"out of memory"-crash. (DA 1.6 beta 4)

The devs have been investigating the cause of such issues but progress has been slow. One thing you can do to reduce the game's memory usage is download the new heightmap module available on SDC, and turn down the planet surface variety slider in the game's video options. Some have reported pretty significant memory use reductions by doing this already.

I have the same problem with the memory crash occurring the third or fouth time so far. I am playing the beta 4 with heightmaps installed and everything updated to the latest (beta) version. I am playing on a laptop featuring Centrino Duo @1,73Ghz, GeForce Go 7300 256Mb and 1 Gig RAM, my virtual memory was set to 3 Gigs when the crashes occurred, I increased it now to its max capacity of 4096 MB, will see if that helps.

In case the devs want to look into that, I mailed my debug and latest savegame files, the case ID being 37851.

This still is related to the Beta 4, right?

I do not remember running out of memory prior to this patch not even when playing in large galaxies with my old computer
(witch was an Amd Athon 1400+ with only a mere 512mb of memory + Radeon 8500 LE 64mb)

I crashed out 4 different times tonight due to out of memory. I have 2 gigs of ram, it would usually happen when I tried to do a save of any kind, after playing for a couple hours. I notice when I first launch the game the memory footprint is about 900k in size and it grows to as much as 1.7 gigs of ram along with a 1.8 gig page file.

One thing you'll learn guys is that this 'bug' seems to attack higher RAM systems. Low spec, low RAM rigs don't seem to have this issue whereas guys like us, 2 to 4 GB RAM seem to get this problem more frequently. I've screamed until I'm blue in the face over this one but they still haven't figured it out.

Just to add my 2 cents worth....I have a desktop that's what i would call mid-range...on large and larger maps I had this out of memory situation occur prior to the latest beta. I am currently using my wife's really nice upper range lap top (dual core 2 gig of memory 4 gig pagefile) and the latest beta and am getting this error on a large map about every two hours. Now I've got it timed so when it starts to act a little froggy (not frogboy, froggy), I reload it and lose a turn to the AI.

The graphics and the speed of the lap top make the desktop look really lame, its interesting to see the graphics on a really nice machine. But the out of memory crash....that's really frustrating. And regardless of how many times I read the posts that it deletes the prior file before attempting to save, I still try a manual save after the auto save fails.....there is nothing I hate more in gaming than having to redo a move, let alone several.

How often do you guys have the saves set to? My auto saves were set to the default 12 turns. But last night I was on a gigantic map, and when it crashed I looked at the time of the last save and it was almost an hour of play lost. I've since changed it down to 9 turns but not sure that's going to help at all. Also I tried the above by downloading the new heightmap and turn down the planet surface variety slider. I turned it down to 50% and it only reduced the starting memory footprint by 100k in size. I hope this gets looked at cause I never noticed this before the 1.6 patch. But then again maybe its cause I'm playing gigantic maps alot lately.

Yes, I have now noticed this also.
Not only do the saving fail, but the previous one also magically disapears!

This whole thing actually seems to be much more severe than I thought at first.

At one point in time I took someone's suggestion and set the autosave to EVERY turn, just to insure that if there was a problem, at least I could reload. Then there was some rumor floating that maybe some of the CTD issues, among other related ones, were because of a memory leak or something to that effect, so I turned it off completely and just relied on luck and myself of course, to save on my own. Not sure how it is now though, but I still save on my own and have autosave turned off.

I have the same issue where every few turns the game crashes. I've also noticed that the game only uses 1gb of real ram and 2gb of virtual even though I have 2gb real and 4gb virtual, though, that may be a windows limitation. (I'm using Vista btw). So what I do is when the auto save fails, I do a manual one, cause I know I'm gonna crash within 2-4 turns. I haven't tunred the silder down on the planet models yet.

Well I made a few changes last night and never got a crash due to out of memory last night. However, I did get a couple of new ones which were crashes to desktop. So it's possible the crash to desktop just never allowed me to reach max ram. So the problem could still be there. I searched some other threads and found that someone had stopped their problems by changing the Page file to let windows manage it. But I had also moved the planet slider down to 50%. OH ya also I had defragged my hard drive. So it's hard to say which one made a difference.

