PC
[edit] Technical problems
* Vertical Sync may force an unsupported refresh rate for some monitors, resulting in no display. Disabling v-sync may correct this issue.
* When launching the game a 'Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library Runtime Error - C:/Program Files/Bethesda Softworks/Fallout 3/Fallout3.exe - The aplication has requested the runtime to terminate it in an unusual way.' error pops out. Pressing any key exits the game.
* When reloading a saved game, your character will have nothing in his/her inventory, just access to Enclave Radio and Galaxy News Radio.
* At 10th Birthday, upon being given PipBoy, unable to move, but able to look around. So you sit there looking around. Eventually your father leaves.... and the guy goes to the bar, and you still sit there.
:Solution: This can be fixed by going to Control Panel->Sound and Audio Devices. Under Speaker Settings click Advanced. Under the Performance Tab lower the acceleration tab to "Basic acceleration" or lower and it should fix it. Enjoy!
:If that doesn't work, typing enableplayercontrols in the console forces the game to let you move around. Doesn't fix any of the sound issues though.
* Not responding when launching the game on XP
* Crash when launching the game on Vista x64 - Program has stopped working message. Note that updating video drivers tends to fix this.
* No games saved when clicking "save". Possibly related to having a roaming user profile. Check if your saves are located in your save game folder. If they are, start game and scroll down to the bottom of your save game list, and your saves should be there.
* Severe drop in FPS at random times while playing in the wastes. Reloading a different save or minimizing/restoring the game usually fixes it.
* Crash to desktop without a send/don't send error report.
* Crash to desktop if Anti-Aliasing is turned on, usually when tab is pressed to bring up the Pip-Boy, but sometimes just on the loading screen. Turning AA off solves this issue for some.
* Crash to desktop when tab is pressed to bring up the Pip-Boy
* Crash when "getignorecrime" is entered into console.
* Crash to desktop on exit. (Also present for some Oblivion users.)
* Crash when "New Game" is pressed in the main menu (related to ffdshow - adding fallout3.exe to the exception list in the Audio Decoder Configuration apparently fixes this, but usually doesn't work.).
* Crashing and corrupting top save to be back at beginning of game.
* Crash when "Play" is pressed in the launcher splash screen (Discuss specific issues/solutions on Talk:Fallout_3_bugs).
* APPCRASH with faulting module Cinemasteraudio.dll. Removing Roxio software, uninstalling Fallout3, then reinstalling Fallout3 appears to fix this. First encountered issue in the bar, later saves also had issue. The fddshow method above may be an alternative to this.
* ~ not working to open console. Going into Device Manager Device Manager->"Human Interface Devices"->"Microsoft eHome Infrared Transceiver"->'Update Driver Software'->'Browse my computer for driver software"->'Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer'->'Infrared HID Device'->'Ok'->'Close' (Note: same fix works for TOEE) Once the driver has been changed, it can be changed back. Somehow changing the driver frees the ~ mapping. Note: Just updating the driver is not sufficient, it needs to be changed.
* Crash on loading screen when trying to load saved game.
* Crashes happen more frequently the longer the game is played, resulting in a "log in and crash straight back out" effect after only an hour or so of game time.
* Crash with error "APPCRASH Fault Module Name: d3d9.dll"
* Disk unable to be read, viewed or otherwise seen as media on some DVD drives such as a Sony DRU-720A. (If you are experiencing this, you could try defragmenting your drive before installing, or install to a new hard drive.)
* VATS - severe drop in FPS for some users when entering VATS. Disabling anti-aliasing in the game launcher fixes this (No, actually it doesn't for everyone. This is the memory leak being addressed.)
* Mouse lag and strange acceleration. Force vsync off in your graphics Control panel to fix.
* Due to an error in installing, certain sound effects (like gun shots/reloading and monster sounds) do not play.
* Drop in FPS after playing for an extended period of time. Restarting the game fixes this.
* Rebinding The Pip-Boy key only rebinds the key to open, the closing key is still default. NOTE: As a workaround, since the three categories Stats/Items/Data of your Pip-Boy are also hardwired to the F1-F3 keys (this is unrebindable, not shown in the in-game >controls >action mapping menu and NOT mentioned in the game manual at all), you can use those instead of needing 2 different other keys for opening / closing the PB.
* Some key bindings are dropped (very rarely) after loading a saved game.
* Wait function does not work when button is rebound to "w" key.
