modding HUGE Problem with Modding RDR2 That No One is Talking About

[Dagger323 25]

6 hours ago, Mr.White said:

Hey guys,

I'm new to the game and as soon as I noticed some annoying stuff I started modding it ahah
Checking on google for a problem with the ASI loader (solved) I stumbled on this post, read everything and got worried...

Since I just roamed around valentine and did a couple quests I have not a big "experience" about the world and I'm worried I'm gonna ruin the experience without even noticing... Do you think these tools + mods are ok or will break the game?

 

Tools

• LML (obviously)
• ASI loader shipped with the scripthook ver 1.0.1491.17 at enbdev (all the others I tried worked the 1st time, but upon restart the rockstar launcher would hang)
• ScriptHookRDR2 V2 (instead of the 'enbdev' version I used kepmehz one from nexus, just because it's apparently newer and updated by him - the asi loader he provides tho was one of those that wouldn't work)
• Online Content Unlocker (the lml one from nexus by energidaan, without "version.dll" that I read causes issues to many, needed for smoking complete)

Mods

• Walking Control Complete
• Smoking Complete
• Custom First Person FOV
• Disable Horse Holstering 1.4
• Restored PED dialogues

I thought they were pretty safe (and very recent) QOL addons, but the Custom FOV one is .ymt and from 2021, so gets me double worried + I read here also the content unlocker can be troublesome

From your experience are those ok, or should I remove them and revert back to a vanilla save (which luckily I have)?

I wanted to install also the remade gun metals mod but now I refrain


PS: while we are at it, since I have a vanilla save and a modded one, I can test something if you need

Cheers!

I have only ever used Smoking Complete and Realistic Gun Metals out of those mods you listed. I haven't personally experienced spawning issues with them installed. But you need to test each and every mod you use for yourself, one by one. Only you can determine if they're causing you issues. Do not just rely on the testimonies of others. Certain combinations of mods might also be affecting things for you that without that specific mod list may not affect someone else's game. TEST EVERYTHING FOR YOURSELF.

[Mr.White 0]

14 hours ago, Dagger323 said:

I have only ever used Smoking Complete and Realistic Gun Metals out of those mods you listed. I haven't personally experienced spawning issues with them installed. But you need to test each and every mod you use for yourself, one by one. Only you can determine if they're causing you issues. Do not just rely on the testimonies of others. Certain combinations of mods might also be affecting things for you that without that specific mod list may not affect someone else's game. TEST EVERYTHING FOR YOURSELF.

 

Ok thanks, if I can I'll test after having played for a while so I can notice the differences, the game stopped working again with the ASI loader I was using, so vanilla game it is in any case!

[TheWrath 1]

On 6/3/2024 at 1:27 AM, PeterSteiner said:

Due to this, I was forced to remove all my mods and play vanilla. What a pity!

 

RDR2 modding is dead.

Yea I am of the same mind, I will probably delete and move on. Cannot go back to playing vanilla. Its a shame really, no other game comes close to this level immersion. I cannot get any trains to spawn in valentine with pretty much every non script asi deleted so its not worth unfortunately.

[TheWrath 1]

On 6/4/2024 at 6:14 PM, Dagger323 said:

 TEST EVERYTHING FOR YOURSELF.

Of course as I am sitting here typing this I had the game running, not ten seconds after I posted a train rolls into valentine while I am waiting. 🤡 It has guards and passengers. Would this indicate that my game is fixed? I have to look for spoonbills.

[Dagger323 25]

7 hours ago, TheWrath said:

Of course as I am sitting here typing this I had the game running, not ten seconds after I posted a train rolls into valentine while I am waiting. 🤡 It has guards and passengers. Would this indicate that my game is fixed? I have to look for spoonbills.

That single scenario is not nearly enough to determine whether your spawns are working or not. You still very easily could have a lack of trains spawning in other locations, and may very well still have minimal numbers of trains in Valentine (merely seeing one pull in with passengers could easily be a rare fluke, as it was with me until I removed enough problematic mods to see them more frequently). Go back and read what I said about witnessing regular trains pulling in at all stations, especially in every settlement. Rhodes is an important one, as is Saint Denis and Annesburg (not including the two trains that are regularly refueling sitting in the Annesburg depot). Comparing your current spawning frequency to vanilla is also imperative.

