Oblivion - Crashtastic!

Aod · 3 Feb 2008 at 11:57

having owned oblivion since release, i thouhgt it was about time that i got down to business and bloody played the game.

no such luck however. for some reason, the game feels the need to crash continuously when i'm playing. it happens most often when i'm going through a door, but also happens often when loading a save.
sometimes it will just happen randomly while walking about.

i'm using the latest patch downloaded from the Bethesda website (v1.2.0416UK).

i've been using the optimisation addons, because they really do help smooth the games frankly ridiculous FPS spikes out (operation optimisation) but oblivion also crashes when it's not installed.

i'm running on a Q6600 (stock) with 4GB of ram and an 8800GTX. my OS is XP-x64

Crowze · 3 Feb 2008 at 12:43

Well Oblivion does tend to crash now and again whatever you do, but there are a few configuration options that add to the problem. The main one I can think of is the background file loader, try turning it off if you haven't already.

Aod · 3 Feb 2008 at 12:51

Crowze said:
Well Oblivion does tend to crash now and again whatever you do, but there are a few configuration options that add to the problem. The main one I can think of is the background file loader, try turning it off if you haven't already.

what is that, how would i turn it off?

Crowze · 3 Feb 2008 at 12:59

In Oblivion.ini (under My Documents\My Games\Oblivion) look for bUseBackgroundFileLoader (or something similar) and set it to False. Although I believe it's off by default, so if you don't know where it is it's unlikely you turned it on. The optimisation addons may affect things though, can you give links to the ones you use? Try running without them, see if it makes a difference.

Aod · 3 Feb 2008 at 14:05

Crowze said:
In Oblivion.ini (under My Documents\My Games\Oblivion) look for bUseBackgroundFileLoader (or something similar) and set it to False. Although I believe it's off by default, so if you don't know where it is it's unlikely you turned it on. The optimisation addons may affect things though, can you give links to the ones you use? Try running without them, see if it makes a difference.

like i said, running without the optimisation addons installed (clean install!) does not stop the crashes.

currently the only mod i'm using is the beautiful people's mod

Meridian · 3 Feb 2008 at 17:21

You say the card is at stock, but is the system? If you are overclocked anywhere, turn it down: no matter how long you can run Orthos, Oblivion can still find a weakness. If your system truly is stable you should be able to play Ob for at least four hours without issue. Mind you, at that point it will crash when you try to exit, but that IS a known bug. It occurs if you exit too soon after your last save.

M

Aod · 3 Feb 2008 at 17:26

Meridian said:
You say the card is at stock, but is the system? If you are overclocked anywhere, turn it down: no matter how long you can run Orthos, Oblivion can still find a weakness. If your system truly is stable you should be able to play Ob for at least four hours without issue. Mind you, at that point it will crash when you try to exit, but that IS a known bug. It occurs if you exit too soon after your last save.

M

i said in the OP. the whole system is running at stock.

rickfin · 3 Feb 2008 at 17:29

I have also this problem. I read that the 169.xx drivers don't support AA+HDR in Oblivion. That's the problem. 162.18 should work.

Mattus · 3 Feb 2008 at 17:54

I had the same problems when I first played Oblivion. Eventually tracked it down to a dodgy codec:

Some users may experience frequent crashing due to an older system file. These crashes may be attributed to the 'mpeg2dmx.ax' file. Simply renaming the file to "mpeg2dmx.ax.old" may correct this issue.

http://support.bethsoft.com/asp/res...2&pos=Windows+XP&top=Error+Messages&rid=23528

Doing that fixed the problem for me.

Crowze · 3 Feb 2008 at 18:37

rickfin said:
I have also this problem. I read that the 169.xx drivers don't support AA+HDR in Oblivion. That's the problem. 162.18 should work.

This is simply due to a broken application profile; AA+HDR can be forced by setting the AA compatibility to 45 in something like nHancer, works perfectly for me.

Edit: On closer inspection it isn't actually working... time to start messing around with random settings in nHancer

.

Aod · 3 Feb 2008 at 18:44

Mattus said:
I had the same problems when I first played Oblivion. Eventually tracked it down to a dodgy codec:

http://support.bethsoft.com/asp/res...2&pos=Windows+XP&top=Error+Messages&rid=23528

Doing that fixed the problem for me.

thanks. will give this a try.

rickfin · 3 Feb 2008 at 19:32

Crowze said:
This is simply due to a broken application profile; AA+HDR can be forced by setting the AA compatibility to 45 in something like nHancer, works perfectly for me.

Edit: On closer inspection it isn't actually working... time to start messing around with random settings in nHancer .

The AA works but when you use it the game crashes after couple of minutes.

Edit:Just tried the game without AA and it crashed right away. This is with 169.28.

EffBee · 4 Feb 2008 at 09:38

Oblivion does crash for me sometimes. But nothing like as often as every four hours. Obviously this is very hardware/software dependent. Just thought I'd put in a good word for the game

simisker · 4 Feb 2008 at 11:50

I initially had severe Oblivion crashing issues - turns out it was the codec thingy in combination with my Realtek onboard sound. Was pretty stable after that; no mean feat considering the huge number of mods I was incorporating.