Ancotar seeks help

[Pervert]

Samwise, old bean, have you ever had the situation in Oblivion where it all slows down----flames hardly seem to move, handles don't turn (or take forever to do so), and spells can take an age to work. I've got that now, and it's at a stage of the game where I'd rather not go back 30 hours to my most recent major save.

Fault with the game---or with my machine? It happened before and is a real pisser.

[Sam Slater]

Do you get lots of crashes and corrupt saves too?

I think it's something to do with the time-stamps resetting, after prolonged usage (timestamps on autosave/quicksaves....I believe). The auto & quicksaves copy over the old saves, which over 30 hours gameplay is a lot!

Make a proper save using the escape key>save option so that you get a 'save 29' (for example) then go into your My Documents > My Games > Oblivion > Saves folder and delete:

autosave.bak
autosave.ess

plus:

quicksave.bak
quicksave.ess

(DO NOT DELETE THE OTHER SAVES WITH NUMBERS AND YOUR CHARACTER NAME!)

You can then restart Oblivion and load the game from your last save (save 29 for example).

Your game -upon leaving/entering buildings will then create new autosave.ess & autosave.bak files with no timestamp issues (the same when using the F5 key for quicksaves.

See if it works. It should because the saves with numbers attached don't overwrite old saves.

It solves the problem with corrupt games and other problems. If things are still going slow then I'd check your system rescourses in Windows to make sure nothings eating up your memory and processor (like antivirus scans etc).

[Pervert]

Cheers, mate. I'll give it a go.

First time I encountered it---months ago---it left me trapped in the Mythic Dawn shrine, and I had to start again from scratch.

[Sam Slater]

Aye, it's a fucker relying on auto & quicksaves because you've no backups.

Before entering any dungeon now I do a proper save via the 'escape > save' route.

You start getting slowdown and corrupt files after around 15 hours game time. It's a well known bug.

[Pervert]

I do get a few crashes, but no corrupt saves. Just tried what you suggested, and the same thing is still happening. Since it only happens at certain points of the game, and I have nothing like anti-virus scans running at the time, it seems more likely to be a game-related problem than one for my computer (unless, of course, my machine just doesn't have the capacity to deal with it). I have taken out the grass scrolling, so that doesn't eat into the processor.

Thanks for the advice anyway, matey. I may have to go back 30 hours after all.

[Sam Slater]

Don't delete all your 'Saves' folder.

Drag it onto the desktop and do a full uninstall/reinstall of Oblivion. Paste your 'Saves' folder back where it should be and you can restart from where you left off.

When the game crashes there a chance of corrupting the oblivion.ini file -or any other file- which causes issues. A fresh install of Oblivion and any mods you had will solves the issue.

Just keep those saves!

[Pervert]

I will do---but that's for another day.

Thanks for all the helpful advice, Sam.