Out of Memory

There have been many posts about this topic; try searching for 'memory leak'. Some people have done an amazing amount of research about this. One of them mentioned turning off Enhanced Ship Rendering in the options screen. I tried it, and my game crashes much less frequently now.

Thanks for the suggestion. I turned it off and it did last a little while longer before it crashed. My version is 1.61 so the old threads did not really help me (most mentioned the 1.6a patch that supposedly stopped memory leaks but is now part of 1.61).

Any other suggestions?

thrasha88

I've tried 1.61a and 1.61c but they don't help much. Even turning the rendering down, as well as the planet surface variety to 0%. I still get a crash. If I load up mods that add ships (such as Babylon 5, Star Wars, and Star Trek Races) my game will last about 12 turns before getting the memory message. I just check the forums every so often and wait for them to fix the problem. I love Stardock and up until this I was behind them 100%, but this game is nearly unplayable now so I'll wait for this to be fixed before I look into their other games too.

Thanks for the input, Kodiak888.

I figured it was something like that since I could not find any reliable fixes in any forum. I will just check back every now and then to see if it is truly fixed. It is a great game but I refuse to be frustrated every 15 minutes!

Let me know if you hear anything.

thrasha88

In Vista, if you right click on the item in the start menu and go to properties, I have tried to use the windows xp sp2 compatibility mode. It appears to help, but I still get the problem.

Ive had the same problem with the 1.61 patch. Had to go back to 1.5 where its always worked fine. It appears to be the same problem Ive had with Sid Mieres Railroads which Ive never been able to fix.

Apparently upgrading to 3gb ram will acheive optimal performance with Vista 32-bit. Hardly a fix though!

I am having a problem sort of like this my dread lords game says the directX3Ddevice is not working any time I invade a planet or attack a ship. my Debug.eer file is non-existant so I can't put it on here. any suggestions. I have e-Mailed stardock but they take forever to get back. No offense entended to any stardock employe out there. thanks

by the way how do you start a forum post

Hi, I found a work around! At least for vista.

Now before you get your hopes to high, I can't prevent the error from happening, but at least, once it happens, with my "workaround", you can get back in and save/restart or simply continue playing more or less as if nothing happended (i.e.: No artefacts).

Now when you get the error, in my case almost always when saving, you alt-tab or are pushed to the desktop with the game still running.

Close the error message and the descript message you get after it.

Then use ctrl-atl-delete to bring up a full screen menu and in that menu, select "Start task manager".

Now, once that new window is open, go to performance and check the memory usage. It should be at max (at least it is for my 1gb RAM).

Now look below the graphs to the left there's a box named "Physical Memory (MB)". In it there's a label called "Cached" with a number next to it. Wait until that number stabilize (it will go up and then stop moving much), it may take a little while as for me it took about 2-5 minutes.

Once it does, close the task manager and alt-tab back to the game. It will take a while again for it to reload it data but once it does, the game should be running just fine. (It did for me).

Now I agree that it may just be more efficient to close the program and start again, but I think that sometimes, you just don't want to do that.

For exemple, I had invaded about 10 worlds since my last autosave (every 3 turns) and reprogrammed each of them for a total of at least an hour lost if I had been forced to restart. In those cases, this technique may be more efficients.

THANK you, do you know how to start a forum post

Click the Create Post button at the top of the page.

I have an AMD 3500+ 64 bit processor, Nvidia 8600, 3 GB of Ram running on Vista 32 bit, and suffer the same problems. variations on settings work sometime but it still crashes. Very annoying,no other problems with games. Finally I have a game where I am not getting my butt kicked and this problem occurs.

I'm running on Vista Ultimate with 2 gig ram and I get the same msg. My current game exits to desktop after about 3 turns (auto-save is set to every 3) and the msg, "Not enough memory to save. Try increasing your virtual memory" is displayed. Yes I could set autosave to less frequently, but I get the same msg when I try to manually save. Basically I can't play my current game anymore because I cannot ever save progress. Very frustrating.

