Good News, Bad News

Good news:

I have made progress on the issues plaguing my ability to play FO3 for more than ten minutes at a go.

Had an incident with the GECK earlier, where the slowdown occurred. I was busy scripting at the time, and too hard-headed to stop and reload, so powered on. The hard drive was making a ton of those little working clicks (Emachines don't have an IDE light; I shit you not). Few minutes later, it goes back to normal.

Was playing the game, and sure enough, it slowed down again. Kept going - muttering profanity the entire time - and it did eventually clear up. Of course, it did it again five minutes later... but the whole thing is starting to feel like some kind of a caching issue.

Cache fills up, performance goes to shit, computer spends five minutes clearing cache; things go back to normal until cache is full again.

Unfortunately, this means that either my system RAM module or GPU are probably fucked up and in the early stages of dying. Going to have to look around and find some testing utilities.

What gets me, is that it doesn't do it on 178.24 series drivers, but does do it on any subsequent version. So I'm leaning towards the GPU.

Especially since I haven't been getting any BSoD's, which in my experience are always present when you have a pooching RAM module.

Weirder still... it only does it in Fallout 3. Was playing Sins of a Solar Empire the other morning for awhile (which is not kind to a system's video components, despite being an RTS) and had no issues at all.

Ditto for CoD4. Ran a botmatch a couple days ago without incident.

Going to have to dig out my Oblivion disc, and see if it's a Gamebryo thing, or just an FO3 thing.


Bad News:

V2 of the remodel is not as ready as I had hoped. Switches all work, but that strip script is giving me trouble. It works fine on a lone companion, but when two or more try to use it within a second or two of each other, only one will re-dress. The one that stays naked's inventory is intact, they just don't re-equip it properly. I'm not sure why this is. The engine is supposed to handle multiple trigger events on subsequent frames, so unless my game is still skipping them, I'm baffled as to what's going on. There's also some tile that needs realigning. S'what I get for doing coordinate math in my head at 0530. I also may have went a tish heavy on the special effects. Unlike my old Bedroom Redecorated mod, the NosCo Vault 1 Remodel will not be extraordinarily friendly to low-end PCs. Ironic since I use one.

It sure it pretty, though.

Companions definitely love the sauna. What is it with women and steam rooms? Oh, well. They lounge naked and don't care if I watch, so I'm not complaining.

Need to work on the bedroom proper's lighting, too. It's fine at the edges, but lacking over the bed in the center. Easy fix, though - just drop in another chandelier and a light to go with it, add said light to lightswitch script, and vee-oh-lah.

Probably going to have to break down and put in room bounds and occlusion planes to help offset the resource hit from all that water.