[Delesthor 1]

i was wondering if vestigia at least helps to make the world more lively as it extends the game pools through gameconfig.xml and messes with how animals behave and herd generally

[Dagger323 25]

43 minutes ago, Delesthor said:

i was wondering if vestigia at least helps to make the world more lively as it extends the game pools through gameconfig.xml and messes with how animals behave and herd generally

Vestigia, from my experience, caused persistent FFFFFF errors, at least when using the optional gameconfigs that increased ped pools. I believe it far too radically edits the game's pools to the point of instability. What did seem to help for me was installing the "An Experimental Game Config to Help with the pop-in and spawn issue" mod from AbdelrahmanMahmoud on Nexus, which I linked before in this thread, but I will link again here for convenience: An Experimental Game Config to Help with the pop-in and spawn issue at Red Dead Redemption 2 Nexus - Mods and community (nexusmods.com)

 

After having used it for a considerable amount of time, I can confirm that it absolutely has improved the ped and wildlife spawns in my game while seeming to be very stable and causing no notable crashes. Your mileage may vary, but it has been effective for me at returning my ped/wildlife spawns almost completely back to vanilla. The only thing it doesn't solve is the train spawns; it may help slightly with them, but it isn't a complete solution in that regard by any means. Trains still seem to be the most stubborn problem to resolve. Test the mod for yourself and see what results you get from it. Granted, it's not going to automatically allow you to just go in and start adding back tons of problematic mods again, because they will still break the spawns if enough of them are installed (or if certain ones are installed that cause enough of a problem on their own), so don't count on that. But from my experience it definitely helps compensate for a lot of what you're probably still not getting in terms of vanilla levels of ped and wildlife populations.

[TheWrath 1]

9 hours ago, Dagger323 said:

Rhodes is an important one, as is Saint Denis and Annesburg

Yea I read back through the thread again and payed more attention to the train stuff. So a train did roll through Rhodes, although it was a supply train and it did have a guard standing on the back caboose though. I was not able to get a train to spawn at St. Denis. I am going to download the Train Engineer mod you were talking about and double check. Does it show a blip for trains rolling into towns as well?

[Dagger323 25]

13 minutes ago, TheWrath said:

I am going to download the Train Engineer mod you were talking about and double check. Does it show a blip for trains rolling into towns as well?

Yes it does. It shows blips of train routes all over the map, which will turn white indicating a train has spawned in once that blip comes close enough to the player.

[Delesthor 1]

around 7 hours testing from yesterday i can confirm that "An Experimental Game Config to Help with the pop-in and spawn issue" helps a lot with the spawns and eliminates all errors with my 8gb vram card , by replacing vestigias gameconfig.xml with the one delivered by the mod the game feels a lot more alive and stutterless , also whenever i encountered a train in the wild while free roaming i saw inside 4-5 peds per wagon , same thing with trams in saint denis

[Dagger323 25]

36 minutes ago, Delesthor said:

around 7 hours testing from yesterday i can confirm that "An Experimental Game Config to Help with the pop-in and spawn issue" helps a lot with the spawns and eliminates all errors with my 8gb vram card , by replacing vestigias gameconfig.xml with the one delivered by the mod the game feels a lot more alive and stutterless , also whenever i encountered a train in the wild while free roaming i saw inside 4-5 peds per wagon , same thing with trams in saint denis

Glad to hear it's improved things for you. If only there was a way to completely fix the train spawns in settlements, I'd be quite satisfied…

[Cratthorax 1]

I might add a bit more to the"ffff" topic. But in before I would like to ask, how many of you guys with the "respawn" bug are in use of the "Hunting Grounds" mod?

