Construction Set crashes in Soluthis' city exterior

[Razorwing]

The Construction Set crashes when viewing certain areas of Soluthis' city exterior.

Initially I thought only modders using the public version of the assets experienced crashes when viewing Soluthis' city exterior. This is because the first report I got regarding the crash came from a modder using the public version, and he reported numerous error messages about missing models. The internal esm contain a lot of new model entries, and sometimes models have been moved or renamed too, so it was normal for the CS to complain about a lot of missing models. I'm happy to say that problem will be solved very soon, by the way.

But lately I've discovered the CS crashes for me as well. I'm sure I can fix the problem, but the really hard part is tracking down which model or models are causing the crash - since I can't even pin down which cell the faulty model(s) is located in. Does anyone know of a way to get the Construction Set to only load one (1) exterior cell at a time? That would let me narrow the scope quite a bit in my investigation.

[Razorwing]

I tried out setting uGridsToLoad to 1 in the ConstructionSet.ini and that did narrow down the cell load, but the focus is still too wide. Something that would help tremendously would be if I could see which references are loaded into memory, since I figure the CS stalls when it finds the faulty model but all I see is general data in the program's status bar and I can't glean any useful info from that.

But while waiting for tips my investigation has turned up that the Type-2 Fire flower is one such corrupted model which causes the CS to crash. It remains to be seen if fixing it solves the overall problem, but I'll give it a go right away.

Edit 2008-02-22, 01:43 C.E.T.: I've fixed the Type-2 Fire flower and attached a copy of it for those who want it.

[sandor]

Originally posted by Razorwing
Something that would help tremendously would be if I could see which references are loaded into memory, since I figure the CS stalls when it finds the faulty model....

I agree, last week I fixed an esp for Dave_91 and that info would have helped a lot.

Could you give me the coordinates of a cell that causes a crash?

[Razorwing]

Originally posted by sandor

Originally posted by Razorwing
Something that would help tremendously would be if I could see which references are loaded into memory, since I figure the CS stalls when it finds the faulty model....

I agree, last week I fixed an esp for Dave_91 and that info would have helped a lot.

Could you give me the coordinates of a cell that causes a crash?

No I wasn't able to pin down which cell it was. I could have found out roughly which of the Soluthis cells it was, with a fuzzy answer being north or northwest of the Vineyard, but I was convinced the crash was caused by a faulty model and then it seemed easier to just keep dropping stuff into a cell until a crash occured. I did that, and it led me to discover the problem with Fireflower02. I don't know if fixing that model fixes the overall crash problem in the city, but I can say that after the fix I haven't experienced a crash in the area I did before.

[Shakes]

Dont know if this will help narrow down problems such as this but I used 'process monitor' for a similar situation in determining the cause of errors in a great mod for the game rome:total war - europa barbarorum. if you have a quick read through this post on their forums youll get the general idea of how to use it. it essentially lists all the file loads requested by the selected program (after applying the correct filters so only cs.exe will show up) which can tell you the last file it attempted to read before crashing.

i dont know the details of how oblivion/cs pre loads, so it could be more hassle trying to pinpoint which load went bad, but if it literally falls over right after failing to load the particular nif, this should tell you which one.

[Razorwing]

Thanks for the tip Shakes, if I experience a crash again I'll definitely check out that program :goodjob:

Other than that it would seem fixing Fireflower02 fixed the crash bug in Soluthis, so I humbly suggest everyone planning to do any kind of exterior work gets the fix I posted further up the thread. Even if it's exterior work unrelated to Soluthis you might still run into the Fireflower02 placed before it became corrupted.