I loaded the increased spawning mod from here http://www.fileplanet.com/194521/190000/fileinfo/Fallout-3---Fileplanet-Mod-Pack-v2.0 - works great! The wasteland is crawling with bad guys! Especially good for level 20, unless you wanna level up fast with all the extra combat XPs you'd get. edit: spoiler? one of the side effects is that, with so many NPC's, the various factions stumble onto each other more easily and get into some entertaining battles. When I was at the mall recently, it was total war between the supermuties and the brotherhood.
anyone else noticed a problem with 182.08whql - it freezes randomly, usually if i look trough the items quickly or if i for example open a box and return and look to another item i get a freeze. It happened near those fire ants, in the house of that kid... btw, i have the latest 1.4 patch
Just so you know the game has a few issues, multi-core support is a bit buggy from what I've read so that might be one of the causes of the "freeze" bug but it's pretty widespread if one can use that term and has multiple known causes. Audio codecs can interfere for example, especially for sound effects and voice although music seems to work a bit better. That multi-core issue also seems to mainly affect quads and perhaps tri-cores as well but can be disabled by adding the line "iNumHWThreads=2" to the bottom of the INI under the [General] tab (For best results use both INI files, I'm not certain why but the game uses two of them and depending on which one you use it takes preference over the other, known issue with disabling VSync for example as it'll only be saved in one of them but needs to be added to the other file to work whereas other commands can work in either file so for best results keep those files identical.) Oh and that command or rather the value will restrict the amount of "threads" to two or rather it'll only use two cores to execute threads on. Threading itself is handled by other commands, which leads to the next issue. Tweaking the game excessively might also break it so be careful what you do with those INI files as the more stuff or rather data it has to load the more unstable it'll get, particularly for view distances and caches. (Had to reduce those a bit myself to prevent frequent crashing.) This is pretty obvious the way the engine works but it's worth mentioning. Finally (By now I'm sure you're thinking something along the lines of "Is this going to go on forever?) the game has problems with clearing data and savegame corruption is a frequent problem as the game might encounter issues when "cleaning up" which will lead to crashes. One known issue is AI and how data for NPC's and even dead NPC's and creatures is handled so if you notice a crash when passing by a area try typing in "TAI" in the console which is short for ToggleAI and it'll disable most of the AI routines, often this helps with the crashes but you won't fix the affected save short of starting over until a cleaning program like what Wrye Bash is for Morrowind/Oblivion (If you've heard about it that is, useful tool but he won't make something similar for Fallout 3 it seems.) Also regarding how the game clears data and "cleans" caches you won't purge all of the loaded data by saving and then loading the game, you need to exit to the main menu for this to work and the game also cleans cells and similar every 72nd hour or third day by default so using a mod to lower this or resting for three days might remove some junk data and reduce save related problems. Then there's technical stuff like the HDR flicker bug that some NVIDIA and ATI users encounter, VATS related slowdowns and other problems since the 1.1 update and general bugs and engine issues, there's a unofficial patch available for several bugs already but nothing short of a new patch from Bethesda themselves can fix hardcoded or engine related issues. (Not going to get into specific details as it's a mess and I don't know all that many specific details about it but there's several bugs in the game still and some problems have been introduced in the 1.1 update and are still not fixed.) Perhaps this'll help clear up a few things but it's expected a open ended game like this has a few bugs and quirks. (There's simply a lot of things going on so the chance of something breaking is a bit higher than in your normal game plus that data is constantly streamed instead of being based around static levels.)
Ha ha well I agree that there's been a few bugs in their titles and unfortunately there hasn't been all that many patches for them aside from one or two per game and then one or two patches for the expansion so much gets left unfixed aside from third party modifications where possible. For Fallout 3 we will see at least one more patch to add support for the "Broken Steel" DLC achievements but I have no idea about their plans for normal patches though a second patch to clean up some of the remaining issues and engine quirks would be nice. EDIT: To the post below, though a bit off-topic - Regarding ARENA I only played it recently when Bethesda made it into freeware (Dosbox emulation), already patched to 1.06 though diskette instead of CD-Rom version though that mainly appears to have affected voices and cutscenes. Daggerfall and Battlespire where picked up a few years ago in one of those bargain bin things certain shops have and runs pretty well via DosBox though BattleSpire was very demanding and while Daggerfall was updated a bit Battlespire only had one patch from what I know though it's a different TES game so it wasn't all that buggy. (Daggerfall however is another story.) (Never got ahold of Redguard though.) Morrowind and the two expansions were purchased in the GOTY edition and were installed for years thanks to modifications, Oblivion was purchased when it was released and the same goes for Shivering Isles and all DLC content including Knight of the Nine DVD compilation. (Was also installed a while due to mods but not as long as Morrowind.)
