Obscure Bugs

Troubleshooting Obscure Problems

These issues don't occur very often, and we don't even really know what causes them, but they hurt nonetheless.

Pathgrid CTDs

Does anyone really know why the pathgrid CTDs happen? The last thread about it I remember didn't find a solution.

This is an older problem that plagued both UL and OOO for a while. Basically, changing pathgrids is risky and requires a lot of testing to avoid CTD issues. I didn't find any surefire solutions for this either. Does anyone know if this topic has been written about in any more detail than the introductory Path Grid Generation article and Path Grids (simple)?

Black Screen Bug

This is the Infamous Nvidia + HDR Black Screen Bug.

This bug can usually be fixed by the mod-creator. It is usually caused by problems in a custom mesh. This can happen if the mesh creator forgot to assign a valid material to part of the mesh. It can also happen if you have an opaque texture assigned to a transparent portion of your mesh. It can even sometimes be caused by a standard shader like the GhostEffect.

It can also usually be solved by updating the tangent space of certain mesh nodes in a .nif file. NifSkope has a spell to do this.

Once you've narrowed down which .nif is causing the problem, simply open it in NifSkope, right-click each NiTriStrips/NiTriShape node and select Mesh -> Update Tangent Space. This works most of the time.

Face Editing CTDs

For some of us the Construction Set crashes when clicking on the 'Face' or 'Face Advanced' tab in the NPC edit dialog.

You can avoid this crash by first clicking 'Preview', then selecting the Face tab.

Edited Mods Not Appearing In Game

For me, I was trying to edit a module after the content of my computer had been upgraded and formatted. After re-downloading everything, I made a long list of changes to the module, mostly some decorating here and there, and went to enable the same mod in game. None of the changes were showing up in game, but would appear in the Construction set as changed and working fine.

The fix was simple. Go into your data folder, and rename the mod you're trying to edit. It then shows up in game.

((Hopefully posted in the right area. I will update this more when I play with the mod a bit to see if the problem was fully solved, but it appears to be fixed.)

Hmm, this page needs cleaning up. Well, in any case: what you're describing is a simple save-game issue. The game includes certain things in your savegame, and will not re-load them from the mod, even if the mod has been changed (the game actually treats a save file as a kind of unique "mod" that always loads last, so any changes saved to it will overrule any changes in your mod). The correct method for handling this is to do a clean save: load your game without the mod enabled, save, and then re-enable the mod. That will flush those changes from your save file, allowing your updated mod to re-assert itself. Note that this will erase anything in your save related to the mod: it is not recommended that you play an incomplete mod, or that you change a mod that you're in the middle of using for a savegame.