Having enjoyed these games for quite a while now in the rain/sleet/snow/shine of crashdom that is the gamebryo engine I, with my near zero programming experience, have taken it upon myself to fix this game. It could take years. But this game will have it's crashes reduced to 1-5% of it's current iterations number, or what I eventually deem to be acceptable.

The purpose of this thread is to gather negative feedback from those that know better; that I may know my wall in all it's nooks and crannies. If you come here to give any kinds of praise, don't bother, even if I read it, it won't help the cause. Come here and tell me why it can't be done. I need that information badly.

Fallout 3 Engine Crash Free
How Exactly:
????
I.
Determine engine related game stoppers: vanilla crashes, save game corruption, memory leaks
II.
Examine previous work done on the subject matter: Oblivion Crash prevention, CASM's non corrupted saves and save corruption avoidance
III.
Determine what features of mods cause more crashes: formID additions, loot list additions, advance scripts, additional map locations

I'm sure I will need help, and heck if this won't get discouraging, but it's gonna be done. This game is too much fun to crash the way it does. I have a dream, of sitting on my duff in five years with the best system money can buy, playing this svcker with max settings, NMC's max texture pack, high res creature models and every dang thing, overlooking a battle between 15 raiders and 15 mutants with a family of deathclaws in the middle, nuking the whole damn mess then running through the wastes to fight another 3 more of those battles, a positive ammo wasting cacophany that lasts 4-5 hours, leaving my brain frazzled and wits drained. And then I decide to put the game down for the night, not because it just crashed and ruined my good time, but because my freaking eyes are tired.

Good luck without access to the source code.

Not a chance in hell.

Thanks for the fuel.

Just keeping my head in reality.

Honestly. You said you have zilch for programming experience, so even if the source code weren't an issue, how would you get anything done?

And with the source code being an issue, how would you get anything done?

Even those who pick a random destination, still have an idea of where they are headed and how to get there.

Surprisingly enough, I can't find fault with any of Echonite's posts - because he's right. You'll get nowhere without at least some programming expertise, along with knowledge of how the game works.

Think about this - if fixing the crashes was so easy, why didn't Bethesda do it? Why hasn't a modder came along and made a magical fixer patch?

They could. But there's no point until the first serious patches are out, because small changes in engine code make for hell on earth when you're doing hooks, to fix bugs via things like fose(obse, or nvse). Once the first patches start really coming out, then you can start debugging, finding common causes, and write something that will stop normalish crashes by carrying commands through extended hooks.

Until then, it's wasted effort. Like golfing in a river. It sure looks pretty with lots of water going everywhere, but you're sure not getting any closer to the green.

In the unmodded original games neither Fallout3 nor New Vegas crash that mutch anyway. Not sure where people this take from all the time. I've only played around 40 hours in FNV yet, but I have encountered only 2 crashes during this time and I am pretty sure they were related to mod conflicts.

Also, if you plan to mess around in the fallout.exe i am pretty sure you most likely will RAISE the crash rate instead of decrease them. Also, I would surely never install a user made exe and I guess many others as well. Only if you get this game support DirectX10.... well this would be a different story

The best we can hope for is something like the Unofficial patch to fix scripting errors and things like that. But engine bugs, not a chance.

Not actually true. WeOCPS and the earlier crash prevention file from Elys made some good progress on stopping crashes in Oblivion. Using detailed error reports from users who experienced crashes they were able to determine specific places where the game crashed and cause the game to skip over those sections in order to avoid the hard crashes.

Of course they never got all of them, but some major ones were avoided this way.

And Morrowind has the Morrowind Code Patch... But we're extremely lucky to have that one. Generally we can't do much about the engine.

I have to agree here. Hopefully down the road NVSE will open up more options for Fixing Gamebryo^TM, but the most we can hope for are mods like Stutter Remover et al. I don't mean to discourage you, poopoopapa, but it will be quite the task to actually fix the monstrosity that is Gamebryo.

