I read a few times now that the Havok engine has a supposed memory leak issue. Can anyone really confirm this? I just recently rented another Havok title, "Force Unleashed II" and never had a freeze issue with it. Where are people getting this information from?

Their pulling it from their "you know whats" IMO. I have played many other Havok titles as well and have never ran into even remotely the same amount of frame rate drops, freezes, or stuttering in general.

Didn't 'The Orange Box' by Valve/EA also suffer freezes, frame rate drop and stuttering on the PS3 too? Admittedly 'The Orange Box' used a heavily modified version of havok.. Still I never encountered any problems when I use to have 'The Orange Box' on the PS3. If the game is suffering a memory leak (and I do believe it does) then maybe it really is the Gamebyro engine.

I had a few slowdown moments while playing "The Orange Box" on PS3, but that was peanuts compared to the freezing/slowdown of this Lag/Freeze-fest. The entire thing was just a rushed project that could have easily had these issues addressed and at least somewhat fixed before launch to make it more playable/enjoyable.

I think your right about Gamebyro. Many other games use havok and I haven't seen people get worked up about crashes or corrupted data. Usually when you hear that its associated with Oblivion,Fo3, and NV and they all use the Gamebyro engine.

You are comparing a 100+ hour gameplay open sandbox game with a linear game that can be easily completed in less than 8 hours.


The reason there are not more games like Fallout is that they are much harder to produce. Each level or area in a game like Force purges a majority of the cache when you load from one area to the next.

In a game like Fallout, it has to remember everything you do from load to save. It loads up everything you look at, move around, open, close, pick up, drop, kill, shoot at, talk to, you get the picture.

Think about what Obsidian did with Fallout New Vegas compared to Fallout 3.

1. They took out big areas. No Megatons, Tenpennys, subways full of ghouls, big buildings, random encounters, etc.

2. They got rid of all mob fests. No Slaver area with a bohemoth, No Airfield with an army of Enclave to fight, no end battle with more than 4 or 5 guys at a time.

Now ask yourself why would they do that? Why put zone doors on tents at Camp Golf? Why no epic battle at the end, other than a carefully scripted battle consisting of a handful of enemies at a time? Why cut the Strip into three really small sections, completely ruining the feel of the area? Why limit to almost none the random encounters? Why are there no big battles during the game like the above mentioned air field and slaver canyon?

The patch fixed script and graphics errors.

I dont know what settings you can fiddle with on consoles but to make the game about 99% more stable on the pc what I do is turn off ambient music.

Havok is a physics engine. It doesn't work that way

Orange Box was pretty much fine on PS3. There were some moments in epiosde 2 where it slowed down a bit but never unplayable, that was completely overblown by the internet.

I've never heard of making the PC game more stable by disabling ambient music. I don't see how that would even be related to the stability of the game, the audio is all mp3

trust me it has worked since morrowind. I have used this tweak in fonv and it massively reduced my crashes and freezes.

I Wish making the console version stable was that easy.

PREACH BROTHER!!! :rock: :mohawk: :rock:



You never know it may just be! I am gonna at least give it a try.

I went and tried it. I don't know if its just a coincidence, but some of the stuttering and hiccups in the game are gone plays some what smoother.

As was mentioned HAVOK is a physics engine which should not be causing the issues that are being experienced within the game. It has absolutely nothing to do with the game saving states of things where loot is etc. etc.

@1: Ok, they took out big areas and included tons of zones, did it accomplish anything? Answer: No, it is more unstable than FO3 ever was, more zones would actually create more of a problem for saving loot locations things done etc. because instead of it being able to remember where everything was in one large area, like let's say if Forlorn hope if it had no zones to go into tents, it has to remember where everything was inside separate zones for forlorn hope making it have to fetch data more when you change into those zones.

@2: So they took out large groups of enemies, and the end battle was a complete joke, did it accomplish anything? Answer: Again, No. the Hoover Dam sequence still had a bunch of slowdown, if not the same amount as the Endgame sequence of FO3 and as you mentioned it had like 4 or 5 guys on screen at a time, maybe. I am playing on Very Hard and had a harder time clearing the Van Graffe's than I did with the "End Battle" which honestly wasn't a battle at all, it was more like taking candy from a baby.

