You should no longer be using -novopt in your simulations. This switch is being deprecated and will become an error in the next major release of ModelSim/Questa. "vopt" is an optimization step that was introduced over 10 years ago that gives you on average 3-10X performance improvement (with corner cases from nothing to 100X). At that time, those optimizations broke a lot of peoples simulation regression tests because they had race conditions in their design or testbench, so the switch preserved the ordering until you had a chance to fix your code. We should all be past that now, aren't we?
To get visibility for debug, you need to use the various vopt +acc= or vsim -voptargs "+acc= switches. Please see the User Manual for preserving visibility in your design.