Skyrim - v1.2 Update

joxer said:

And don't tell me crashes cannot be reproduced by any means. I don't see a problem getting the hardware a player who reports them has at home. IIRC when you report a thing like that, you should use the hardware/software list from dxdiag. You suggesting Bethesda can't pinpoint a type of machine that has most crash reports?
Seems as if both Bethesda and you expect from the player himself to determine the cause of those crashes. The problematic part is… Not all players work in general technical support and certainly no player has the source code of Skyrim.

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A reproducible problem is one where if you do this specific thing then that specific problem happens. Someone above mentioned a few specific spots where the game always crashes/hangs. Those are reproducible. "The game crashes sometimes" is not a reproducible problem.

Oddly when I first played I had a few crashes but I haven't had any lately. And I have an 8 GB system BTW.

kalniel said:

Not really - I've got a newer machine with 6GB ram and it's also running flawlessly - without any third party fixes.

LAA is treating a symptom, not a cause. It also isn't working for anything like everyone.

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I'm in the CTD every 2 hours camp as well. My partner in crime (wife) is running the game on a similar machine with Windows 7 (I'm running Vista 64) and hasn't crashed once. We both keep our drivers up-to-date. I honestly think it's a series of memory leaks and her system seems to be handling the leaks a bit better than mine. I'm still enjoying the heck out of the game, even with the crashes, but I'm going to try the mod that ups memory to 4GB and see if that helps.

I crash about once a night, say about 6 hours. I'm guessing it's a memory leak. The LAA didn't resolve the issue for me, but I couldn't see that it hurt anything either, so give it a go.

I've tried the game with ultra settings, with no texture mods, no .ini tweaks and the game worked realy great and looked awesome. One random weird bug/event that didnt realy bother me a lot except perhaps a little on the immersion factor, but all fine.
The close-up textures are way too much blurry, but medium/far textures are superb.

Then, i started to tweak the .ini and downloaded a few mods and the game is near perfect, but crashed a lot more.

Then i used the mod to use 4gb memory and i rarely have a crash and the game is absolutely gorgeous.

This is my story. I believe that some have a diferent story but this is my personal experience. I love the game, i ditched a lot of games i was playing for months for this and i'm spending 4-5 hours a day in it. I love it.

My GF hates it though, go figure.

KnightPT said:

i'm spending 4-5 hours a day in it.

My GF hates it though, go figure.

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Go figure what?

BillSeurer said:

"The game crashes sometimes" is not a reproducible problem.

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Yes, but it could be a hint to a system's faulty driver setup and/or a game's memory leak.

I've played about 30 hours and have had one single crash. I haven't seen a single quest bug, at least anything I noticed. There's an occasional pop-in with textures, but it's rare. The absolute worst part is that my followers are a little erratic, and tend to be a little too hostile, sometimes chasing enemies kind of far, but they have always returned.

The hotkey issue is weird and not easy to learn, but I have it figured out for my character's play style and once you get it set up it works fine. Should have been better from the start, but it's not game breaking at all.

Skyrim is not "buggy." I'm not claiming it's bug-free, but it's entirely playable, and it's a really great game. Yes, there will be fixes and patches and mods to improve it, but these reports of bugs and problems are really over hyped, and speak more to the problems inherent in PC games... everyone's machine is a little different, and some people have problems.

Skyrim is great so far. Really, really great.

Alrik Fassbauer said:

Yes, but it could be a hint to a system's faulty driver setup and/or a game's memory leak.

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But it doesn't give you the information you need to do anything about it. It appears that most of the time, for most of the people, the memory usage is at a playable state. For some people (and I've no idea how you would begin to assess what proportion, given forums tend to massively over-represent those having problems just after a game is released) something is causing this stable state to change to an unstable state.

If it's just general game memory leaking then that's reproducible via long term test, and we will all see it. That's the kind of thing that should be caught in QA, and if it was ever an issue it appears to have been caught and fixed, given some people never experience the problem despite playing the same way (in general) that others do.

