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Post by sleepygirl on Jul 30, 2019 5:50:38 GMT
I knew that Alt-Tabbing would make the game crash, but what I wanted to see was what Task Manager was showing in the performance window. Normally I wouldn't do this, but it was the only way to see which cores were being used.
On reflection some of the utilities from Nexus that I tried that were supposed to overcome game engine deficiencies made the game run on a single core. Having seen plenty of CTDs while trying to tame both the Steam version and the GOG version with Task Manager running in the background it was very plain that everything was being loaded onto the second core of the No.1 processor while running these 'fix' patches. Individually each core in my monster of an old Xeon computer is nothing to write home about when it comes to speed, but because there is eight of them they are able to throughput a lot of data. The game is now running perfectly happily on two cores so I'm glad I persisted with trying to get things working properly.
The other thing is deleting GOG's nosy parker ware has dropped memory loading as well as the loading on both CPUs significantly which is a very good thing indeed.
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Post by dogonporch on Jul 30, 2019 18:31:42 GMT
It took me a while to figure out WHY this computer got hot when playing Oblivion offline. It was because the 'second time's the charm' method of starting it offline left rundll32.exe endlessly trying to download non-existent extras as part of the Windows Games 'features'.
Since Oblivion hates alt-tabbing...the solution was to use Windows Resource Monitor before launch to Suspend rundll32.exe...leaving it as a ghost...Oblivion now starts first try...pesky 'nosy Parker' (lol) doesn't phone home.
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Post by sleepygirl on Jul 30, 2019 19:01:38 GMT
It took me a while to figure out WHY this computer got hot when playing Oblivion offline. It was because the 'second time's the charm' method of starting it offline left rundll32.exe endlessly trying to download non-existent extras as part of the Windows Games 'features'. Since Oblivion hates alt-tabbing...the solution was to use Windows Resource Monitor before launch to Suspend rundll32.exe...leaving it as a ghost...Oblivion now starts first try...pesky 'nosy Parker' (lol) doesn't phone home. I still have to suspend rundll32.exe should I switch off my internet connection due to Windows Games 'Features' or else the same thing happens and the CPUs start running hot. What I and many gamers would like to do I'm sure is suspend the Microsoft team who thought this up, - preferably with a rope around their necks. For a while things were Ok when I deleted the 'features' stuff out of the registry, but of course ever helpful Windows put it all back again eventually. But at least I'm not getting GOG Galaxy hogging resources any more.
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Post by dogonporch on Jul 30, 2019 19:10:49 GMT
It took me a while to figure out WHY this computer got hot when playing Oblivion offline. It was because the 'second time's the charm' method of starting it offline left rundll32.exe endlessly trying to download non-existent extras as part of the Windows Games 'features'. Since Oblivion hates alt-tabbing...the solution was to use Windows Resource Monitor before launch to Suspend rundll32.exe...leaving it as a ghost...Oblivion now starts first try...pesky 'nosy Parker' (lol) doesn't phone home. I still have to suspend rundll32.exe should I switch off my internet connection due to Windows Games 'Features' or else the same thing happens and the CPUs start running hot. What I and many gamers would like to do I'm sure is suspend the Microsoft team who thought this up, - preferably with a rope around their necks. For a while things were Ok when I deleted the 'features' stuff out of the registry, but of course ever helpful Windows put it all back again eventually. But at least I'm not getting GOG Galaxy hogging resources any more. I had all sorts of suggestions re: registry changes and deleting various files...these are all WPFs...so eventually they'll sneak it back in. This was THE elegant solution as suggested by folks with similar problems. You just need admin privileges, of course. This suspend lasts until a reboot. All your other older games with the same rundll32 issues will also start again.
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Post by jgf on Jul 30, 2019 23:26:29 GMT
Doing a quick check by starting the game and then Alt-Tabbing out (which crashed the game) I was able to determine that Oblivion seems to be running on the second and fourth core of the No.2 CPU. If that is so and it's quite happy doing that I think I'll leave well enough alone and not try to get clever by adding any engine patches to the game or try setting anything in the Process tab. Thanks very much for your suggestions though. That indicates Oblivion was running on those two cores at the time. Once in the 3D part of the game windows can spread Oblivion threads through as many cores as are available, so the possibility remains that the game is not stable when presented with all the cores on your system. (And of course the possibility remains I am way out in left field, a location with which I am intimately familiar.) There are many utilities for assigning affinity, I recommended FlipTIB from experience and its simplicity; it's the only one I know of that merely toggles that one bit in the exe, most of the others run as processes in the background and, when they detect the program running, work the same as the Task Manager method. I had forgotten Oblivion's penchant for crashing (on both my systems I can safely ALT+TAB from the menu screens, but not from the 3D game), sorry. I remember not being able to ALT+TAB from Morrowind at all, leaving was fine but it would return to a frozen menu screen ...and some rather unpleasant language from me.
