Depends what you want... if you want perfect VATS go for v1.0 + fake patch otherwise v1.4.

I'm just wondering: How does one roll back a patch? I'm running 1.4 and I heard there's a lot of crap in that too.

Well, in any case I prefer Bullet Time mod instead of VATS, so it will be 1.4
Thank you

I agree 100% with Tarrant here, however I somehow think that Bethesda doesn't do Any QA at all on Mods.

Mods are a pain in the butt because they are not standardized as compared to how Beth makes everything else - and they are probably spammed now having to QA all of the DLC's (their own mods), which I'm sure increases testing time for all releases now.

If I make my guess right, Bethesda's QA is probably testing a mod or two for the first time because of this very issue.

Bleh, I'm not upgrading (ever) unless this is fixed. VATSs is very nice, but 1.5 effectively eliminates the modding community - I know that can't be intentional or desired.

Quarn, Great work on discovering and posting this early - I hope that Bethesda can do something about this one, or I don't see much point in working mods anymore.

M

If I don't use 1.5, will I be able to get broken steel..?

Yes you can, you'll just have to follow the usual procedure of copying the esm and bsa files from the Live! DLC folder into the Fallout 3\data directory and activating them in the launcher.
Oh, and probably deactivate GfWL, because you'll the game lacks the achievement detection stuff, which might lead to problems.

Should I use fake patch or 1.4 for that? Or doesn't it matter which?

damm. just patched. does somebody know how i can reverse patch back to 1.4? [censored]:new version of fose only works with 1.5. why 1.5 is reallt bugged.

It's almost like some programmers on the Dev Team just can't resist tweaking random things like VATS and the reference mechanism in a failed effort to tune the game when they're only supposed to be changing specific things.

I actually program for a living and one of the things I have noticed is that there are many co-dependent bugs. I have seen programs run correctly (or almost correctly) with a critical bug which should cause havoc. You fix the bug, everything is stable and works as expected in a test environment; your release the program to the real world and random sh*t starts to happen. You get a request to fix the problem "DR"; you find another problem. And sometimes it fixes everything and sometimes the process repeats. This is very easy to do in c/c++. What I suspect happened: Fallout 3 uses a lot of middleware such as the gamebyro engine. So when they fixed the LOD, it probably changed the calls to the engine and for whatever reason this call is failing when mods are used. It could also be a "simple" memory allocation error. The truth of the matter is that when you are programing in the belly of the beast weird stuff happens. Yes all programs should bug free but they aren't no matter the best intentions of the devs; and it are also dependent on a lot of other libraries and other things (codecs, the Microsoft dynamic link libraries, video driver, sound drivers, etc) being correct.

Huh?
FOSE v1.1 beta6 provides support for:
Retail DVD and Steam builds 1.0.0.15, 1.1.0.35, both versions of 1.4.0.6, and 1.5.0.22.
GECK build 1.1.0.36.

That's so true... Fix one bug and you create 2 new ones.

If you use the fake patch you have to add the bsa files to the .ini for them to load, otherwise there's no problem using the fake patch, and about all the changes made are integrated into it, plus the unofficial patch.

well, send a angry mail to bethesda. hope if the will fix it. (i don't think so because some guy will just say ctrl+a and delete)

Something tells me people only read the last page of a thread a little too often. GStaff said he has told the team, so it's out of our hands. Well, out of end user hands. They always have it on their hands, even when it's complete sh*t. Speaking of which, don't shake a gamesas testers hands.

Oh, and as one person mentioned, the whole issue might have been caused by something completely different(since bugs don't play by any set of rules we know of), so it might not have been even a mistake they made, it could have been a side effect to a bugfix. Programs can run fine with tons of bugs in the code, with no errors during testing, but if you start fixing them, sometimes crazy stuff happens that you might not notice until you've f*cked up something vital.

I think that the hunch someone had of this issue being caused by a new mechanism, used to prevent savegame bloating, really might be right. After all, caching and purging is probably the major issue in Oblivion and Fallout 3, since most of the frequent crashes happen exactly when that is done, for example the codec incompatibility and background hard drive use ones.

