Stability suggestions

There are a couple of other game play related quirks that I'll skip for now such as the quest "fbmwHHOdirniran", topic "1Odirniran", statement "Go to Odirniran....". Unfortunately the order which should start the House Hlaalu quest instead reads SetStage fbmwHTOdirniran 10 which starts the quest for the Telvanni side. It should instead read SetStage fbmwHHOdirniran 10, HH rather than HT. In effect House Hlaalu agent 0edrynoSarethi (Edryno Arethi) was turned into a double agent in the translation and that's not how it should play in Morrowind. Oops ;)

But that type of thing aside aside there are a couple of more stability related issues which seem more important. Primary one at the moment being the heavy use of EVP or EvaluatePackage through the game scripts. While it's a valid and useful command it should NOT be running the full game, every frame of it, and for every relevant NPC. That's a lot of excess overhead and a real increase in the risk of crashes as the EVP page at the Elder Scrools wiki points out. My guess is it could improve stability around towns such as Balmora where it's used on one or more NPC and where people have complained of sporadic crashes. http://cs.elderscrolls.com/index.php/EvaluatePackage

If it's specific to a given moment or act we're probably fine, such as the script 0VedeleaOthrilScript which points to fbmwHHOdirniran == 50 and distance to a specific reference. But a large number are more like fbmwAssabaBentusScript, fbmwBotrirScript, fbmwDinScript or others in that they seem to run the whole game due to the following lines or ones very much like them.

IF fbmwMVMonsterDisease.FollowNow == 0
        mwDinREF.EvaluatePackage
ENDIF

Every frame of the game it's going to be running evp just to make sure that the NPC follows for the few moments of the relevant quest. That can be assured, without the excess strain on resources, by a simple set of edits such as the following.

    IF fbmwMVMonsterDisease.FollowNow == 0 && GetQuestRunning fbmwMVMonsterDisease && GetStage fbmwMVMonsterDisease < 50
        mwDinREF.EvaluatePackage
    ENDIF

It still checks for the follow package but now it only does it IF the relevant quest is running, and IF the quest stage where that follow command is dropped in the script hasn't passed. Before and after that we don't have them running EVP all the time.

With a search in Construction Set (edit, find text) for the phrase ".FollowNow == 0" I found a large number of these and there might be more out there which I haven't spotted yet. Fixing them doesn't seem too involved, the quest stages where the follow command is dropped are for the most part right there in the script so there's little additional digging to do with some attention to detail.

While I'm here one other unrelated issue. On interior cells it would be good to have fog near set to 0.0001 so those who are impacted by it don't get hit with the NVIDIA black screen bug. Wrye Bash supposedly fixes it but it doesn't seem to fix mod cells, plain vanilla oblivion it does well but not mod for some reason. That might fix some issue for some of us as well.