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Post by sleepygirl on Jul 30, 2019 23:38:21 GMT
I'll see how it goes jgf. If it looks like too much core choice is being an issue again I'll certainly try the affinity option. At the moment at least the game does seem to be working so I won't change anything unless I really have to.
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Post by jgf on Jul 31, 2019 9:51:23 GMT
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it." One reason I hate automatic updates. Hopefully you have it behaving now (or at least you know where to slap the case, lol); though I would play a while without many mods, with a very critical eye for any oddities.
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Post by sleepygirl on Jul 31, 2019 12:43:18 GMT
The few mods I have loaded in at the moment are a known quantity and they are working fine so I'm not going to be adding anything else no matter how tempting they might be until I have a good few hours of play on this game install without any problems. After that I may add other things one at a time watching closely for errors, but I'm certainly in no rush to do that.
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Post by sleepygirl on Aug 1, 2019 2:18:00 GMT
I'm sure you've all struck this before......... A plainly lethal arrow wound on a NPC and it does nothing much at all despite that fact you've been sneaking and it's a 3X damage hit. So I had a think about it and I had a close look at T'Saara who is supposed to be from a race that's good at archery and her class is supposed to be good with a bow as well, - and somehow things didn't add up. Archery mods that speed up arrows or cause more damage aren't the answer to my mind when the problem is that my supposedly bow skilled character can't seemingly hit anything for toffee as far as the game engine is concerned. So I gave her a pair of gloves that increase her archery skill. Not a game breaking amount, but enough to lift her out of being rendered almost useless with a bow by the game engine. Bows and arrows still remain levelled, but now T'Saara can use them properly. She is primarily an archer, but she can use a sword if she really has to. No real armour skill, but if she does wear armour light armour is the best choice for her. T'Saara is very stealthy and this is very much her other primary skill so if the game engine is setup to make her skills less than best when any bandit with a grudge and a warhammer is able to give her a good hiding if she's not careful enough I think it's more than Ok for me to put her on a more equal footing. How many times is it now that I've started off the Main Quest? I think it might be seven, - or is it eight...... The last three times it was with Eiolynn I do know that. Doing it with T'Saara will be different though. For a start she's more fragile than Eiolynn, but makes up for it by being quick and agile. Somewhat of a loner since she's an Ashland woman far from home, but not as much as Eiolynn who didn't want to be friends with anybody alive or dead. T'Saara isn't especially dishonest, - more an opportunist that doesn't mind helping herself to anything nobody seems to want anymore, - so I guess as long as she can stay on the right side of the law she should be alright. I should mention the fur helmet T'Saara is wearing. I know it must be the least regarded helmet in the game, but a lot of my characters have worn one no matter what their armour level as I look on it as being more a useful kind of hat that can be worn on cold nights to help keep your ears warm or when it's raining or while sneaking and getting your hair tangled up in stuff would be a major inconvenience. Eventually they end up being enchanted which makes them more useful, - but worn as armour, - no they don't get worn for that reason at all.
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Post by jgf on Aug 1, 2019 5:05:31 GMT
My archers get a marksman boost also, just irritating that the enchantment must be put on a piece of clothing/armor instead of on the bow itself, as in Morrowind; especially at low levels marksmen are at a distinct disadvantage in the game (somewhere I have a screenshot of Vilja and I, as a couple of stupid noobs, fighting a troll with at least two dozen arrows sticking out of him).
Your helmet reminds me of the Colovian Helm in Morrowind, you never saw any fighter types wearing one (never saw any Colovian armor either) but many others did, it looked like a comfortable fur lined cap. There was a bug in the unarmored skill that meant you had to wear one piece of armor for it to work, so my "unarmored" characters all wore the Colovian Helm (enchanted of course). And its overall shape made it perfect for a mage.
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Post by sleepygirl on Aug 1, 2019 5:50:10 GMT
In the vanilla game you only really see a couple of bandits wearing the fur helmet around level 1 or 2, though it's available from the usual traders. As armour it's fairly useless and will be the first thing to end up broken, but that's never bothered me. Nearly all of the other vanilla light armour helmets don't really appeal to me at all and if I could remember how to use Nifskope I'd reskin the fur helmet into being a steel cap with mail attached to make an alternative helmet. I remember those Colovian Helms. My fairy character Niggle ran about wearing one for a while until she got bored with it. And since I did play unarmoured characters sometimes I remember that unarmoured bug and having to wear one piece of armour. All a bit annoying really.
