Gorgeous
Sad part... I haven't been able to enter dragonsreach in quite a long time. It CTD's on loading when I try to go through the door. There is a clear point when this happened, because I had most of my mods installed by the time it started. Before that, zero issues... going pretty heavy, too. I have tried the usual culprits. Weather mods, lighting mods, water mods, NPC mods, SMIM... alla dat. None of those are doing anything bad. Sure enough, none of those things were problems before. It's not the save because if I turn off all mods it works. Fishing around in xEdit yields nothing. It could be just a bad ESP, or a mis-flagged mesh. Absolutely no way of detecting that without actually using the tools to comb over every detail of suspected mods for problems isolated within them. I wish it allowed me to see which mods are oldrim - I have some of those installed, so it might be meshes.
It'd be one thing if I could get in and it crashed on rendering. I could guess as to what object it was. And I'd have papyrus logs to dig into. Crash on loading gives me nothing there but some stuff about ESPs that doesn't help me. There's something it is loading in that it doesn't like, though...
Everything in Whiterun hates to be modded, it seems. If you search around for CTD's in dragonsreach, the only conclusion to draw is that literally everything causes or doesn't cause CTD's in dragonsreach.
Always been a thorn in my side. Bad meshes have always been my worst nightmare in general... actually a bad normalmap in FO4 had me running around for hours. See... there's a Sanctuary texture that's used on roofs in downtown Boston. And somehow the way they spread on THOSE meshes causes a CTD. It has corrupted mipmaps. You can't see them from where you crash... it's a goddamned rooftop. Not to mention, they're fine in Sanctuary. I think that from whatever angle you approach Sanctuary it never has to tangle with whatever mip level is bad.
Fun part, CK tools just do this to assets sometimes. You never know when it's gonna vomit out that one texture. It's really not the modder's fault. The tools just suck. Could they isolate the mod in a custom clean save and potentially test for these things? Sure. Is that reasonable? Hell no! Again, how are you supposed to know? Some things are obvious, but so much is not. We are the guinea pigs. I think mod users owe it to modders to sniff these things out. That's how it went with that mod. I sniffed it out myself, planning to go to them about it. Turns out somebody else beat me to it.
Annoying, but it is a community effort, I suppose.
How is anybody supposed to figure any of that out? Sift through one by one and ignore nothing. Don't think a mod for one location can't break a completely different location. Once you find it, start deleting textures until you find it. It's crazy. I think you have to chug a bottle of cough syrup before the logic starts to make sense. I hear you see it in the form of geometric shapes that look like interlocking perk trees. I'm just not that hardcore, man...
So now I'm about to make a list of my nearly 500 active mods, print it out, disable all of them, and then start re-enabling them in the order they load, crossing off as I go along. If I'm REALLY lucky, I may only restart the game 100-200 times
Thank you though, this shit ain't always easy lol
In other news... I'm really liking Obsidian... the sunsets are delish. Like, yaaaassss.
More fun... I was crashing past this point. But I knew what that was right away. Better roads has an option to add/overhaul bridges around Whiterun... and I would crash right when I entered that worldspace. Yank em out and all is good. But now my pre-generated lods are busted lol. I'm telling you it never ends. It's my fault for running untested or known-bad mods and then pregenerating lods for them. Pretty much locks you in. There's a multistep process for disabling Dyndolod before you can even touch the stuff it's made lods for. It creates a lot of dependencies and leaves open scripts in your save. It has the ability to self clean, but you gotta do it right. THEN you can troubleshoot.
I like to think it's all worth it. The results can be pretty nice. It's just so much trial and error. You have to be able to shake a lot of things off. It reminds me a lot of dating a narccissist.
This is why I still haven't put up a list btw