TES V: Skyrim

A few here. Nothing game breaking.

 

I've probably had 5 crashes over 50 hours of gameplay.

 

Yeah, seems to periodically crash to desktop on my machine once every few hours or so.

 

It crashes periodically for me too, typically when I want to fast travel...I select the new place, press go...then direct quit to the desktop, without an error message or any other indication.

This happens like every 2 hours or so...

 

I'm encountering the exact same issue. No error. Nothing. Just quits to my desktop. It happens pretty frequently.

 

My # of CTDs doubled thanks to last night. So that's 1-2 hard locks and roughly 6 CTDs now with 30ish hours in.

 

I've had one CTD and one hard-lock. Over like 30 hours of gametime. And as far as I know I have the oldest and slowest computer of anybody.

 

I've had a lot of CTDs, but only one hard-lock. And the CTDs have stopped for the most part since I have LAA working again, I've only had one since then.

 

Where can I find an explanation of the LAA work around? This seems to be the root of a lot of people's issues.

 

Yes, same here, only one crash here so far.........today.

Must have CTD'd at least eight times now, and I'm only level 9. Still, I'm REALLY enjoying the game, and I would enjoy it 50% more again if the interface wasn't so fucking clunky, bad, and just plain god-awful. I encountered my 2nd dragon just after dinging 9, its fire breaths nearly killed me several times because switching between bow and healing spells is so cumbersome, but after LOTS of arrows the bastard croaked.

Then just afterwards a snow troll nearly killed me when it went down for the count and I thought it'd died, turned away from it to check out my helper who laid on the ground, quivering in pain. Then the troll suddenly reared up in front of me and gave me QUITE the surprise! Lol, he took off 40% of my health in one hit... Note to self: ALWAYS make sure your enemies really are dead before considering them dead, especially if they're dangerous!

Mammooths: damn pests! They're more dangerous than dragons. While they may not have nearly as much health, their melee attacks just WRECK me. 2 hits, dead. Right now, they're just sneak practice dummies. I just can't win against them, they hit too hard and they run about as fast as me so I can't sprint to gain some distance either. Maybe if I had some good rocks to stand on I could kill one without it being able to reach me, but it'd certainly kill off my helper instead so I don't want to try that.

Speaking of helpers, they're dumb as f'n rocks! They just CAN'T jump it seems, or even deal with any abrupt change in elevation period no matter how small and insignificant (apart from stairs), and they won't even pass a brook of water in some cases without running up and down the stream looking for a place to cross. Crazy! Why can't the game's pathfinding use player motion as hints for its algorithms? Just have the bloody helper follow in my footsteps for chrissakes, how hard can it be?!

 

I don't know the specifics of how it works, only that it seems to do the trick.

Basically, the default TESV.exe file can't access any more than 2GB of memory. By flagging the program as "Large Address Aware" (LAA), it can now access up to 4GB of memory. For whatever reason (and only a programmer could tell you for sure), this seems to alleviate a lot of the crashes that the program has. It doesn't necessarily improve performance, but it does seem to make the program more stable.

There are also some INI tweaks, like bumping up uGrids (loading higher LOD meshes at a greater distance) that almost require the executable to have LAA, because the tweaks require a lot more memory than the default settings. Without it, tweaks like that are Crash City. That's what pissed a lot of people off when Steam replaced the executable with one that couldn't be made Large Address Aware, it nullified a lot of the tweaks and enhancements that people were doing.

Right now, I've gone back to the original executable and deactivated Steam updates until they get this sorted out. That's definitely a workaround because I've had to disable perfectly legitimate (and otherwise desirable) Steam functionality in order to make the game playable for any length of time. And I'm not even using that many tweaks.

There are instructions scattered about for using the LAA workaround, and there's also a launcher program available on SkyrimNexus that allows it. I'm waiting for things to settle down after the next patch before I decide which method to use on a long-term basis.

 

LAA

32bit apps just crash if they exceed their memory limit. This was a big problem with Supreme Commander. Forged Alliance came with LAA on release while people hacked the original game's exe.

CTD and lock up folks - maybe try prime95 torture test on blend for an hour. Be sure to turn on the two error checking options in the menu too - SUM(inputs) and round off checking. I wonder if you're seeing system instability. Could be due to unstable overclock, or RAM timings or even PSU. If you want to really stress PSU, try Furmark at the same time as Prime95 but set Prime95 to not use one core so Furmark can have one.

I have only had a few CTDs with Skyrim on 2 different PCs. One a Core2, the other a Phenom 2, and one with a Geforce and the other a Radeon. Both on 7 64. I'm not using LAA nor have I tweaked anything beyond shadows and fov.

 

Let's examine this:

1. Only happens with Skyrim, and not other programs or games that stress the system far more than Skyrim does.

2. Happens to a LOT of people playing Skyrim. In fact, I'd wager the vast majority of players have had issues of some kind.

3. Happens on a wide variety of hardware; dual and quad cores, AMD and Intel, ATI and Nvidia graphics, doesn't seem to matter.

As someone who troubleshoots computers for a living, one of the first things we look for in a widespread problem is the common factor. In this case, there's only one: Skyrim.

 

You only have anecdotal forum evidence that it's widespread and even have people saying it is not a problem for them. Forums also tend to be full of people with problems but not those without. There are people using unsupported tweaks and forcing driver options. Overclockers who may not have a clue how to test their system. Homebuilt boxes with crap PSUs or unstable RAM timings. Unknown background apps. Gobs of variables.

Another possibility I can think of is the game exposes system weaknesses that the other apps and games being played do not. While it certainly is clear that Skyrim has bugs, at least for me running the game mostly stock it hasn't really been unstable.

 

I have had a few CTDs and none are reproducible. Fallout 3 was very CTD-happy and even though Bethesda claims the Skyrim Creation Engine is new, that is a load of bollocks and it is just a version update of Gamebryo.

 

I had some crashes relatively early on, but around that time I also had a far more jarring sound sampling issue that caused reverberation to become distorted/noisy. Turned out there was a day 1 recommendation of setting Windows to output at 44.1khz, which ended up fixing my sound issue. That 'fix' was actually meant to prevent crashes, and it may well have since I haven't had a sudden CTD ever since.

 

I'm level 21 now and haven't had one crash or lockup, the game for me has been 100% solid. Note I have never tweaked ini's or done anything like that, I only picked settings from what Bethesda provided in their config app. Generally speaking I do not tweak pc games outside of what the companies provide. The reason being that they only q/a what is in the shipping game. By tweaking stuff in the ini's, etc, you may be exposing code that hasn't been tested or is known to be buggy.

 

lol isn't that the truth. It even stutters as you run around just like Oblivion and Fallout 3.

 

Using smithing, alchemy and enchanting together is so overpowered.

Stuff i've created today
http://imgur.com/a/OTD7R

 

Some tweaks provide huge gains for basically no cost in performance or stability. E.g. increasing the FOV can be done through the simplest console command ever. "fov 85" and your game is instantly better. Everyone should do it, unless you care about achievements because apparently any amount of console tweaking and you are a cheater