 

There are two "ffff-errors" I can verifie are not caused by any modded state. One you will experience in chapter 4, trying to talk to Pearson to go hunting for Crayfish with him. The second one is also chapter 4 related to the "A fine night of debauchery"-mission. For me it would crash in the cutscene after you jumped in the water(so the one you reach the bay). As of yet I  have not found a way around it. It behaves the same, no matter if vanilla, modded, mods removed I'd supspected, or trying to skip scene/abandon through it. Both ffff's are mentioned on dozens of posts all across the internet, and they range across all variants of the game, modded, pre 2022, vanilla etc. So, with a high probability, those two crashes are caused by any of the game updates and not a modded state.

 

The Perason error I've got solved by looking to the opposite side of the camp where he is sitting(at the bay), so that Pearson gets "correctly warped" in his place before moving in to talk to him. Why warped? I don't know, but that's what he does. It's not a coinsidence and it is not random. It happens all the time for any of my testing session(which are a cramp in the anus, because of long loading, random player respawn and no proper manual saving) and it was solved one and the same way for all the states(posted upside). During that testing I again figured my initial statement of not adding any mods that add "new stuff" to the world, is correct. Specifically it had me deinstalling two mods that added "blips" to the map. I don't want to publicy shame those mods, but "blips" should give you a hint. Those two mods were newly installed and not in any of the lists I had provided in my previous posts.

 

A solution for issue number 2 I'm currently working at/trying to verifie. The internet says one solution is to do all other quests of chapter 4 first, then move on with debauchery. Obviously to verifie this I have to play the game and I usually take my time in sandbox RPG's so it's maybe going to take some days/weeks depending how much quest focus I can manage to keep up. It's not easy to not drift off in this game. There's just so much to do, discover, and immersive yourself into. However, virtually every other solution provided by the internet does not work, only works partially(such as the issue would randomly return in a different story scenario). Those solutions include: changing your graphics from DX12 to Vulcan and vice versa, verifie game files on Steam, removing all, some, or mods you deem culprit, shving/trimming your hair/beard inb4 doing the quest(yes, that was an actual proposal). The crash was persistent across all sessions and happened exactly in the same spot when the four leave water and Arthur starts to talk.

[Cratthorax 1]

I think I was wrong about the "A fine night of debauchery" crash. I'd spend about 4-5 hours to nail the culprit by:

 

1. removing all mods and tools(ScriptHook, Rampage, version.dll etc.) and testing against this particular mission

2. adding only tools and prerequisites(ScriptHook, version.dll, mod manager files), but not mods

3. bit by bit adding more mods after each testing session

4. finally narrowed down to "softer.asi" and "hard.asi"

 

I suspect the "softer.asi", because Bolmin70 is a rock solid author, but this mod was just a port from another mod ranging back to pre 2021. So if anyone has contact to Bolmin70, you let him know. I guess it's the "No auto reload in Dead Eye"-feature, because this one acted up when you start the ship's bar gunfight by auto reloading when going into dead-eye first time. The other two features "no glow on objects", and the harder difficulty settings, which I only had no stamina/dead eye-core refill on waking up from sleep enabled, I don't think would affect the mission and in return create a crash. Something in the scripted scene of this particular mission corrupts whatever is happening in the background on this particular mod.

 

However, I can't say for sure and so I removed both mods, since they're only minor additions that do not necessarily make the game significantly more easy on my hardcore setup. Also, testing against this mission was a pita given its long approach and you couldn't save/auto save anywhere. So I had to do the whole scripted scene over and over again...probably about 10-12 times, because I wanted to be sure before making any statements.

[Chirag3004 0]

I started doing research for finding a solution for Micro Stuttering in my game (Below Link no. 01) and found that there are lot many problem gamers are facing which led me here. 

 

Link no. 01 - Minor Micro Stutter - https://postimg.cc/Y4tKS63y

 

After going through this entire thread I tested my game that i aint suffing from any other issue yet or maybe haven't looked in right place. Following are the link of the screenshots from my game. Please forgive my Graphics choice, Thats how i prefer my game to look.

