I played my assassin for a few hours last night without a single CTD (would happen within an hour prior to the LAA patch.
TES V: Skyrim
- Thread starter Frank
- Start date
Personally I don't understand how the public reacts to games. some are lambasted as buggy when they actually are fairly darn stable and others like skyrim are not stable at all, yet people just smile and whistle about it.
For me the game was actually less stable recently than at launch, and I was assuming that was probably due to my fudging with the .ini files so much. Or it could be due to 1.1 and 1.2 patches. I'm just glad it's more stable now with the LAA update.
People are more likely to forgive a "go anywhere, do anything, at whatever time you want" game rather than a "simple" corridor shooter.
Saying that, I just past 150 hours in Skyrim, with very few bugs.
Good grief, I might be at 30 hours and I'm on my 3rd character (who, as an assassin, just discovered what was loaded on Cicero's broken-down wagon my 2nd toon passed).
My third character, which I am going to create the next year is going to be an archer. I explained the whole story here:
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?p=1607622#post1607622
I want to save Roggvir, like in this video:
But I wonder if, in order to have the best bows, I should increase my Smithing skills and so on, in a similar manner melee warriors do with their items, or it's more about Alchemy, which I love.
On another subject, the official trailer of the game has surpassed the 10,000.000 views mark.
Link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjqsYzBrP-M
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?p=1607622#post1607622
I want to save Roggvir, like in this video:
But I wonder if, in order to have the best bows, I should increase my Smithing skills and so on, in a similar manner melee warriors do with their items, or it's more about Alchemy, which I love.
On another subject, the official trailer of the game has surpassed the 10,000.000 views mark.
Link:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjqsYzBrP-M
I'm at about 130 hours and while I've found only 1, can't progress with the quest bug (NPC in an unaccessible location), the games pretty horrible in terms of bugs. It reminds me of the pre WOW MMORPG's which were shipped in a clear Beta state, that's no longer feasible because WOW changed expectations, that president has yet to be set for single player large scale open world games I guess.
Without the LAA flag set my copy would crash every 2 hours. I still don't understand why every developer doesn't just set the damn compiler option, no bodies used the top bit of an address to flag anything since about 1995.
At some level it's unfortunate they get away with it, since they now have no motivation to do a better job going forwards. "You get what you reward" as the adage goes.
People forgive it, because despite the bugs and the horrible UI it's still a fantastic game with an ungodly amount of content. It's the most enjoyable game I've played in probably 5 years.
Are you just rushing through? Im at 150hours on my first character, and I've only done 5 of the 18 main quests.
Mind you, I did spend 3 hours in Blackreach. That place is GORGEOUS!
30 hours on 3 characters? Do you level past 5-10? I don't understand how you could achieve this in Skyrim. I'm at about 150 hours on 1 character.
I only finished the main story with my first toon. I got my 2nd one, a orc barbarian, to around 20th level, barely out of Act 1, though he had finished the Companions quest line, before getting bored whacking everything with a warhammer. My 3rd toon is 8-9th level, just started him a few days ago. Did the Thalmor embassy and just got into the Dark Brotherhood.
Yep, the guy is quite amusing -unlike the guy in the video speaking about the new UI mod- and he was completely stumped for an answer, a great WTH. The "I am pushing you" line brought me a smile too. My favourite part is after the nerdrage fit when the guy shouts: "Fresh fish!!", "Fresh fish!!" after Roggvir collapsed. I noticed the load times when launching a previously saved game are really fast compared to my Xbox 360.
@ERP, I don't understand all the technical terms but I can tell you I am quite surprised that I didn't even experience a single crash on my Xbox 360. I am not holding my breath, but if it didn't happen until now it is highly unlikely it will ever happen, fortunately. I am on my second character, I started the second when I was level 20 with my first one, and I am now level 17 with my current magician. I barely touched the main story quest with either character, too. I also didn't have any important bug. But then, that's too simplistic, given the fact some people have experienced crashes or performance issues in different platforms. It has been an awesomely fine fantasy role-playing experience for me until now.
@ERP, I don't understand all the technical terms but I can tell you I am quite surprised that I didn't even experience a single crash on my Xbox 360. I am not holding my breath, but if it didn't happen until now it is highly unlikely it will ever happen, fortunately. I am on my second character, I started the second when I was level 20 with my first one, and I am now level 17 with my current magician. I barely touched the main story quest with either character, too. I also didn't have any important bug. But then, that's too simplistic, given the fact some people have experienced crashes or performance issues in different platforms. It has been an awesomely fine fantasy role-playing experience for me until now.