A page or two back I reported how Eiolynn put 66 plain steel arrows into a troll with an enchanted frost bow before it was dead which was pretty stupid really. I didn't give Eiolynn any kind of marksman upgrade because she isn't supposed to be all that good at using a bow, but she made up for it by poisoning all her arrows which of course she had to learn how to do helped along by a little training from Mages Guild members. Poison of course suits Eiolynn's character and personality perfectly.
With T'Saara supposedly being a skilled archer I decided the gloves were the best choice since an archer is likely to be wearing gloves whether they're equipped with armour or not. The gloves are based around the glove mesh for the Dark Brotherhood robes and I found them on Nexus. Since my archer characters are often carrying two bows (short bow/longbow, enchanted/not enchanted & etc) and are likely to own several others as well I find the gloves to be the best solution to the problem.
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Post by ghastley on Aug 1, 2019 16:51:35 GMT
I'm sure you've all struck this before......... A plainly lethal arrow wound on a NPC and it does nothing much at all despite that fact you've been sneaking and it's a 3X damage hit. If it's any consolation, Skyrim makes it worse: there's an upgrade in the Marksman skill tree that will paralyze your target when you hit them, ensuring that they don't die, even if it was a x15 sneak bonus with the best bow in the game and the most lethal arrows. The paralysing bonus takes precedence and ruins a perfectly good kill. I've always wanted my archers to have the assymetric bracers, with the protection on the inside of the left forarm, and the fingers of the right hand. They force the archer to be right-handed, so why not the equipment?
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Post by sleepygirl on Aug 1, 2019 18:16:41 GMT
Ah, - I shall add that to my list of reasons why I don't play Skyrim.
And yes I would love it if there were proper archer's bracers in the game. The gloves I'm using are not bulky like gauntlets so they are better, but having the right equipment would be just so nice.
I actually own an ancient Bear Archery bow, but I wouldn't really like to call myself an archer since I'm not much good at it.
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Post by sleepygirl on Aug 2, 2019 3:55:12 GMT
Playing as an archer in Oblivion is not easy. T'Saara was getting mobbed by Stunted Scamps during the Battle for Kvatch so I got her to climb up the ruins out of reach so she could pick them off without getting beaten up all the time. Her Dunmer 75% resistant to fire ability is very useful against Stunted Scamps, but she can't take too much of being beaten up by them. Even with her upgraded marksman skills it's still taking too many arrows to kill a Stunted Scamp. She was shooting pretty much shoulder to shoulder with an Imperial Legion archer at one stage and it was like their arrows were doing nothing. When battle was engaged T'Saara was carrying 320 arrows and at the time I took this screenshot the fight to reach the watchtower with the passage into the keep was only 2/3rds done. Inside the castle keep T'Saara was instantly in trouble because there was nowhere to climb out of the reach of the much tougher Scamps inside to use her bow and her ability with a sword and shield wasn't good enough to go toe to toe with them in a melee fight. There's only Salvian Matius and her left, - everyone else is dead, - so things aren't going well at the moment. I've got T'Saara saved out in the castle courtyard at the moment while I have a think about what to do next.
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Post by sleepygirl on Aug 2, 2019 7:54:18 GMT
While thinking about it I realised that Salvian Matius is a tank. He's essential so he can clear out most of the Scamps while T'saara keeps out of the way. So that's what I did and once T'Saara wasn't getting mobbed anymore due to the numbers of Scamps being thinned down she was able to cope with the necessary sword and shield work Ok.
I'm running the Passive Beasts mod, but not Safer Roads because I realised that while Bandits and Marauders can be a nuisance they do offer a means of honing a character's fighting skills. In T'Saara's case it gives her a chance to improve her blocking skills since that's where she's lacking at the moment.
Things have moved on to collecting up all four of the Mythic Dawn puzzle books and soon T'Saara will be going to mess up everyone's day at the Mythic Dawn shrine. Baurus didn't survive the meeting with Raven Camoran this time around and T'Saara was quite pragmatic about it in her usual Ashlander way. Oddly Eiolynn was upset by Baurus's death when she did the MQ which surprised me more than a bit and she invoked her terrible gods to turn back time (load the last save game) so that Baurus survived the meeting in the sewers. Am I taking roleplay too seriously? Perhaps I need to get out more. But I am having fun even if I do know some of the streets in the towns of Tamriel better than the streets of the town in which I live.
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