Obl. locks up on me after 6-7 hours of play

Lehiff · Post by **Lehiff** » Thu Jul 15, 2010 3:23 am

Hi all,

I'm posting this technical question here, as the Gamebanshee crowd seems very knowledgeable.

My beef is this: I have Oblivion - GOTY edition. It was very cheap but hopefully that doesn't mean that it won't work properly

After playing for about 6 or 7 hours give or take from the start in the Imperial Dungeon, the whole thing locks up on me. This happens every damn time: I start a new character, everything's dandy, then WHOPA - as soon as I've played for the allotted time, the game starts crashing. If I go back to an earlier save game, it's fine - until the same amount of time has passed, then it starts crashing again, even if my actions from that point on were different than the earlier game which also crashed. There are no error messages, it just locks up and crashes to desktop. It seems there's nothing to be done. Now why is this?

I am running OBL on a new machine with Windows 7. Its specs far exceed the minimum requirements. I generally run a number of mods, including Oscuro's Overhaul, although I've been very careful with the Mod Manager and load order, because I believed that to be the problem. Varying the mods doesn't seem to actively change anything though. The game itself runs very well with only random crashes now and then, as seems to be the Oblivion way. Reinstalling with different mods and starting with a different character doesn't do anything either.

Does anyone here have experience of this issue, and if so, have you managed to fix it?

Cheers,
Lehiff

Tricky · Post by **Tricky** » Thu Jul 15, 2010 5:01 am

Oblivion, especially unpatched, is known to suffer from memory leaks on older systems. That may build up and cause it to crash every couple of hours. Oscuro's mod will definitely increase the chance of that happening, it is huge. But why it should do that on newer systems is something I can't understand. Perhaps you should provide more technical specifications of your pc.

Tip: create a new, unpatched installation of Oblivion. If it also tends to crash after a couple of hours, you can at least rule out the heavy duty mods. There are other mods out there that do the same as the 1-2 core Oscuro's Overhaul mods, while adding absolutely no fluff.

Lehiff · Post by **Lehiff** » Thu Jul 15, 2010 5:49 am

Thanks, Tricky - much appreciated.

Off the top of my head (Don't have the precise details to hand since I'm at work at the moment, naughty me, really) it's a 6GB, quad core 3 GHZ processor, 1TB hard disk running Windows 7. The graphics card is a GeForce 250 GTS. I've been wondering if the multi-core processor was a problem, since it does sometimes mess up older games from what I understand. The last couple of times I tried playing OBL I had it all patched up with the newest releases, but that included a fan-made patch, which was perhaps a bad idea?

I don't have the game installed at the moment, because my previous experiences have made me pretty pessimistic about trying again if it's going to crash a few hours in anyway. But I suppose that trying another overarching mod than Oscuro would be a good start.

Cheers, Lehiff

Tricky · Post by **Tricky** » Thu Jul 15, 2010 9:29 am

Oblivion was one of the first rpgs to actually be optimized for multicores. Sounds like some script or another has trouble keeping up with your computer.

I had Oblivion installed on an older system that had just enough balls to play it. I saw the same sort of behaviour you describe, except the duration between crashes took place within far shorter intervals. Your PC is probably just better equipped to handle the stress the big mods like OOO generate. I don't know about the fan patch, but replacing OOO with something else has solved nearly all of my stability problem for me.

UncleScratchy · Post by **UncleScratchy** » Thu Aug 19, 2010 7:41 am

Lock ups, crashes and memory leaks

This game has a lot figgity querks. When I first started playing the game on my Dell XPS600 it used to grind to a crawl towards the end of the game. When I upgraded my video card from a nVidea 7800GT to the 9800GT it really seems to have helped. I also increased my RAM to 4GB. So your system seems to have more than enough guts to handle it. Be sure you have all the current patches applied to the game and latest drivers for your video card as well. One thing that I have to check is the audio and video codecs files that have been applied to my computer by other games. The "l3codecx.ax" codec causes my game to crash every hour or so unless I remove it. I know loading Dragon Age Origins adds that codec and I have to remove it or relable it for Oblivion to run smoothly. I'm running on XP so I just do a search for the codec, go to it and relable it to l3codeax.old or something like that. Did you try removing the game, defragging and doing a fresh install?