I don't even have issues with the PC version. I don't think it has crashed once in my 30+ hrs of play. (i know, thats not much) I think the main issues with crashing are hardware incompatabilities, and on Xbox 360, which we cannot change at all reguardless of how experience you are in coding, or if you magically gain access to the source code. I think we're going to have to sit this one out and let Obsidian fix it, which it sounds like that are trying to do. Just give them time.

No, what echonite and others have, heh, echoed is exactly what I want. Why it can't be done.

So far we have
I.
No programming experience/no source code
II.
Obsidian might be working on engine related patches
III.
Monstrous amount of work

So, obviously, I need to get a hold of the source code and learn to understand it. I fully intend to reach obsidian and bethesda, hopefully gamebryo before they explode into smaller bits and discuss what was never done and what should be done with the engine. I can surmise that obsidian/beth will be releasing patches per DLC as they did before, fixing and breaking things as they go. But FO:3 is what it is, and will not change unless someone else changes it.

Speaking of the crash prevention software released by elys and wisdom earle, has anyone any contact with elys? I just reached wisdome earle and am beginning to understand what I need to learn exactly to accomplish what he did. Whether that will be enough for my purposes remains to be seen.

@yoss
well it does crash alot, NV less so but still, even without mods its hell of an unstable game

@OP
dont forget that you will not have access to gamebryo documentation docs additonally to the source code, gamebryo only gives you docu when you give them 250 grand for whatever reason anyone would give em money
most likely you will also have to crack and modify the game exe which is not illegal per se but will get you banned from the forum most likely

Personally from the checking of a dozen or so machine of friends, which were having CTD's they were all related to either codec issues, to software conflicts or hardware issues(either failing, or configured improperly). Unstable? No I wouldn't say so, not nearly as bad as say oblivion or morrowind at release. That was bad. Actually to point out that the same engine has been in use since Morrowind(8 or more closely to 10ish years including dev times) has something to say about it's longevity and scaling abilities of it, despite all the problems.

So you just kinda made a pointless thread to complain about why/how you cant fix the game?

No, I need the information related to why it can't be done to figure out how it can be done. So far I've received many problems to solve, and many reasons to solve them. Keep the negativity coming, I feed off of it.

So... We are supposed to discuss things that can't be done so they somehow can be done?

I guess there's no harm discussing dreams... Disclaimer: I don't know a whole lot about the following so those who do feel free to correct me.

Changes to the exe might work in a Morrowind Code Patch style: A program which patches the changes into the exe, without having to release a custom exe. But that's assuming there are obvious flaws in the code that someone can spot and fix. And New Vegas is a lot more complicated than Morrowind.
And whether this would even work with an encrypted Steam exe is another issue.

On top of that it's not really smart to try something like that on a game that is still actively being updated. The Morrowind Code Patch came out 6 years after the game was originally released.

Different games, different issues. You can't even say that Oblivion's and New Vegas's crashes share the same crashing issues. I doubt that any of that crash prevention stuff for Oblivion can be applied to New Vegas.

Conclusion? Leave it to Obsidian, at the very least until they're completely done with the game.

Your best post yet, Talkie.

Getting source code isn't going to happen. Instead, you'd probably want to learn how to program, how things work in memory, disassemble an executable (and make use of the results). From there it should be smooth sailing.

Aha, a post I wrote none of?

wow you really over simplified that. But you also forgot that he will probably need to learn assembly language as well as C++ and may want to buy a copy of IDA Pro.

Keep it coming full swing.

Quick question, C++ or visual C++?

C++


Listen, You CAN NOT get into the source code. Obsidian/BethesdaSW would never allow it. BethesdaGS has been working on it for around a decade, they are not about to let some random person on the internet tamper with it. And if you think contacting them will yield anything, you are also mistaken. They have their own people, and have no interest in discussing it with random people on the web.

All we are doing is talking. It will change nothing.

/thread