*FIXED* my CTD due to memory problems.

Congrats

Yup congrats... lol I have no diea what a couple of things you said actually meant but it's good to hear you got it working.

Yippie ?

It must of been the Ram. GC2 must of been sucking up all your catch ram. Even though you fixed it, uping your Virtual Memory might of helped also.

You can also download a Ram Tester (forgot the name) that will test if y our Ram Is Stable. I have a feeling alot of these crashes are Ram Releated for either Unstable ram, or Virtual Memory is too low.

This is what’s puzzling, I have a 6 gig page file (permanent), 2 gigs of memory (tested) and a ultra clean unfragged drive, but had game crash's only with Gal Civ 2 no other game. Anyway all day play and no crash yet, so one of the things I done, fixed it.

what does the 2nd thing do, exactly.....

Cacheman is a splendid little utility that has been going since the ark right up to the present day with CachemanXP.
Basically it manages your memory, releasing unused or forgotten memory when you are running low, in my case I have it set at 200meg where as the default was only 30 meg and didn’t cure my crashing. I raised the recovery limit to 200 meg after reading somewhere on this forum that saving a game can eat up 100 meg of memory.
Cacheman reads your memory every 3 seconds hopefully catching and preventing the inevitable crash though lack of memory.

This is only my interpretation and my be totally wrong. All I can tell you for sure is that it works for Gal Civ 2.


Find it here.

http://www.outertech.com/?_charisma_page=index&PHPSESSID=30cdb31934185988265ec424efd4832e

CachemanXP is a memory management utility that allows you to configure when memory (physical and virtual) optimization is done, rather than leaving it up to Windows to do it based on Microsoft's (very dismal) default settings.

It also uses algorithms to make it the least intrusive memory manager available.

It is not necessary, but definitely useful if you have problems and don't know how to handle them yourself, or have to deal with programs that have memory leaks (like GC2).

Dyna> A 6GB page file is a waste, WindowsXP cannot use more than 4GB for a swap file (unless you are running the 64-bit version).

Thanks Mistoffeles, Ill knock it down to 4096.
Hope this helps others with similar problems to get playing again. I know how it feels not to be able to play, it feels like getting caught in a pig poo downpour with your wellys stuck in the mud (not nice).

Where did you get cachemanXP? I want to try that to cut down on my memory crashes.

Where did you get cachemanXP?

Google.

The link to a free version of CachemanXP in is post #7

All day without a crash......wonderful

Link

Since the link got a little jacked up in post #7, I thought I would repost it.

I also want to say thank you for the link.

@e-stab
I noticed your Racial Victory medal, how do you get that one?

Cheers,
Reaver

When I dropped the auto recover lower than 100 meg it starts crashing again.
Keeping it at 200 meg I have had 2 solid days of game play on gigantic map with all races and tons of jewellery covered ships and no crash.

great, I'm going to try this and I'll report, I had a few crashes and was having trouble continuing my metaverse gigantic game at this point, was actually losing turns of game time, hate repeating the same turns over and over......

There is one way to find out which of the two solved the problem.
Get rid of Cacheman.

The background star density problem has been known about since version 1.0.
If it is too high, you will have problems.

Mine is set to 61, by the way. It has been so since version 1.0, when I first learned that very high star numbers was an invitation to a crash.

FreeRAM is also a good RAM utility as well, and of course being free always helps. I've posted elsewhere that I pretty much do the same as you do, only I have it set to free at 256mb... not a big difference really. I do get a game lag when the program frees up the RAM but it's no big deal unless I'm trying to squeeze out a huge/gigantic galaxy. Then the lag time rises a good deal. I'm going to try out the program you're running and see if there's any difference in performance.
Oh, BTW, it's nice to play a game without the CTD's... YEAH BABY!

anything like this for Vista?

Vista uses superfetch takes your free memory and puts it in cache. I found this out trying to figure out where all my free memory was going. Vista probably wouldn't work correctly with this type of program.

"Vista uses superfetch takes your free memory and puts it in cache."

Yup, and because of how differently Vista's memory management works, memory managers for XP probably won't work as well in Vista.

If you're on Vista, the best thing you can do is to simply add more memory.

BTW, ReadyBoost is a part of SuperFetch - ReadyBoost essentially places some of the hard drive cache on a flash drive.

So, yeah, Vista's caching works completely different from XP's.

"A 6GB page file is a waste, WindowsXP cannot use more than 4GB for a swap file"

XP uses 32 bit addressing for both virtual and physical memory? I thought the virtual addressing would use a larger addressing scheme. I guess not .

I have 4 gigs, and a 7.5-15 gig cache, and mine crashes every other turn.

I have Vista 64bit 4 gigs RAM and 8gb - 12gb of VM...still getting it because it doesn't matter how much you have, it happens from running into the GalCiv2 1.5gb limit...(Note not just GalCiv2, I believe its all 32 bit games that have this)

Nope, don't know why it happens on this game, but not other games like Civ4 and things like that.

Yep. TA has a lot of new memory-reducing features that should get it down to where it won't happen any more. Though since some of these are actually features and not bug fixes (ex: new planet texture system), they won't get backported.

Can't we mod them in? Oh wait "new planet texture SYSTEM" which means the textures themselves won't help much without the system using them...darn...worth a thought.