM up to 8Gigs.Still, nevermind - maybe when the economy picks up.

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Aaaah.

Can't a man rant without being told the cold' date=' hard truth?

[/quote']

Not with Arthmoor around. I've tried it too... :lol:

Like all men of venerable age he enjoys disbusing the young of the illusion they have anything original to say.
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Heh. That's because some rants honestly make no sense. Yeah yeah, I'm a killjoy or something. It just tends to bug me to no end to see people bag on the game for crashing when it's being asked to do far more than it was ever designed or expected to do. It's easily a miracle that it has survived the abuse most of us heap upon it.Especially since much of the blame lies with Microsoft not having given Bethesda realistic hardware specs on the 360 back in 2005. An ungodly number of issues can be directly pinned to that and it's amazing the game functions even in the vanilla state. Yet now we have people piling on 400+ mods and graphic replacers that strain 2GB cards and only now is the underlying game breaking under the weight.Yes, Skyrim is demanding right from the start. I expect it will only become moreso. However, at this point I'm more afraid of the hackery some of these injector modders are going to be doing than I am of hitting it with 200 CK generated mods. People will blame Bethesda for the mistakes of modders, which just isn't right.That's *MY* rant and I'm sticking to it!

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Dwip, another almost too obscure reference there.... fortunately my caffeine kicked in just in time!Nehrim seems to have one because it does. Somewhere, somehow, one of its scripts is doing bad things. Using Streamline greatly delays the onset of problems from it though. But you can't escape it entirely. They have their own internal memory purge thing but it doesn't work worth a crap.

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Heh. That's because some rants honestly make no sense. Yeah yeah' date=' I'm a killjoy or something. It just tends to bug me to no end to see people bag on the game for crashing when it's being asked to do far more than it was ever designed or expected to do. It's easily a miracle that it has survived the abuse most of us heap upon it.[/quote']On the other hand, would it have killed Beth to have spent a week a year ago re-optimising the engine after Fallout 3? Especially given that a new edition has been released since.
Especially since much of the blame lies with Microsoft not having given Bethesda realistic hardware specs on the 360 back in 2005. An ungodly number of issues can be directly pinned to that and it's amazing the game functions even in the vanilla state. Yet now we have people piling on 400+ mods and graphic replacers that strain 2GB cards and only now is the underlying game breaking under the weight.
Or with Bethesda, building a game as a 360 port before the 360 was half-finished.
That's *MY* rant and I'm sticking to it!
well, you do own this joint.
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Killed? No, but I doubt it would have been advisable to try optimizing a codebase that's already in a fragile state. Especially when as far as their obligations were concerned it worked fine. They fixed all but one of the critical bugs in the system, leaving only the animation bomb behind. THAT is something I'd have liked to see them fix.No, fault lies with Microsoft for signing developers up for launch titles without bothering to finalize the specs in a reasonable time frame. Though, yes, Bethesda can still take some blame for not rolling the game back another 6 months beyond March 2006.

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