As I said the entire game was a rushed project. The crafting system was unfinished. The story was very limp. The end battle was even limper than the story. Waaay too many quests had major issues. Damage calculations don't seem to work properly (How can a character wearing something like leather armor survive a sneak attack headshot from the Anti-Materiel Rifle) I have had <---that happen too many times for it just to be a small glitch. And since it is a rifle that ignores equipment (Anti-Materiel and not Anti-Material) it should definitely do what it's supposed to. People really need to stop defending this abomination of work. The more people defend it the more developers will say to themselves "We can continue releasing unfinished games and finish them with patches because we have supporters regardless..." which is crazy! Most, and I am saying most not all, these issues should have been found pre-launch and the memory leak or whatever is causing the slowdown, stuttering, freezing, and crashing should have been looked into quite thoroughly.

Ok, as I've stated before to folks that keep hoping for a fix to the freezing problem. Good luck to you.



It's not going to happen. They have investigated as much as they can and what I stated is how they tried to get around the memory cache problem.. I also said it didn't to them much good since imop FLNV freezes as much if not more that fallout 3.


Fallout 3 still has the exact same issues. Exact.

I've been telling people what they can do to limit the freezing since Oct 19th and will continue to as long as this game holds my attention. I suspect that like me, most of the 5 million people that bought the game are actually through with it and as soon as another game takes up their time, will be done with this one.


The "Major" 20 megabyte patch addressed scripting errors, graphics glitches and that's it.

Here's a simplistic example.. you know, like Jesus would do...


Take Oblivion. That's the game engine. You make a mod for it. Some characters using the premade skins and such. Some dungeon levels of your own design. That's Obsidian.

Now people play the game with your mod. They can't get our of your dungeon, because you forgot to put in a door. They can't talk to the guy you put in the cave, because you forgot to put in script to handle the encounter. The game crashes if you stay in the cave longer than 5 minutes.

The first problem is a design flaw. You can fix that. The second is a scripting error. You can fix that. The third is a programming problem with the main game engine which you didn't write. You can try to fix it with some kind of work around, like forcing a player exit from the cave before the five minute problem occurs, wich isn't really solving the base problem, it's just avoiding it, or you can leave it as is and hope the players just finish the cave normally in under 5 minutes.


I know... it's really simplistic, but that's what a lot of people haven't got out of this. They tried to get around the cache problem by making FLNV smaller as I demonstrated in my above post. It didn't work, or maybe it did to some degree and we just don't realize how bad it could have been had they not done this.

Again..
1. Save your game and exit if you experience any abnormal play at all. Slow pip boy, Slow Vendors, Stuttering after zoning in. Longer load times. Anything like that.
2. Don't play more than an hour at a time without resetting your ps3. I recommend 30 minutes, or at least that's how I do it.
3. Never load a game from inside the game itself. If you want to start from a load, always do it clean from a reset ps3 and game.
4. If your game does freeze, absolutely never shut the ps3 off with the power button in the back of the console. This can brick your console.

This should limit the cache related freezes to a minimum. It won't stop them all, but it's better than doing nothing. I don't say Bethesda/Oblivion shouldn't have released a better game. I am pretty angry with them that they did. However, in the real world, the game I have is the only one that's going to come along, so I do what I can to minimize the problems.

I see what you are saying, and I understand that Obsidian has no control over the actual game engine, so what should have happened is that the creators of the engine should have immediately started trying to fix the problems with it if they were planning on using the engine in future releases. Whether it be a HAVOK engine problem Gamebryo whatever the engine that has problems needs to be addressed, or seeing as though new engines could be created that could have been an option as well. Basically I do all the things that you stated like resetting the system etc. etc. but none of us should have to do this crap. Oblivion (at least on my end) never had even close to as many problems as FO3 and FO:NV. So until they are able to release something that can prevent my and other peoples frustration with this all I am going to do is try and get all the trophies and then it's a shelved game, and most probably for good, if they leave it the way they left FO3.

Yep, I agree 100% with that stuff. I have supported this game company for more than a decade. It's pretty annoying that they decided to farm out FLNV to Obsidian to try and seperate themselves from this exact issue. Just like you, Oblivion was pretty stable for me, both on the PS3 and on the PC. Between me and my kid, I bet we've pretty much done every kind of character you can do on Oblivion and Morrowind. I don't know if it's the difference in texture loads or what, but Fallout 3 was for sure much worse and FLNV even more crash prone.

I did what you suggest and I plat'd the game twice. Two seperate sign ons and I haven't put the game back in the console in 2 weeks.