Freezing and Microstuttering

[Thetri]

The game freezes whenever I load my save when first starting for 2-3 mins then microstutters before fully loading and being perfectly smooth and it plays fine until I fast travel to another area where it then either happens again or it plays runs smooth until I take a step forward then it starts the stuttering and freezes again for 2-3 mins. This only happens on this particular character where I've played through a lot of the main quest. When I start a brand new game it plays smoothly with no issues.

I'm not sure if the issues is related to my mods or if it's just a save file bug like what used to happen with games like Skyrim on the PS3 where more progress = more slowdown and freezes. I'm on Beta v0.11.0 and I'd prefer not to upgrade and have to reinstall mods again.

Mod list in order they appear in load order: Archaeologists, BasicMagicRegen, Carry Weight Customizer, Daggerfall Skyshards, Daggerfall world map, Distant terrain, Enhanced sky, handpainted models(builds, main, treasure piles), harvestable crops, inventory filter, levelup adjuster, loading screen, love and lust, mountains and hills, no dice, NPCHealthIndicators, Prostitutes and Lovers, RoleplayRealism, RoleplayRealism-Items, Sneak and crouch combined, taverns redone, vibrantterrainflats, villiagerimmersionoverhaul, VIO-Sprites, wildernessNPCs, world tooltips.

QuestPacks: Kamer, Perform At Taverns, QP1, Tavern games

Textures: CifRci portraits, and a bunch of pngs of NPCs from a pack I don't know the name of.

I've used most of these mods before and played the game for a long time without running into this issue on both the windows and linux version. This particular case is on Windows however. It also freezes for a while when saving the game too. To the point where it says the program is not responding but it eventually does work.

[Interkarma]

Hey there.

My standard advice is to unzip a fresh copy of DFU to another folder for testing (you don't need to delete your main copy). Run fresh build without mods and confirm if issue persists. If problem is resolved, then add mods back one at a time until you isolate which mod (or combination of mods) causes the problem.

If stuttering happens even without mods, the next thing to try is clearing quests. Some mods add hundreds of active quests which can bog down the game. Make a new test save then use "purgeallquests" to nuke all quests or "purgenonstoryquests" to just remove non-main quests.

If all else fails, please attach a zip of your save (how to locate) and we can take a closer look.

[Thetri]

Problem fixed after using purgenonstoryquests command which purged about 6000+ things. Thanks a bunch

[Interkarma]

6000 !

Yeah, that'll do it haha. The quest machine is very lightweight, but no way it's designed for that kind of punishment.

[Jay_H]

Perform At Taverns

This is your culprit. It endlessly duplicates itself after starting.

[Interkarma]

Thanks for identifying that mod Jay.

[13thsyndicate]

I've hit 7500 active quests with Perform at Taverns going, plus any attempt to open the rest window in a tavern can spawn hundreds of textboxes to click through making the game unplayable; it's a great concept but the quest mod is just broken.

[Hazelnut]

I think this is a growing issue that we have with Nexus mods. There are mods which don't work well, or even break savegames - plus mods which don't work properly with newer versions of DFU. This is an issue because many authors move on and are not contactable. Unfortunately they are the only ones who can update or just remove the offending mod on Nexus.

I don't have any idea what could be done about it, but it concerns me. I wish that nexus would allow for some trusted moderators / curators to have edit access to any DFU mod pages where the author has not logged in for 6+ months and is unresponsive so players could be warned or something. This is not going to happen though, so I guess it is what it is.

[Interkarma]

Even when mod creator is dutifully updating their mods and solving problems, there's no guarantee the player will update their end. This can add support burden on either core team or mod creator, wherever player goes to for help.

Maybe something we can do is consume a text table in StreamingAssets listing mods that are no longer compatible or known to destabilise game. Then display a warning like the one shown after player removes mods. Something like:

Code: Select all

The following mods have known compatibility or stability issues with this version of Daggerfall Unity. Continue?

<list mods>

YES NO

It should be easy enough to compare mods based on their name/version strings so that if mod is updated later it won't trigger a prompt. This at least gives player an alert they can action or not without us actually blocking anything. It's just informational and might prompt player to review their mods.

That's one concept we can handle on our side even if mod creator disappears for good and their Nexus is years out of date.

[13thsyndicate]

Would you be able to implement a check for specific quest mods this way as well? Perform at Taverns uses the quest system which is one of the reasons it's so buggy.