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Fallout 3 stability, ways to improve?

Bateluer

Bateluer

Lifer
Ack! I started playing FO3 again a few days ago. Trouble is, it seams to crash to desktop just as much as it ever did. I don't have any of the DLC for it, but every 10 minutes or so, it seems to crash. Makes playing it a royal pain, and I often have to replay the same chunks repeatedly, depending on where my last save was.

Anyone to improve the stability or fix the issue?
 
FO3 was pretty stable for me. I could play for at least 2 hours before any crash, if it crashed at all, but this was running under Wine for Linux. I know that due to Wine I couldn't run with full graphical quality, so maybe try turning down the graphics settings a little and see if that helps. If it's possible try to force DirectX 9.
 
poohbear said:
make sure u install sharky's codecs, they really help w/ stability.
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Link?

Edit - Nevermind, found them. Seems to be a common problem with Windows 7 after reading through their forums.

I've been running an E8500, 8GB of RAM, Radeon 4870 512M, and Win 7 64 for almost a year now, with barely any problems in 99% of games. All drivers are the most current provided by the respective providers.
 
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For some inexplicable reason, ffdshow also has a destabilizing effect on FO3. I myself have experienced it, and removing ffdshow fixed it for me.
 
Coolone said:
For some inexplicable reason, ffdshow also has a destabilizing effect on FO3. I myself have experienced it, and removing ffdshow fixed it for me.
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Disabling it results in the game not being able to even start for me. Bah, I hope New Vegas doesn't suffer from this crap.
 
Bateluer said:
Disabling it results in the game not being able to even start for me. Bah, I hope New Vegas doesn't suffer from this crap.
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It probably will. All the DLC that Fallout 3 had was such crap even after the game had already been out for months. They have no idea how to code a game to not be glitchy.
 
zerocool84 said:
It probably will. All the DLC that Fallout 3 had was such crap even after the game had already been out for months. They have no idea how to code a game to not be glitchy.
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Its disgraceful. 🙁

Edit - Did a 2am run for some food and stopped at the Walmart. Seems sale was in progress, picked up SC2 with an included 10 dollar gift card. 🙂
 
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sticks435 said:
Check here: http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php?/forum/36-fallout-3-pc-issues/

There is a fix to limit quad core CPU's to 2 cores, and offload the AI to the 2nd one. That seems to fix most issues. Also, make sure you don't have it using Creative Alchemy. It causes the game to crash randomly on windows 7. The only problem with that is, the music on the radio stations will stutter and skip.
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Ya that should fix a large chunk of the crashes, just do what it says here:

http://www.sevenforums.com/gaming/20199-fallout-3-windows-7-w-quad-core.html

I ran it on an i7 920 and it crashed pretty frequently however after doing the above fix it now crashes much less than before. Its not rock solid but its a heck of a lot better than it was before.
 
Never had crashing problems on my Q6600. Maybe crashed like 5 times the whole time I played it. I don't have any help to offer you, but I'm just saying that the game doesn't crash for everyone.
 
I was getting frequent crashes until I applied the microstutter fix in fallout.ini, and they completely disappeared after that. (although at the cost of a framerate-dependent game speed)
 
I also edited some .cfg or .ini file (was getting a lot of crashes while indoors). After a tweak or two I had zero crashes and it became VERY stable for me. At first, it was very frustrating, but there are a couple minor/easy tweaks out there that should help a great deal.

This was using WinXP 32-bit, Q9550 (quad-core), nvidia GTX 260
 
My crashing problems cleared up right after getting a couple of the DLCs. I was running a q6600 on Win7-64. Though I think the game is so haphazardly coded that no particular fix is guaranteed to work for any other set up. Multiple points of failure.

Bethesda is on my 'no-fly' list now, til they hit the magic $10 limit.
 
Fallout 3 seems to have issues if it's running on systems with more than two CPU cores. The best thing to do is tweak the ini file and force it to use only two cores. That fixed the crashes for me.

I do have one annoying problem with sound. Music on on the PIP-Boy radio skips if I run the game using my X-FI for audio. Must be an issue with Creative's drivers me thinks. Doesn't do it if I output audio over HDMI.
 
I stopped playing Fallout 3 due to the crashes, same with Oblivion, never came back to them, and I've been doing mods for both. Fortunately (for sanity's sake) I was spending more time in the Construction Set and the G.E.C.K. than in the actual game playing it, still, the crashes turned me off entirely after a year or so with Oblivion, and after a year as well with Fallout 3, a real shame because I've always liked those games for what they were excluding their stability problems.

I spent countless hours trying to tweak both of them to no avail, sure I was able to stabilize them "more", allowing me to play for one or two hours at times, but I was never ultimately able to play a single (not a single one) play session without at least one crash. But, anyway, I've discussed this to death back then and I won't get too much into this, it'd be futile, in the end all I can say is good luck, you'll need it. Just check the official forums and look at the PC and Console versions of the technical support sections, you'll be able to comfort yourself in knowing that you're not alone in that boat, believe me (yes, even the Console versions crash, so just imagine with PCs and the numberless variations of hardware and software combinations).
 
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Oblivion did get the crash prevention addon with OBSE which really did fix a lot of the crashes, specially when you ran a lot of mods. I don't think that Fallout 3 has anything like this so far. Disabling GFWL did help me with crashes though.
 
Bateluer said:
Ack! I started playing FO3 again a few days ago. Trouble is, it seams to crash to desktop just as much as it ever did. I don't have any of the DLC for it, but every 10 minutes or so, it seems to crash. Makes playing it a royal pain, and I often have to replay the same chunks repeatedly, depending on where my last save was.

Anyone to improve the stability or fix the issue?
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Another option would be to uninstall the game, and then reinstall without patching it... just try your retail version.
Might behave differently.
I recall having almost no issues with it on my AMD X2 and 4850. (didn't patch it).
 
wow I never had crashes or any other major issues with Fallout 3. I was getting some hitching but lowering my AA fixed that. I also had the graphics go wonky on one set of drivers while using some graphics mods but no issues on the stock game.
 
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