I meant the VATS issue might have been caused by some other bug fix, it's pretty much fact that the current issue is with non-persistent references just being ruined(in everything but ESM files, anyway) by some not so bright move by Beth. It wouldn't look like a problem at first, because they test with core stuff I'd guess(no mods are done in their fashion, and many mods are different, so how do you know which one would break in what way?), and they wouldn't have time to test things that shouldn't even have issues(HaVoK data on items missing after reload? Can't activate items after reload? Who would think to test things after a reload? That's like guessing what's in my pants right now, which no one here could do because 1) no one knows me all that well, if at all 2) those who do know me know that I'm crazy enough to place random things in my pants{Is that a rod of wonder in your pants, or are you just happy to see me?}), so most of the problems that the latest patch has are not something that could be found in a standard testing environment, and who has more workers, Beth or the Modder community? They need us to find bugs that they missed, and alert them nicely. Sure, I'd love to place a note on a brick and toss in through a gamesas testers window with all the latest bugs and how they are caused, but I don't have any bricks or rubber bands. Plus, finding them would be a [censored], and I'm lazy. I'd much rather just PM them.

Ah, yes. But that surely is nigh impossible to deny - after all they don't sit down and say 'Hey, let's break a core gameplay element!'.
Otherwise, the only thing I'd ask Beth is to test one, probably the, feature only the PC version has, and do it thoroughly. I think they absolutely should, since mods are the one thing that keeps gamers interested in their games right now, even years after many games normally would have dwindled into, hehe, oblivion. And, big one, the compilation date of the patch is somewhere last month, so someone should probably have noticed, if they don't shut down QA over that time, that is.

About this... I've noticed this bug waaay before I patched to 1.5. Whenever I enabled a mod that added non-persistent creatures (Ex: Behemoth Ants, D6 Wastland Boss Pack, etc) my game would experience the exact same crash described above. I even remember one modder creating a "boss monster addon" had to quit because he couldn't find a way around this problem. (And I've seen some topics on this board about solving this issue which, if I remember correctly, were inconclusive.)

Now I'm not sure if this says that previous patches had similar incompatibilities, or that these mods cause the same issues as 1.5, but it may be worth looking into.

EDITED : Reason - I was being thick

I can't say I understand this. I was using 1.4 up until 1.5 came out, and then I patched, so 1.4 is what I'm used to. VATS is positively better in 1.5, for me. That sick freeze-up when starting vats is, by-and-large, gone. I think one time I saw really weird vats percentages, so it's not perfect, but yeah. Who defines what they are supposed to be changing? I appreciate that VATS is now acting better.

I've noticed other things that both the 1.4 and 1.5 patch have put in that are nice. Enemies/followers move much better in fights and it's more fluid-looking. I mentioned some other things elsewhere.

So far I like what 1.5 has done for my game, but see, the GECK is not set up to handle an environment where it's necessary to force persistant refs on every single thing that someone may drop into an exterior cell. That box isn't automatically checked, and there isn't even a batch function for it. And apparently, not checking that box in the case of living NPCs can cause a savegame to become unplayable. So, that setup is really not right, the GECK doesn't support that deal well enough. I'm not disagreeing with that. But I'm also not willing to act like that patch is a giant piece of [censored] because it's not. It's just got a problem.

I have only one request for further patches: A FULL CHANGE LOG. I hate not knowing what small things were changed, what errors were fixed, what tweaks they are trying out, what discrete things that you wouldn't notice unless you knew what you were looking for they did(like with VATS, the issue in 1.35 was caused not only by the delay, but also a FoV choice), and a area where you can see what the fixes fixed even if it was a very important quest or something that you should keep quiet about(because I hate vague descriptions of vital fixes).

well, not nice. can i downgrade my game back to 1.4?

Seconded. But Beth is pretty secretive, I guess we won't see something like that coming before the day Pete Hines always states what the devs are doing right now. As in, when pigs fly. ^_^

I have reinstall,
switch to 1.0+Fake patch....

thanks "1.5 bug" information....