UPDATEAll the issues described in this thread are being accumulated (after discussion) in the
Troubleshootingcategory on the CS Wiki. It's not complete yet and will probably be rearranged, but it's shaping up into a nice list of issues (and solutions, where they exist).
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How it all began:
A recent discussion I had with scruggsy in the
Reneer's Corpse Mod thread prompted me to start some digging on common problems related to savegame bloating. It wasn't easy to find good information about this issue, and in the process I remembered some other old nightmares that don't seem to be very well documented, either.
So, I'm wondering if anyone knows of a good place where this sort of info has been collected already? If not, it surely seems like it would be worth creating a resource like this.
Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated.
Here's a brief list of some common mistakes and their effects on players. Please suggest more ideas if you can.
PlaceAtMe Bloating SavegamesI was most surprised to find no mention of this issue whatsoever in the high-profile tutorial
Casting Spells From An Activator, which apparently gives very bad advice by giving script examples that will leave garbage in your savegame. The problem is that
disable doesn't remove the reference from your savegame. It's mentioned on the
Etiquette page, but this is a pretty weak warning:
QUOTE
... avoid using PlaceAtMe to create new copies of an object when you could simply use MoveTo on an existing object.
The
PlaceAtMe page has a good warning and the
Talk:PlaceAtMe page has some additional details, but these issues are not mentioned in the places where people really look for answers (i.e., tutorials), so I'm not sure how effective this is.
This really scares me because in the last month or so my primary savegame has ballooned from ~12Mb to more than 26Mb. I have no idea which of my 100+ mods might be doing this (maybe more than one of them!), and there's a reasonable chance that disabling the culprits won't repair this damage even if I do find them (I do have to find the culprits to prevent further damage). Does anyone know what some of the most common culprits are?
I certainly suspected weather mods right off the bat, so I already disabled GetWet and PJ's Lightning Strikes During Storms, but this didn't have any obvious effect. I haven't had time to check the scripts in those mods yet.
I found a post by Wrye on the UESP site saying that a companion mod has caused problems like this, but it was pretty old and didn't mention any names.
I'm guessing the reason this issue hasn't been more widely discussed is that it seems to be a bit tricky to use MoveTo on a persistent object instead of PlaceAtMe/disable on a temporary reference. There's some discussion about this on the
Talk:MoveTo page, but it's far from being concise or clear.
Has anyone written a good tutorial on how to properly use MoveTo instead of PlaceAtMe/disable? Deathless Aphrodite recently posted some good teaser/hints about using a check on loading screen with begin menumode 1007 so that MoveTo will work when you go from exterior to exterior, but I didn't find much else on the subject.
Pathgrid CTDsThis 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.
Anyone know if this topic has been written about in any more detail than the introductory
Path Grid Generation article and
Path Grids (simple)?
Changing Script Variables This issue is best summarized in Wrye's thread
Overriding Scripts and CTDs based on discussions started in MentalElf's thread
In desparate need of a save game editor, but it seems like this info really hasn't made it into popular circulation yet.
Perhaps the CS Wiki should have a prominent page about
Common Gotchas or something similar where we can accumulate this sort of stuff?