* Sometimes when firing full auto or pistols too quickly causes sounds of weapons to be silent for a few shots. (Sounds very similar to the "radio glitch" mentioned under general bugs.
* With 5.1 surround sound, sounds from behind come through front speakers and vice-versa. (Hmm... Is this more than just a improperly configured windows vista soundcard/speaker setup?
* Streaks, flickers, and graphical corruption on full screen with Vista and SLI enabled. Running in Windowed mode solves the problem. (Try adjusting your monitors refresh rate, I'm not sure if you have to adjust both your graphics cards to the same refresh rate since you are using SLI, but you may.
* When the Pip-Boy's color is changed, the color does not change in third person view. (In other words, if color is changed to amber, then the pip boy remains green until activated) Yep, the animation doesn't change either.
* Turning on radio causes graphics to stutter, possible solution: turn down the graphics a bit, if your graphics are walking on the edge, throwing in the sound might be just too much for a few seconds, and cause the stutter. (Hmm, are you possibly using an onboard soundcard and an onboard graphics card? If you have a PCI/etc. connectable soundcard or graphics card, try that, I imagine that would be less taxing on your motherboard.
* On some configurations, no 16/9 or 16/10 resolutions are available in setup.
* Can't exit vault 101 - game crash. Loading imported save do not help - game crash after walking anywhere.
* Suddenly unable to play holotapes. Reverting to a previously saved game seems to fix it.
* Music on the pipboy crackles and pops, while the DJs are coming in crystal clear. Is fixed by installed K-Lite codec pack, opening FFDshow and moving the DirectShow slider all the way to the left. *Note a properly functioning radio will have a slight underlying hiss the farther away you are from the station. This is not to be confused with the crackling/popping which is a symptom of broken codecs.
* Defeated enemies weapons sometimes spontaneously disappear from their inventories, leaving only the ammo behind. Loading an earlier quicksave didn't help, but restarting the game and loading the very same quicksave again did fix this.
* Pressing Tab does not exit Pip-Boy when in the Items->Misc->Keys submenu.
* After playing for a long time, textures start to be loaded at very low resolution. Restarting the game resolves this.
* Raiders spawn inside the stone bridge ramp between Wilhelm's Wharf and The Citadel. Raiders can shoot out from inside the solid walls.
* Bad Z-sort of transparent hair texture when Grandma Sparkle is wearing goggles.
* In VATS, at certain zoom levels, it won't highlight any areas on the target until you either select a new target with the left or right arrows, or unless you move the cursor to a far edge of the screen and back again.
* If an Xbox 360 USB controller is plugged in, and if "Enable Xbox 360 Controller" is set to "Off" in the controls menu, key bindings in-game will still show as the controller. (e.g. In the HUD, instead of displaying "Use E)" which is really the keystroke you would use if the controller option was set to off, instead when your crosshair is over an item, it'll show up as "Use A)" as if it were still using the controller.) Unplugging the controller will remedy the bug. You can also go to control settings and set "Enable Xbox 360 Controller" to on, and then off again to fix this, but you will have to do this every time you restart the game.
* In the Inventory screen, when interacting with the various boxes and containers of the game world, it's not possible to scroll the item highlight cursor up/down with the arrow keys. When you try this, all you get is an unhealthy "flicker" between items as if the cursor is stuck somehow. NOTE: This only happens when you still have the mouse pointer hovering over the list, i.e. it's not a bug at all.
* Sometimes when user plays with an Xbox 360 Wireless controller, the game disables it and user must press on Xbox guide button in order to re-enable it.
* In the wasteland, if user looks at the mountains, the geometry flickers even with Ultra settings.
* When walking in the wilderness it is possible to have your feet seemingly stuck in the ground, or walking in mud, and jumping only makes a tiny jump. This followed by warping back to earlier positions and finally a crash.
* Game is freezing for 3-5 minutes, then you can play for 3-10 minutes and it's freezing again...
* Jumping key is very unresponsive at times, i.e. sometimes my character jumps when I press it and sometimes not. This is especially annoying when you want to jump from one building to another or across an irradiated body of water. Note 1: This may be caused by encumberance. Note 2: Nope, it also happens with empty pockets and is more likely related to being on uneven terrain. (Yes, I noticed this as soon as I got to Megaton! I would jump from balcony to balcony and the outer rails don't respond to jumps. I figured it was from my low agility of 1, but the map surfaces just aren't made very well it would seem.