 

Link no. 02 - Peds Spawn - https://postimg.cc/689Y2YkR
Link no. 03 - Train and Peds Spawn - https://postimg.cc/1gdHdPfc
Link no. 04 - Train and Peds Spawn - https://postimg.cc/ZByctgNk
Link no. 05 - Wildlife Spawn - https://postimg.cc/sMwKp5zL
Link no. 06 - Wildlife Spawn - https://postimg.cc/06jnZr2y

 

Please suggest me in case i have missed. I have tested many random places like Saint Denis (Railway Station, Garden, Regular roads), Valentine, Wilds, Snowy regions at North(Lake Isabella, Colter, Adler's Ranch, Cairn Lake), Seas and Rivers, etc. Haven't found anything abnormal. I have all types of Wildlife, Trains and Peds spawns. However, I am still having Minor Micro Stutter in my game as shown in Link no. 01. Below is my Modlist :

 

 

Please suggest me what i can do to stop Stutter and Other testing methods for checking despawns.

[Mr.White 0]

Playing around vanilla, I have to say even the game itself is unstable regarding "entities" (npc, vehicles etc)... I brought a stolen chart up to saint denis, dismounted, walked literally 6 steps in a direction because two dude were screaming, looked behind me and the chart was already gone.
Same with random encounters, kill a bunch of people, chase one of em for 15/20 meters, turn back and the bodies already disappeared - to not talk about random bonfires, sometimes you follow the smoke and it disappears along the camp while you're almost there.

I think this means the game is at its limit anyway and they put some sort of flush algorithm like that to prevent it from going bonkers, so probably that's why any mod whatsoever can clog the engine and it starts despawning active entities to prevent memory crashes etc...

I think our best hope is if Rockstar will release the "next gen" updated they promised, that will probably make the game stable in that regard....

[Delesthor 1]

Been testing timescalers this week to see if they break spawns and train schedules and i can't really feel the difference between the "longer days" mod and "timescale" from wickedhorseman , if anyone has experience with these two and knows the best choice between them it would be of great help

[Dagger323 25]

On 6/9/2024 at 11:46 PM, Delesthor said:

Been testing timescalers this week to see if they break spawns and train schedules and i can't really feel the difference between the "longer days" mod and "timescale" from wickedhorseman , if anyone has experience with these two and knows the best choice between them it would be of great help

I've stayed away from the "Longer Days" mod because of the numerous reported issues it has with train scheduling/speed and other reported spawning problems. After testing the "Timescale" mod for some time, it seems to evidently be bug-free, and I haven't noticed any apparent issues with it affecting spawns. It will slightly change the train scheduling; since trains are loosely tied to time schedules, they will show up at a different frequency relative to real-world time in some scenarios, though this is totally acceptable and expected behavior for a mod that makes timescales longer. Overall trains spawn about the same with it installed, they will just not be showing up as often in real-world time due to the length of time it takes for in-game hours to pass (which will also change based on which version of the mod you use). The mod seems to have no effect on train speed though unlike the way "Longer Days" apparently affects them, making them move around the map at a snail's pace. Based on all the negative reports I've read regarding Longer Days, and my own experience using Timescale, I'd recommend sticking with wickedhorseman's Timescale as it is a newer mod that uses a native solution as opposed to script files and should cause far less problems as a result.

Edited June 17 by Dagger323

[JKL409 7]

1 hour ago, Dagger323 said:

I've stayed away from the "Longer Days" mod because of the numerous reported issues it has with train scheduling/speed and other reported spawning problems. After testing the "Timescale" mod for some time, it seems to evidently be bug-free, and I haven't noticed any apparent issues with it affecting spawns. It will slightly change the train scheduling; since trains are loosely tied to time schedules, they will show up at a different frequency relative to real-world time in some scenarios, though this is totally acceptable and expected behavior for a mod that makes timescales longer. Overall trains spawn about the same with it installed, they will just not be showing up as often in real-world time due to the length of time it takes for in-game hours to pass (which will also change based on which version of the mod you use). The mod seems to have no effect on train speed though unlike the way "Longer Days" apparently affects them, making them move around the map at a snail's pace. Based on all the negative reports I've read regarding Longer Days, and my own experience using Timescale, I'd recommend sticking with wickedhorseman's Timescale as it is a newer mod that uses a native solution as opposed to script files and should cause far less problems as a result.