Yay 1.4! Boo CTD's!
Not a single CTD since the update, even fully tweaked/modded. Nice performance boost, too.
My mods are as follows:
Realistic Water Texture
Enhanced Night Skybox
Enhanced Flora
Enhanced Distant Terrain
I'm forcing AO through the Nvidia CP, and 16x AF. Game looks immense. I'll post screens.
I saw a mod for new shaders. Looked pretty cool, I should check it out.
Not a single CTD since the update, even fully tweaked/modded. Nice performance boost, too.
My mods are as follows:
Realistic Water Texture
Enhanced Night Skybox
Enhanced Flora
Enhanced Distant Terrain
I'm forcing AO through the Nvidia CP, and 16x AF. Game looks immense. I'll post screens.
I saw a mod for new shaders. Looked pretty cool, I should check it out.
I am away so cannot play, but I logged less than 40 hours so far and the first 2 weeks in Dec it seemed I quit playing each time simply because of a crash to desktop.
I never touched the ini files. I had quests break and had to get the console involved to get out of them. Still I really don't mind that much, but I also don't always understand the furor some people get themselves into. I always like going where I am not expected though. I got a horse and rode to the throat of the world to begin with just because it was the top of the map. So I expect a few things to be borked.
I played quite a bit yesterday, post-patch, and nary a single crash, touch wood. Other issues remain, including wonky follower pathing and so on, but at least one of the biggest legitimate gripes seem to have been dealt with. Or at least postponed long enough that you quit the game of your own volition before it happens, I dunno.
Well, for a slightly technical analysis of LAA and why it likely increases stability, let me pontificate:
In my mind, the only reasonable answer as to why allowing LAA would produce a more stable game would be that the instability is caused by memory fragmentation. With memory fragmentation, as the game periodically allocates and deallocates bits in memory, after a while you end up with memory stored in a very irregular fashion, with gaps all over the place. So even if, for example, the game is using 1.2GB of memory, that memory may be splattered all over the place, using a span of 2.3GB. And then if the game requests some new memory, and can't find a space in memory large enough to handle it, it may just crash.
So, if you move from 2GB to 4GB, how does the fragmentation problem change? Unfortunately, that depends upon a lot of details I am not privy to. But my naive expectation is that the relationship is not linear. That is, the doubling of the memory available is likely to dramatically increase the amount of time until there is a crash. So if it crashed after four hours of play time before, it may now take 16 hours. Or it may be impossible to crash due to fragmentation alone, just because there isn't enough data that Skyrim ever stores at any one time that it can fragment enough at 4GB to crash.
At any rate, Bethesda *could* have handled this by simply sacrificing a bit in game load time to delete and reload nearly all game data when the player loads a new save, and potentially does it again from time to time when the player transitions to a new area.
In my mind, the only reasonable answer as to why allowing LAA would produce a more stable game would be that the instability is caused by memory fragmentation. With memory fragmentation, as the game periodically allocates and deallocates bits in memory, after a while you end up with memory stored in a very irregular fashion, with gaps all over the place. So even if, for example, the game is using 1.2GB of memory, that memory may be splattered all over the place, using a span of 2.3GB. And then if the game requests some new memory, and can't find a space in memory large enough to handle it, it may just crash.
So, if you move from 2GB to 4GB, how does the fragmentation problem change? Unfortunately, that depends upon a lot of details I am not privy to. But my naive expectation is that the relationship is not linear. That is, the doubling of the memory available is likely to dramatically increase the amount of time until there is a crash. So if it crashed after four hours of play time before, it may now take 16 hours. Or it may be impossible to crash due to fragmentation alone, just because there isn't enough data that Skyrim ever stores at any one time that it can fragment enough at 4GB to crash.
At any rate, Bethesda *could* have handled this by simply sacrificing a bit in game load time to delete and reload nearly all game data when the player loads a new save, and potentially does it again from time to time when the player transitions to a new area.
Memory defragmentaion generally requires some sort of managed handle system like .net or Java provide. It comes with large performance trade offs though. Systems are generally considered fast enough these days that managed environments are fine for general applications. For high performance real time gaming on the other hand the penalty is too great.
Well, damnit, hit a show stopper of a bug. Was doing the Dark Brotherhood quests last night, got to the point where i have to chase after Cicero and Arnbjorn up to Dawnstar, and I'm stuck now because Arnbjorn is sitting in a pool of blood and won't interact with me, and despite reading Cicero's journal the door to the sanctuary won't offer me the correct option to enter. Anyone know of a fix to this?