Weren't you like 8 when The Elder Scrolls: Arena came out? Oh heck...this is getting too much off topic. Anyway: in the past Bethesda games were terribly buggy.
just got this game a few days ago and i am impressed so far. the story is great as is the huge environment and graphics. i encountered a few CTD's out of nowhere, but i was able to resolve these by reading through this:http://www.tweakguides.com/Fallout3_1.html . i changed a few .ini settings dealing with system ram and multi-threading and all has been well since. however i have encountered a strange problem. it has happened both with the original and now a modded version of the game. after playing ~1hour or so i noticed that some of my settings revert to a lower level. i usually run 4x AA and 8x AF with everything on "high", which i tweak a bit (lighting distance etc...). it seems to happen when i leave an indoor area and go outside. suddenly AA and AF are off and it seems that draw distance is nearer. also the tree/grass settings seem to be at the lowest level. yet textures and shadows still seem to be set high (this also happened with vanilla game). usually when this happens it is preceded by stuttering and FPS drops. then i go inside and when i come out everything is ugly. i dont get why this happens since the game auto-detects ultra high settings for my setup. i got some slight FPS drops in certain areas so i turned the settings down a bit and everything was good, except the CTD's. when i resolved them and i was able to play a while i began to noticed this odd behavior. is there anyway to remedy this other that stopping the game to close it and re-start?
Another known issue, search the official forums and you'll see it's been mentioned a few times. (Can't remember what causes this or if it was even resolved, seems VATS plays a part of it and switching locations could perhaps be involved with something as you say.) http://www.bethsoft.com/bgsforums/
thanks for the response. i quickly read through a few pages of the forum and i found some people with similar issues to mine. so far i have changes some settings in CCC so maybe that was it. BTW, what are your settings in CCC? update: well i found a few things in the bathsoft forum that have seemed to help. turning off cat AI seemed to work, but then it CTD'd after entering a home and exploring. loaded up the game and started from the most recent save (auto save after i had entered the brandicies home in greyditch) and it worked without a CTD. weird. this game is turning out to be like a hot girl friend with drinking problem...
Yeah the game can behave a bit odd at times though it seems to be pretty random. CCC settings are AA set to Edge Detect while being application controlled and 16x AF forced, adaptive AA is enabled and mip-map details are set to high quality, VSync is forced off and Catalyst AI is set to standard. (Tried advanced several times but it doesn't really affect performance all that much and disabling it makes the 4870X2 card revert to single GPU mode as it controls it's crossfire functionality among several other things like game specific optimizations and tweaks.) I haven't noticed this issue myself though but I've read several posts by people commenting about this problem on the Bethsoft forums so I only provided a quick link there as there's many different reasons reported to cause this. For example someone reported that entering VATS and then leaving it disabled AA (Perhaps AF as well.) though it mainly seems to have affected vegetation, another user reported that switching between interiors and exterior cells caused a similar problem whereas a thid person said it was due to opening the pip-boy and then when closing it this happened. Bit hard to pinpoint a specific cause to this issue when there's so many varied reports about what causes it.
thanks again for your reply. i was reading through some of the posts at bethsoft regarding my issues. FPS slowdowns, vats problems (seems that after a while the hit probabilities go way down, however quick travel or entering/leaving a building seems resolve this?) and the aa/af/grass issue. it seems that the only thing that fixes everything for me is restarting the game periodically. i read that the aa/af/grass issue has to do with hdr and aa. not wanting to disable hdr or aa if i dont have to, i kept reading and found that renaming fallout3.exe to oblivion fixed the problem for others. i did that and ever since i havent encountered the aa/af/grass problem and i have had far fewer lockups/freezes/fps jumps. although i did get a freeze that required alt-tab and game shutdown in the task manager. guess ill keep tweaking... another weird thing is that just for the heck of it i installed some texture mods, and now the game seems much smoother. all in all this game is the best ive played in years and im having a great time playing despite its problems.
