Fallout: New Vegas - Tips and Mods @ Bethblog

Oooh do the tips include surefire ways of avoiding the save-game corruption issue?
 
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I think the second patch fixed it.

I know I've played for 55 hours or so and have not seen any save game problems (and have had the game CTD a few times right after quicksaving or loading a save).
 
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Yep, I haven't had any issues since the second patch that Steam pushed to my machine. I lost several hours before that patch though :(
 
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Thought that was fixed in a patch already?

No that fixed a seperate steam related issue. There is another issue which affects a few percent of players regardless of platform which causes save games to become corrupt at times after "Come Fly With Me" or after visiting Vault 3. It's been relatively hard to diagnose as the exact conditions for triggering the corruption have been hard to pin down.

What is particularly strange is that when a user loads a save game prior to the corruption and repeats all steps leading up to it, the error is repeated 100%. Still, if those same actions are repeated on separate playthroughs the error will, for the most part, be unlikely to occur in general. It seems that it must occur through a combination of unrelated earlier variables that make a particular playthrough susceptible to corruption at those locations.

What is insidious about the bug is that it does not crash the game when it introduces malformed data into the running game. It only crashes when any save containing the malformed data is loaded. This means it is the bane of the marathon session as, even in the case of someone who creates separate saves every 10 minutes, they can find hours of gameplay rendered unloadable.

To their credit- bethesda has cited this as their number one priority. Unfortunately that statement was made a few hours after the last patch and no word has been heard since. I imagine that the same difficulties players have had in diagnosing what exactly predisposes someone to encounter this bug (as actions demonstrated to reproduce the bug for one playthrough have been demonstrated not to trigger it in others) have also confounded their efforts to patch it.

There are dozens of pages in multiple threads discussing this issue in the official forums if you are curious. I had one playthrough where I encountered neither the Vault 3 or REPCON related save-game corruption and two partial playthroughs where I had encountered each. The same issue presents itself on the PS3 and xbox as well- although there is an unhelpful error message regarding DLC in those cases as opposed to a simple CTD.
 
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Thanks for the update, jh! I hope that they're able to fix the problem soon. I just got done with Repconn last night, so I'm crossing my fingers.
 
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If you get as far as leaving the building after finishing Come Fly With Me and your saves still work, then you did not generate the bug. The other place to be mindful is Vault 3. For some reason killing or speaking to moto-runner can cause this glitch as well.

It probably has to do with a global or quest variable being improperly generated upon completion or failure of a quest. I'm guessing a non-integer or non 0-1 value being written to a variable that is supposed to be an integer or only 0 or 1. There's probably a script that should set the value equal to 1 but instead sets it equal to itself+1. This would also explain why some playthroughs generate this glitch and others don't- if the variable were 0 when you encountered the potentially game-corrupting line of scripting then it would be set to 1 and not cause any error. If however the variable were already set to one, then the malformed code would set it to 2. On loading the save game, the game would see a variable that can only be 0 or 1 set to an invalid value and crash.
 
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The only glitch I got with motor-runner was that they didn't take his helmet after I completed the quest. For some reason I couldn't get rid of it through the console either. Luckily there was a mod that allows me to transfer it to a container or drop it.

It seems I was really lucky only to have that little headache.
 
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I've completed Come Fly With Me with both characters I've played, no problems so far.
 
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I've completed Come Fly With Me with both characters I've played, no problems so far.

Yeah like I said most people don't encounter the issue. As I also said, it seems to have something to do with other actions taken by the player that unfortunately result in a variable being set to an unrecognizable value. Simply going to the vulnerable areas of the game is not enough to cause the bug, it requires a certain amount of bad luck. The fact that most people can complete these quests without running into the glitch is not an unknown- though a large number of people are running into the glitch on all platforms.

I've always wondered something though, and I don't mean to offend, but what is the impetus for this sort of response? "Some people are having X problem" getting the response "Not me." It's like "My bone marrow appears to be cancerous" getting the response "I've had my bone marrow for 40 years and it hasn't produced a single cancer cell." Or "My ford pinto's gas tank ruptured and my car burst into flames" getting "I've had mine for weeks and it hasn't produced a single fiery explosion."

I mean I do it sometimes too, but I've always wondered why people do it. It's like a strange compulsion.
 
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I've always wondered something though, and I don't mean to offend, but what is the impetus for this sort of response? "Some people are having X problem" getting the response "Not me." It's like "My bone marrow appears to be cancerous" getting the response "I've had my bone marrow for 40 years and it hasn't produced a single cancer cell." Or "My ford pinto's gas tank ruptured and my car burst into flames" getting "I've had mine for weeks and it hasn't produced a single fiery explosion."

I mean I do it sometimes too, but I've always wondered why people do it. It's like a strange compulsion.



Because computer science has come a long way compared to medical science (or rather, it's easier to figure out since we designed it from scratch). We simply don't know the cause to most severe medical issues - most scientists guess that "genetics" tend to be a factor in most cases, even regarding cancer and heart problems, but there are still many factors we don't know of.

Computers are different. All factors are known. Nothing unexpected should theoretically happen, and if so, you can debug it to find out the exact cause of it.

I have very few problems with games on any of my computers. If an issue is as rare as this problem, it's most likely a user error or some kind of weird software or setup. That's just my opinion though.

Overall it's simply interesting to know whether or not many/few experience an issue.
 
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Interesting thing about Come Fly With Me. I was doing the quest and everything went fine EXCEPT Jason Bright didn't finish his whole dialog with Chris Haverson and the PC. I figured this might be a problem, so I reloaded from before I entered that area and the conversation fired completely the second time. I'd say pay close attention to that conversaion if anyone else plays that quest. If Jason Bright doesn't thank the character and then followup with an apology to Chris Haverson, you should reload from a previous save. Unless a person had played that quest several times, as I have, they wouldn't know part of the dialog was missing.
 
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Hmm, if that's the trigger, then it could depend on the way you handle the quest. There are several ways of dealing with Chris.
 
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If an issue is as rare as this problem, it's most likely a user error or some kind of weird software or setup

Like I said, it's a platform-independent glitch. It has been experienced on the PS3 and the Xbox360 as well. User error and software setup are extremely unlikely to be related. It is more likely to be the result of a few of very many possible series of player actions (all perfectly valid) within the game. Only a relatively small but still significant subset of possible choice combinations triggers the bug.

I think you helped answer my question though- I think the reason we all (me included) tend to want to chime in with "hasn't happened to me" is a combination of the "just world hypothesis" and "fundamental attribution error." I do this a lot too but I was academically curious as to the mechanics behind this sort of response.

Hmm, if that's the trigger, then it could depend on the way you handle the quest. There are several ways of dealing with Chris.

Now that's an interesting idea. I'll load up an earlier save from one of the corrupt playthroughs I have (before I encountered the error) and try variations of telling chris beforehand and not telling him. I'll also check some of the conversation triggers for Bright. You may have just helped me find a way of fixing this issue using the geck and possibly writing a utility to correct malformed variables in existing saves (if it's that narrow of a range of possible malformed variables). If that's the case a lot of people will owe you hours of gameplay time they've recovered.

*Fingers Crossed*
 
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It's a shot in the dark, jh, but who knows? It'd be cool if you could fix it though.
 
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Sadly it looks to be inconclusive so far. My pre-corrupt saves still generate the issue and the full dialogue is playing. I have been able to find a few specific values related to those npc's and that portion of the quest that appear to differ between my working and non-working playthroughs though. So it is progress.
 
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