Game Crashes Constantly - Solved Thread - MISERY mod for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat

Hello! I installed Misery 2.2.1 two days ago and have been playing it often with no issues. Until today...

It just... crashes. I've noticed that other crash posts on this thread are linked to specific actions: opening inventory, equipping weapons, shooting their gun, etc. My game, however, just crashes when I walk forward for a few minutes. Sometimes the game just crashes in a few seconds of movement foreward. It seems to only crash when I'm outside (Zaton, in this case), so I assume the problem has something to do with the game just having issues loading everything that goes on. In an attempt to fix the issue, I lowered my video quality to the lowest possible setting for essentially every graphical aspect of Stalker and the game still crashes. No error message from the X-Ray engine, either. I don't use any addons, just vanilla Misery. Crashing has been a constant issue, and I am at wits' end as to how to fix it. Any suggestions to fix this problem would be greatly appreciated! Thank you.

Just in case this helps, my specs are as follows:

AMD Ryzen 7 1700 Eight-Core Processor

16gbs of RAM

GeForce GTX 1060 6gb

What alife.ltx switch_distance are you using? The default for MISERY is 300 meters.

Your CPU just meets the minimum recommended speed for the original game, and MISERY (at the default 300m distance) has well in excess of 4X as much going on at any one time. I know you have 8 cores, but unless you have an advanced cooling system capable of keeping all your cores running at 100% at the max turbo frequency, this CPU will have a little trouble keeping up with the alife demands of MISERY.

There is, however, no reason you should not be able to play crash free, with the right set of settings.

Check out my tips page: Moddb.com

While you stated you tried lower graphics settings, the precise procedure you use to do that will greatly impact whether those settings are actually applied or not. When the engine crashes, the next start makes it return to a different set of video settings than the last you applied. If you follow the procedures in my optimization article, you will very quickly identify the ideal set of features/renderer for your hardware configuration.

The Absolute Nature 4 (AN4) bundled with MISERY 2.2.1 are higher than the minimum available. I recommend everyone reinstall AN4 and use the lowest grass height and draw distance. Those millions of blades of grass will tax even a pair of the best GPU's in SLI if Sun Rays, shadows, and AA are enabled. Turning AA off will always help (if your renderer even has it enabled).

There is also the possibility that you have a freak set of spawns going on. Rather than the typical 4-8X as much life as the vanilla game, a bad group of spawns can result in unusually high populations that will overload even the best system. If the mod was performing adequately for a while in Zaton, and suddenly you are starting to have a lot of crashes, spawns could be the problem.

I would reinstall AN4 using the same FOV (I also suggest running MISERY at 55 FOV for lower end CPU speeds) as you originally installed at. The default for AN4 is 55. Call of Pripyat/MISERY's graphics will look the best at 55 which is what the original game was designed for. I have a 16 thread CPU running at 5.2GHz (all cores) and a RTX 2080 Ti, and I still use the MISERY default of 300m, 55 FOV, and keep AA (which has little benefit on the small textures used anyway) turned off. I use the lowest grass height and draw distance and keep my grass density turned to the minimum so I can smoothly play at 2160P with 60 FPS.

Lowering you switch_distance to 150 or 200m will greatly reduce the quantity of life in active state and could also potentially even push any abberent spawns outside your alife radius improving stability.

Keep checking for crash logs. Empty logs occur usually when the system has too little time to register an overload and generate a log. When you get closer to optimal settings, if yo still have crashes you will be more likely to have something useful in your log (we only generally need the last ten lines of the log).

Jasper34,

Thank you so much for this in-depth solution to my crashing issue! You went above and beyond for me. Just one question: how do I reinstall AN4? I must have missed an explanation in the other optimization link you provided in your post, however, I can't find any guide as to how to reinstall AN4. Thank you again for your help!

Sorry, I should have posted a link: Moddb.com

Another advantage of reinstalling AN4 is there are 8 different themes and you can choose a different one for each map if you like. The performance differences between them are negligible. Again, use the same FOV as you did when installing MISERY, or all the weapon zooms will be off.

Awesome, thank you! Would I have to start a new game if I want the reinstall to take effect?

By the way, changing the Alife spawn distance did the trick! There is still occasional stuttering, but no crashes. Again, thank you so much for all of this advice. You've been extremely helpful.

You do NOT need to start a new game if you install AN4.04.

Happy Hunting Stalker!