Fair warning: any of you waiting on the edge of your seat for 5.64, don't.
In a huge slump this week. Not sleeping, getting some pretty serious cabin fever, and am frustrated with games in general. Haven't even touched the GECK, other than to help Herculine with a container problem.
Got MMM installed, and it has fucked my game blue and tattooed it without the benefit of either lube or a reach-around. I can generally play less than an hour now before the computer runs out of memory and the game crashes.
It helped a bit when I removed that 'natural selection' nonsense; but even when it does work I'm now relegated to about 2/3 normal framerate. Barely playable. Extra stress on the system is screwing up the companion system, too; causing AI errors left and right. I think it has mostly to do with those "improved" texturesets. Not optimized or compressed or something (aside from the fact that they look like crap). The raider textures clash heavily with the Type 3 replacements already in place, too.
I'm sure it's all fixable if I break out a cauldron and copy of the Grand Grimore, or something; but to be quite frank I'm sick of having to unfuck other people's mods just to get them to be playable. I have aspirations in life other than "merge patches". I just wanted increased spawns to make things more interesting. I don't want someone's nostalgia trip back to Fallout 2. Again, we have a mod that has completely ignored its original scope and now is just a bloated pain in the ass.
Trouble is, I can't just axe the shit, or my saves won't load. Got to get into a cell that isn't affected by the mod at all (which pretty much leaves only Vault 1), wait seventeen days, stand on one foot and chant a banishing invocation while Bolero plays in the background at precisely sixty-four decibels. Assuming I don't screw up anyplace, the game MIGHT work right again.
Last time I was a dumbass and tried MMM it fucked my game up to the point that I had to delete all saves and start a new one.
Considering I've logged some sixty hours into this one and collected all but two or three bobbleheads, I'm not thrilled at that prospect.
I know how you feel. Before getting my new rig I was playing Oblivion on a Dell that had only 1 GB RAM. I could never play at a resolution higher than 800 x 600 and things like HDR or texture detail were out of the question. I'm just curious... what are the specs of your rig? There's gotta be some way to optimize something to make it run a little bit better.
ReplyDeleteWe're a ways past tweaking stage, I'm afraid.
ReplyDeleteI'm on a single core 2.4ghz Athlon 64 (but in 32 bit mode, due to Gateway being too cheap to include a 64 bit edition of windows), 1gb DDR2, and a GF8800GTS.
In case you don't have the FO3 box handy, 2.4ghz single core is bare minimum spec, and the 1gb is actually UNDER minimum for Vista (rated to require 1.5gb).
The fact that I'm an expert in ringing every ounce of performance out of a rig is all that lets me play as well as I do, anyway. I'm pretty sure "on paper" this computer isn't supposed to be able to handle 1024x768, ~75% view distance, 50% distance on objects and LOD, reflections, refractions, full HDR and specularity; not to mention the higher-than-default-res body and armor replacers. Even so, it still turns in a solid 20 - 25fps in most places. Not the sixty plus you read about in the forums, but considering that 24fps is "full motion" movie rate, and the human eye is incapable of distinguishing anything over thirty anyway, I think it's not too bad.
I could keep it working more likely than not; if I were to scale back on a few options... but I ain't gonna.
I like my hot girls, pretty guns, and stylish vault.
Fact of the matter is hardware can only be pushed so far and maintain acceptable reliability.
And for the record, if you want to know just how good I am at wringing performance out of a system?
I ran Oblivion for almost ten months on an 800mhz PIII with 416mb RAM. According to the box, the game isn't even supposed to be able to start on anything under a ghz, let alone be playable.
Sounds like you've not had a good week; I was wondering what was up, since you usually blog more often. I've honestly never understood other gamers fanatical obsession with framerates over 25-30 fps myself; doesn't that just lead to phantom performance issues, since it tends to make the game try to render things that are out of view.
ReplyDeleteReh. No week is a good week. Some just suck less than others.
ReplyDeleteTake my natural depressive tendencies, add in exhaustion, and make my prevailing hobby/distraction not work anymore, and you have an outstanding recipe for an unhappy me. I'll get back to being able to ignore it again - I always do.
I've never had a good enough system to have to worry about it, but I've read that too high a framerate causes vertical "tearing", and since FO3 scripts run on a frame-by-frame basis, it could conceivably cause script issues here and there. Switching on Vsync will lock the FPS to a maximum of your monitor's refresh rate, which is supposed to prevent all that. No idea if it actually works or not.