Glad I stopped by the forums. Seems I am NOT the only one experiencing these very frustrating things .
What with new M$ Woes, and everyone upgrading their softwear, only logial that this one needs some tweaking as well.
I am to the point where the game(s), do not even load anymore.
I was thinking about a fresh uninstall/Install..any one have any suggestions on this?
Or do you think it best to just wait for another Fix?
I really enjoy this game, but this problem of memory, freezes, and all the rest, not enjoyable.

It seems Microsfot has acknowledged a memory leak issue in Vista's DX9 handling (described at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940105), but they don't currently have a download for the hotfix. You have to contact Microsoft support to get it. Kudos to cnygaard for finding this.

there's no hotfix at least not a free one (need to contact support centers wich cost a LOT) oh well, I'll wait.

I've also noticed performance issues when playing on gigantic maps. What I did was set my pagefile to 8 gigs, I know thats huge but this game apparently requires a very large pagefile late in games.

Also you could all try Pagedefrag, since windows is unable to defragement the pagefile, this free program will do it at windows startup. I'm not sure if this will work for Vista but its been fine for me on XP. I would post the link but I'm not sure how, just do a goole search for pagedefrag, its very easy to use and shouldn't screw you're computer up.

If only those people had been in Vista dev at MS and the graphics hardware vendors.

Speaking as a pathetic GalCiv2 junkie who was once a fairly handy PC tech, I'm getting close to assuming I won't get good behavior out of this stinkin' new Vista box at least until SP1 is out, so there goes my flirtation with the Metaverse.

By diligently trying both to update my drivers and comply with Windows Update, I seem to have made my brand new Vista Home Premium box a really sick puppy. Things are so bad that the debug.err I posted in another thread made Kryo talk to me like my box was a laptop, but it's an HP Pavillion m8001n desktop. At least I'm not responsible for the hardware purchase...

You have onboard video though (the GeForce 6150LE) so it's actually very much the same from a drivers standpoint.

Alright, maybe the weird OEM hardware choices aren't what's really "gotten so bad." I just got myself caught between scraps of outdated knowledge and perhaps too much trust in, oh, Windows Update...rassafrassa...fer frak's sake...mutter-curse-mutter...

Still, I'm interested in opinions on whether Vista SP1 will drastically reduce the incidence of this sort of thread. I have to work and play on the same machine right now (which apparently means no play because GC2 is my only game at the moment), so I can't play around with interim hotfixes like the one Kryo reffed in post 15.

Put somewhat differently: Can us folks caught at the cheap end of the Vista rollout hope to get decent performance with software updates or will we need to upgrade the hardware even though our new machines are all Aero-friendly and whatnot?

My "games" desktop is still running on XP, and it's still getting the Out of Memory message.

I won't buy the expansion until the issue is fixed. It makes my game nearly unplayable, when it ran so great beforehand. It's so frustrating to not have a solid answer. I'm glad it works for some people, and it works decently for me without any extra mods on, but something is wrong when Supreme Commander runs better on my comp than this game.

Alexender000 or anyone else who has been able to circumvent the problem by alt-tabbing:

Have you ever tried running in a window, and does it make a difference if you do?

How do you run the game in a window?

I just gave up on a Gigantic game due to slow downs. Interestingly, the game was fine during the first session. Almost as soon as I loaded the game for the second session the slowness started, and did not improve.

I'd have to try it, but I don't think it will since the whole point of the alt-tabbing in this case is to free the resources used by GalCiv and them reload them.

Somewhere in Options (Game tab?), there's a Fullscreen check box. Clear it and you'll run in windowed mode.

Cari, I have no idea if the problem you're investigating might also involve hard crashes after a PC goes to sleep, but I had one that was so hard it left no updated debug.err (my last save was newer than my last debug). I was running in full screen mode. When I woke the machine up, it said something about losing a critical device and Galciv was gone by the time the desktop reappeared.

This was after apparently having at last gotten an adequate Nvidia driver installed (fingers crossed) on my new Vista 32-bit machine. I have not tried to see if the same thing happens when waking up from hibernation.