* Scrolling with mousewheel in Pipboy 3000 causes fatal crash, monitor turns off and you have to reboot system
* On the Rivet City Flight Deck, pointing towards the broken Bow is a portion that is a good deal lower than the rest. The game fails to realize this and has the player walking on thin air. (Hmm... I didn't make it to Rivet City yet, but this sounds a lot like the problem I wrote about under "discussion" for the grayditch area". just what is the deal with these maps on this engine?
* Cannot talk to "Mister Burke" character in the bar in Megaton (have tried disable/enable fix to no avail)
* Small black screen on launch.
* Wild dog totally vanishes when I brought my PipBoy up in order to change weapon. Dog vanished when exiting the PipBoy.
* Scroll wheel problem. Using scroll wheel makes anything usable by the scroll wheel constantly up or down. e.g either fully zoomed or out on map, either fully zoomed in or out for 3rd person to 1st person, either fully scrolled up a list or down the list. If you scroll up (wheel) the scroll bar will move up to the end and will be unmoveable unless you scroll down one click with the wheel to try and put the scroll wheel in neutral, scrolling two much down will move the scroll bar down to the end. Sometimes when the scroll bug is activated after talking to someone even through it wasn't activated previously. This also affects VATS.
* User cannot quit the game normally and has to reboot the computer.
* With Sound Blaster sound cards using surround sound, some sounds such as NPC speech do not always play. (Sounds like clipping from an overtaxed processor not able to process the ogg stream in six channels)
* Some sound clips get stuck and loop until very far away from source. - fixed by lowering or disabling "hardware acceleration" in Control Panel > speaker > advanced [Seemingly related to EAX support]
* Fawkes's Gatling laser will occasionally cause a sound glitch when fired at a target that has just died, quicksave/quickload resolves this.
* Memory leak related to excess processes, on-board sound card, and/or SLI. (The memory leak is still very much a problem regardless of what processes you are running... I get it and I disable every process I can, including explorer, start menu, etc. And yes, while those things can make it worse, the root cause of the memory leak is not an issue of a user's system management at all.
* Upon exiting VATS, graphics will have automatically reduced to low settings with jagged edges, flickering buildings and trees, and brightly lit pixelated shrubs. Game restart will revert graphics back to normal state. (sounds like antialiasing is somehow getting shut off from zooming in on enemies maybe and your video card is not restarting antialiasing once leaving VATS, have you maybe managed to get a similar problem to occur with either zooming in and out with scopes, or playing with third person modes mouse wheel zoom? Also do you have your card's settings managed to "application specified" Or does your card have a anti aliasing level "forced" by your card's software?
* The game freezes during the character creation stage, a few minutes after selecting the gender for the player.
* Complete crash of entire system when opening gate for Washington Monument.
* Attempting to enter the Arlington Library after the entire building has been cleared (but before any books have been turned in to the Scribe) causes the game to crash (Faulting application fallout3.exe, version 1.0.0.15, faulting module ntdll.dll, version 5.1.2600.2180, fault address 0x00001230).
* Pink screen during few seconds after launch while background music and voices are playing and then crash on desktop. Mostly for ATI videos.
* Game freezes randomly after entering any house with no NPC present in it.
* Saving while inside the Nuka-Cola Plant often leads to corrupt saves (game crashes to desktop when loading the save). Sometimes the game crashes during quicksaving there. Seems to be specifically this location that causes those, hasn't happened elsewhere.
* Blue screens or reboots system when you enter name, use pip boy or get to character creation screen, this is still unresolved for people with this issue.
* When entering the Super Duper Mart, after 1 minute or less inside the building, the screen starts to show white dashes across the screen (like static) until the game freezes completely requiring a restart, or if the user exits the game quickly, the computer doesn't freeze, but the static remains.
* Using the scroll wheel in the console (used to scroll through targets) causes a 'Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library Runtime Error - C:/Program Files/Bethesda Softworks/Fallout 3/Fallout3.exe - The application has requested the runtime to terminate it in an unusual way.' error.
* Crash when a Raider near Megaton is killed.
* General freezing issues after short amount of gameplay - NOTE FROM POSTER: I managed to fix this by changing the memory buffer size, in the ini, to a much larger number and deleting all but the most recent saves, also I deleted all the auto saves (autosaves.bnk and autosaves.bnk.dat), as these are generated at load anyways.