 

I'll be honest, I actually hadn't tested the Timescale mod because I assumed it would just be the same situation as the Longer Days mod... 

This is intriguing.....

 

Clearly there are ways of getting around these spawning and train related issues. 

The comically slow trains when using the Longer Days mod was always a massive issue for me when playing. 

[PIZZASPULUNKER 0]

About to get into modding, aware of this issue, what's the best way to check if the issue is presenting? I've seen something about pink birds outside of Saint Denis, but I also saw some trainer could monitor the spawn pool? Appreciate any advice.

[Dagger323 25]

23 hours ago, PIZZASPULUNKER said:

About to get into modding, aware of this issue, what's the best way to check if the issue is presenting? I've seen something about pink birds outside of Saint Denis, but I also saw some trainer could monitor the spawn pool? Appreciate any advice.

Go back and read my posts detailing how to check for train spawns. I've reiterated it too many times already to go to the trouble of typing it all over again. Spoonbills alone are not a reliable way to check for the problem as they only really serve as a generalized indication of normal wildlife spawns and do not necessarily signify normal ped counts in stagecoaches, wagons, and trolleys, and certainly provide no accurate representation of correct regular train spawning, which is one of the first aspects that breaks in the game and easily the most difficult thing to try and resolve.

Edited June 22 by Dagger323

[Last Redemption 0]

 

Hello, I also had the problem with the trains not being available. I was probably working on the problem for 10 to 20 hours, but the problem has gone away since last Wednesday (June 19th). All trains spawn correctly again. I don't know what it is, maybe it's because I downloaded ScriptHook from Nexus Mods (https://www.nexusmods.com/reddeadredemption2/mods/1472) or maybe it's the new Rampage update, but it works for me again and I use lots of other mods. However, Railroad Engineer again led to train spawning problems for me. 
I hope I can help you all with this.

[Dagger323 25]

38 minutes ago, Last Redemption said:

 

Hello, I also had the problem with the trains not being available. I was probably working on the problem for 10 to 20 hours, but the problem has gone away since last Wednesday (June 19th). All trains spawn correctly again. I don't know what it is, maybe it's because I downloaded ScriptHook from Nexus Mods (https://www.nexusmods.com/reddeadredemption2/mods/1472) or maybe it's the new Rampage update, but it works for me again and I use lots of other mods. However, Railroad Engineer again led to train spawning problems for me. 
I hope I can help you all with this.

That just sounds like you changed something that altered how the trains are spawning and don't know what you did to make that happen. You would need to conduct a lot more thorough testing to narrow down what precisely was/is affecting your train spawns rather than purely wild guessing, which really isn't helpful in the slightest.

Edited June 22 by Dagger323

[PIZZASPULUNKER 0]

On 6/21/2024 at 7:52 AM, Dagger323 said:

Go back and read my posts detailing how to check for train spawns. I've reiterated it too many times already to go to the trouble of typing it all over again. Spoonbills alone are not a reliable way to check for the problem as they only really serve as a generalized indication of normal wildlife spawns and do not necessarily signify normal ped counts in stagecoaches, wagons, and trolleys, and certainly provide no accurate representation of correct regular train spawning, which is one of the first aspects that breaks in the game and easily the most difficult thing to try and resolve.

Thanks. Pink Birds are spawning both outside Saint Denis and in the wild (found some whilst on a bounty hunt), stagecoaches have 2 people most of the time, and I’ve seen 2-3 trains spawn in, plus the ticketed one had 4-5 people per car. Looks like I finally got my custom assets down by removing the horse overhaul. When I get back I’m going to add a couple more and try again. I’m *this* close to my perfect game.

[Delesthor 1]

Has anyone tested the new mods for unlocking online animals into single player from " PlayRedThenStayDead " to see if they break spawns or trains ?

[Waggs21 0]

So idk if this has happened to any else along the lines of this same topic and it seems we’re using very similar mods… i keep having a pretty big issue; Everytime i try to lock onto a hostile NPC, i end up locked on to a story NPC, and it seems very strong.. and secondly along side that i can’t ride a wagon with a story NPC because they are hostile and i push them off like im stealing it.

 

Any ideas??