I did notice something very weird before one of the crashes, I alt tabed out and the game exe was only using up about 3k of memory, this couldn't have been right. I had been playing it for an hour and it should of been huge. Before I did one of my saves I went back out and looked and it was at 79k in size, a few turns later it crashed to desktop. Why is the memory footprint of the game changing so drastically? Could windows xp just be dispalying it wrong?

I moved the slider to 0% and saw a drastic difference in crash frequency, and, like Shabitz, no longer due to Out of Memory.

Windows vista uses 1 GB of ram in the operating system so no suprise your only being able to access 1GB for the game

Vista only uses 300mb of ram which is still a ton, but, there's plenty free.

Has this worked? I myself am baffled anymore. I don't get the out of memory error but do get the memory write error as I experience a CTD. Other CTD's seem to happen randomly with no prompts regarding memory issues.
But, after reading the thoughts regarding AMD processors experiencing issues with the latest beta builds, in the beta thread by Cari, it seems there is more amiss.

I have a low end system and I am getting this crash as well. It seems to happen only on saving the game for me.

Scincerely,
Scintor

Didn't mean to single you out Scintor... You seem to be the first one to admit having problems on a 'lower end' system whereas the usual response I get is someone rubbing it in my face that my 'higher end' rig sucks while they can play their game without issues. I should have stressed 'most' people in my statement there.

We think this is solved in beta 5.  The other thing to do is download the heightmaps and reduce the planet variety in the  settings.

Since my last post, I've loaded the heightmaps and minimized all those settings. I have not downloaded beta 5 if its available. But after the heightmaps was still able to get the out of memory after about 2-3 hours of gameplay. I am at 2 gb of ram and a 4 gm ram pagefile. It doesnt seem to use that tho. Last crash I looked at the ram allocation (which I've heard isn't all that accurate) and the ram use was 1.3, so I don't know what unless its trying to save something greater than that again in core ram instead of pagefile....no programmer here, I have trouble loading most of the downloads. I gave up when they went from tape to floppies.

Last night I ran with 3 changes that I made, the windows manage page file and I turned throttle framerate off in the video options and turned down the planet surface variety slider to 0% . I no longer crash out randomly but I still get the out of memory error when doing a save. I've aslo changed my saves to save every 1 turn. This is kinda annoying because it seems to slow everything down a bit. But now I don't go back 45 minutes after a crash.

One thing I did notice when I got the out of memory error last night. The game was taking up 1.3 gigs of ram , normally it had taken up 1.7 gigs before getting that error. So turning down the planet slider, I don't think that really mattered it still errors at some point. I alt tabbed out to grab my save file and move it to my desktop, then tabbed back in to try to save again, no dice. I then looked at my memory footprint of the game and it was at 1.8 gigs and went non-responsive on me. I had smart exception running but it never detected a dbg file to send.

I'll try the beta 5 files tonight I've got it downloaded on my desktop just wasn't sure if I should try it.

What and where is this heightmaps module on SDC? Took a look but I really have no idea what I'm looking for.

Never mind, when I updated SDC in magically appeared.

I am also getting the Out of Memory crash, happening when I try to save the game. I have been doing an "alt-S" at the end of every turn so that I do not lose so much play time, but that is a two-edged sword since it gives the bug more "opportunities" to crash the game. Also, frustratingly, as pointed out above, the crash seems to obliterate previous "saves" in the process. I have 2 Gig of RAM, Vista, AMG Athlon X2, and am running the latest DA beta.

I'm seeing the out of memory crash also. For me it's happened only on saves, but it's pretty frequent on a large map. 2 gig RAM, XP Home, DA at 1.59[b].096. I had the heightmaps module installed.

You know they say about 5% of people are having memory issues, I think they have this wrong and it's a lot more, just in my small clan 2 friends have the same problem.