So something else must be happening to change the state - if that's coming from a driver or hardware on the users system then that's really out of Bethesda's control - they can test as many combinations of hardware and software and versions of software as they can, but they haven't really got a hope of reproducing the mess of systems that will be used to play this game. However if there is a common hardware/software/software version that shows up in the bug reports then they can test it and see what they can do to mitigate (often via contacting the driver authors with a use case they can fix).

If that's coming from the game, then again it must be a particular set of circumstances that occurs, given the lack of a general problem. That is where the full reports need to be made about where/when/what crashes occur, with save game files etc. so that they can analyse and try to reproduce the same problem. In such a case it should be the situation that starting from the same point and doing the same things will lead to a crash. That seems to be being hinted at in a very few cases (initially I thought none, but some people have suggested locations with a high chance of crashes). That's a real start in beginning to see what the problem is, and whether the fundamental stability can be improved, or whether the expressing conditions can be tweaked so that it's not exposed as frequently or at all.

Quote from Boris (ENB) on the official forums:

ENBSeries said:

LAA helps to increase memory usage limit of Skyrim to 3 GB, if game (modded by Hi-Res textures f.e.) reaches this limit, it crashes anyway because of incompatible engine code. It's may be too hard to find and elliminate such problem for patch developers (and they are not full team), but at least they can check amount of memory used and unload some resources to keep in range of those 3 GB. This info i got after testing by some users here (developed special test).

Another changes/update in first topic:

Any user may play with LAA mode enabled, even if he/she have less than 3 or even 2 GB or RAM, only SSD hardware will die soon when swap files will be on them.


And at last, i don't care personally about this problem any more, because developing memory manager with support up to 16 GB of memory in Skyrim, f* off everybody.

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kalniel said:

Quote from Boris (ENB) on the official forums:

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Link please. Ad who's saying what? Is a Bethsoft dev talking in red or black?

ENB is that place with the supposedly improved .dll for directx.

Ovenall said:

Skyrim is not "buggy." I'm not claiming it's bug-free, but it's entirely playable, and it's a really great game.

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Just because it's not buggy for you, doesn't mean it isn't for others. I've had my share and others considerably more. A game can be buggy and there will still be people who have little to no problems. And for those who experience more bugs, the game can still be called playable. If you had more issues, I doubt you would be saying that. Before applying the user created LAA fix, I had many CTDs, and also I have an issue (still) with occasional extreme slowdown entering a new area, requiring me to restart the game. There are many other glitches as well with NPCs.

However I love the game and I'm having a great time playing it.

My biggest concern with the new patch is if it still has the Steam DRM, then I'm not going to apply it. I'm currently using an older .exe with the LAA fix and Steam updates turned off. That's how I avoid CTDs. 6GB Ram, 64 bit W7. Unless I can patch the game and revert just the TESV.exe ?

Bedwyr said:

Link please. Ad who's saying what? Is a Bethsoft dev talking in red or black?

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http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.ph...laa-support/page__view__findpost__p__19527660

No, it's a user who has been working on a LAA patch (he's made one for several different games). The bits in red are the ones he wanted inserted into the first post on the thread - I should have just removed the colouring or explained the context a bit better, sorry.

I've had water textures missing. Big area's where you just see the bottom but can still swim in it. Invisibility power (forgot what it's called) that you get for joining the nightingales doesn't work. when you click on it it shows a spell affect but you don't turn invisible and everyone can see you.

Other small things which I don't think are bugs but are annoying. Such as meeting someone , they greet you rudely, then you help them with a quest and they are very grateful. When you leave and come back later though they greet you rudely again as if you've never met.

Also, I don't understand the factions. I helped the forsworn leader in markarth and they were very thankful, but whenever I come across any forsworn they attack me on site.

sakichop said:

Also, I don't understand the factions. I helped the forsworn leader in markarth and they were very thankful, but whenever I come across any forsworn they attack me on site.