my problems went away, well most of it (slowdowns, lockups..) i've edited FALLOUT.ini file, following strings - these are multicore optimizations: bUseThreadedBlood=1 bUseThreadedMorpher=1 bUseThreadedTempEffects=1 bUseThreadedParticleSystem=1 bUseThreadedAI=1 iNumHavokThreads=5 (before it was on 1, i edited to 4 and saw later @ tweakguides its good to set to 5) bUseMultiThreadedFaceGen=1 bUseMultiThreadedTrees=1 bAllow30Shaders=1 (allows sm3.0 making hdr more natural...) - you need to edit/change shader package 19 and rename it to shader package 13... - uGridsToLoad=5 => this looks allot better but cuts down fps quite a bit if set anything higher than 5 (i tried 7, noticed like 10fps drop), but it looked allot better more detail on distant objects... and also these, tnx for the info GeoD, i forgot about tweakguiedes.com bBackgroundLoadLipFiles=1 bLoadBackgroundFaceGen=1 bBackgroundCellLoads=1 bLoadHelmetsInBackground=1 iBackgroundLoadLoading=1 bBackgroundPathing=1 bBackgroundNavmeshUpdate=1 bCloneModelsInBackground=1 all in all the game seemed more stable, and far less slowdowns, still some but allot better. btw the slowdowns went away if i quit to main menu and load back into the game. One more thing, if i quit the game and not quit to main menu i get a lock up, so when i finished playing i must first quit to game main menu and then quit to windows, and it quits as it should.
thanks for the info digital hunter. i had previously applied the multi-threading edits and they have done more for the games stability than anything else. i also did a few other things from the tweak guide pertaining to system ram usage which also helped. i did the bAllow30Shaders=1 edit and it seemed to help some, but there are still fps drops/stuttering. i suppose these issues are due to texture mods that i have installed causing my 512Mb cad to run out of vram. i alt tabbed out when i got fps drops/stuttering and RT showed my vram usage to be ~700Mb. these symptoms are periodic and usually dont affect my gameplay so i can live with it. also i think that i found out what was causing my aa/af/grass issue. when i use vats with 4xaa everything gets ugly when vats ends. leaving my aa at 2x doesnt do this, so i guess im on 2xaa. one last thing regarding vats, i read that the 1.4 patch randomly breaks this feature. hit probabilities sometimes seem very low even when i am close with a weapon in good condition. is there a way to revert back to an older version of the game without doing a re-install? i tried googling with no luck. guess ill keep reading over at bethsoft... thanks again for all of your help jonas and digital. if i find anything that seems to help my stability or performance ill post back.
Known problem since the 1.1 update, people even revert to the 1.0.15 EXE due to this and use mods like this one to still enjoy most fixes to the game. Various stuff about it further down in this article. http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Vault-Tec_Assisted_Targeting_System That mod I talked about. http://fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=4635
I imagine this has been asked before but it's the sort of search term that yields hundreds of irrelevant results so at the risk of having a chair thrown at me I'm wondering... Is the Fallout 3 DLC available for people who've bought the game through Steam? More specifically, if you download the DLC through the GFWL program does it work with a Steam-based installation of the full game? I'm contemplating getting the game but don't particularly want to lose out on the DLC just because I use Steam regularly.
quick question,,i just finished downloading anchorage from live, problem is im about to upgrade to vista and i cant find where it saved to so i can backitup?
For both of the above questions you can use the regular LIVE program to buy and download the DLC then copy the files manually to your Fallout /Data/ directory and activate it like a regular modification. For me, on Vista, it's stored in the following place. "C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Microsoft\XLive\DLC\425307d6\00000002\d96e635e19d298dac6820680085d45c5d36b9130" On XP it would be something like this. C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Microsoft\XLive\DLC\425307d6\00000002\d96e635e19d298dac6820680085d45c5d36b9130