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The forsworn aren't entirely unified. Some of them are actually rather crazy - if you've payed attention you've probably seen the corpses on slabs with their hearts removed showing a half finished ritual where a hag-raven would turn them into a briar-heart. Some follow him but some follow a hag raven matriarch in one of the larger ruins.

I think only two forsworn locations become non-hostile.

On December 1st I'll have to log on to Steam to get the latest Terraria patch and that will end my crash-free Skyrim game since this patch doesn't fix that. Freaking dead people at a wedding get fixed, but not the crashing. They should have left the dragons like that. I liked how they flew off sometimes.

Oh well, it's no problem. I'm level 42 and I've played well over a hundred hours of this game. Half of that has been relatively crash free, but Terraria is releasing a megapatch that will pretty much make it a whole new game again so I'm not passing on that.

I'll play that until they fix some of the more glaring issues and give the modders some time to do their magic.

Gotta say I'm still surprised that this game was this much fun. Even with the console UI, the crashes and all the rest, I've haven't enjoyed a TES game like this since Morrowind. Though they are two relatively different beasts as far as how they played, they both were a lot of fun that sucked many hours out of my life. Damn vampire games

Some PS3 users have reported issues with resistances working correctly (elemental resistance for summoned atronachs seems to have disappeared). I've told my steam not to update Skyrim so I can see what the response is before updating.

I've also disabled Steam automatic updates, so I can observe user experience before having to update myself. Wouldn't want to fix something while breaking something else!

Update: The 360 patch is now live, and users are reporting the same issues the PS3 users had concerning resistances not working correctly. In short, anything that gives you a weakness or resistance such as magic and poison are completely nullified. To my understanding, this means that an Argonian's natural 50% resistance to disease and a Breton's 25% resistance to magic are null, and supposedly the block perk that gives you elemental resistance is also having issues (though no confirmation yet).

I wonder if this means I can Soul Trap dragons.

Alrik Fassbauer said:

Unfortunately he is right : The PC is not their primary platform anymore. All their energies now go into consoles.

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I wish people would stop using hyperbole. If all their energies went into consoles, there wouldn't be a PC version. In any case, cross-platform development has many benefits, least of all increased stabilty (fewer undiscovered bugs) and higher quality of the codebase.

Now, if you're talking about optimization and UI design… but I don't think that even the former is an issue these days with all the standard APIs and similar hardware.

JDR13 said:

The PC isn't the primary platform for any major game developer nowadays.

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Which doesn't need to be a problem and can be a benefit.

joxer said:

Take for example an issue where you can't drop/sell/store a certain flute from inventory - there is no player that waon't be affected by this bug if flute is picked up. And how many lines of code or variable changes is needed for that? I gues one. Two, most. But no, Bethesda patched some rare pacified dragons like there are no more dragons to kill in the game. Geez…

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You seem to know why exactly this bug occurs. How do you know this? You think it is a simple property of an item that is set up wrong? Are you very sure about this?

I know I sounded outraged when I lamented the lack of fix for my crashes, but I agree with someone else who said something like, "common does not mean easy to fix."

If you can fix easy bug A, but hard bug B takes a longer time and/or hasn't been nailed yet, do you delay patch 1.2?

Thaurin said:

You seem to know why exactly this bug occurs. How do you know this? You think it is a simple property of an item that is set up wrong? Are you very sure about this?

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It occurs because:
a) an item flag (variable) is set wrong or is not set at all at a certain point (means - 1 line of code needed) or
b) the code doesn't check at all for this item if the flag is changed or not but assumes it's a permanent quest item with nonzero weight that mustn't be sold, dropped or removed from inventory but has to annoy the player till the judgment day (means - 2 lines of code needed)

Please don't mix engine bugs with quest bugs.
Stutters, flickers, uglytextures, lags, memoryleaks, crashes to desktops and corrupted saves are engine bugs that can't be solved easy with a few changes in the code. Common or uncommon, doesn't matter. Unlike those, quest bugs can be fixed easily, even in cases of a scripted event that gets broken in the middle and then doesn't continue.