Out of memory on save

Let me see if I understood correctly: the game has been running for 3 days and then you did experience an out of memory error. I wonder if how many people are letting their games running continuously for 3 days. I wouldn't label 1 crash in 3 days has having more problem than everyone else. Who knows, if you had saved the game and turn off the computer when you were going to sleep, as I doubt you didn't sleep a bit during these 3 days, you would have surely avoided the out of memory problem.

I agree.

It is best to save often to avoid these types of problems.

And if you save a backup copy at the same time you will always have a backup game to revert to, because the attempt to save a game without enough memory will result in the file being deleted.

But, how anyone could go 3 days without saving during the interim boggles my mind.
What are, or were, you thinking?
That both GalCiv2 and Windows are both perfect in their abilities?
And that both will do what you ignore to do?

They are relatively dumb programs compared to your 'higher intelligence', after all.


Personally, I would not leave any program open for three days without saving the latest revisions several times in the interim - and for sure before I left off for the night or time being.


Stupid is as stupid does, I suppose.

A Geek, maybe.
SuperGeek?
...

That implies 'more than normal' attention to detail.

Grade - F

While I appreciate the flames, I feel I should point out that I did not indicate a lack of saving, only that the last one failed. Also, my system was only using 1.4 GB of memory at the time. I had plenty left, even within the 2GB barrier that does not exist on my system. I had indeed saved previously (not to mention the autosave, which I have set to every other turn).

The comment as to more problems was in reference to the many bugs posted in the beta reports fourms. Most were minor things, but things no one else reported none the less.

The devs may well want to know about this crash and it didn't hurt anything to let them know. I build systems for a living and this one is quite capable of running for months without a restart and with quite a few programs (and most games, ie, Silent Hunter II) running for weeks at a time. I do it quite frequently. The Super is earned from my peers, not self appointed.

I've had a quite similar problem, but for me it happens after about three or four hours. It doesn't really bother me; I always assumed that it was CPU heat taking its toll on my machine.

Thats Silent Hunter III (with GWX). Thought I better clear that up before the flamers get on it. Can't seem to edit posts today either. What's really fun is running SH3 and GC2 at the same time. Now that is a test of computer performance!

I get the save game crash after about 3-4 hours as well. I play on gigantic maps with about 6 other races.


Kelly Crawford.

That shouldn't happen with the latest beta, as I changed the way that games were saved so that it saves to a temp file first, then moves the AutoSave to the PreviousAutoSave.

It's generally not a good idea to run 2 DirectX apps at the same time.

Generally it's an out of memory issue; if it crashes while saving, there will be asserts from the memman at the bottom of the debug.err file.

When the game hits the 2 GB memory mark, Windows cuts off memory allocation for it and won't give it any more.  It's not that hard to hit it on a gigantic galaxy with lots of planets and lots of ships. We've been working on trying to reduce the amount of memory that GalCiv2 uses, but it's a fairly big problem and we've run out of easy things to cut down.  If you turn down your planet surface variety slider to 0, it will take longer for the out of memory bug to happen in new games.

This happened to me too. It wasn't actually a crash. I minimized the game (dual core CPU) and saw a pop-up which said "save aborted" and I also had a balloon on the task bar stating that I was low on virtual memory. Virtual memory is when your work demands more RAM than you have, so it spills over onto the hard drive and begins using it for additional RAM. This is why more RAM makes things faster! I opened Task Manager and saw that my page file totaled 2.47GB. I have only 1GB RAM, so it was using 1 and a half GB of hard drive for RAM! So I closed other apps like I.E. and Fraps and then Task manager and returned to the game and it was then able to save and quit. To remedy this, I'll either get more RAM (Win XP only recognizes up to 3GB), and/or increase the allowances on my hard drive for page file. Start>RUN>MSCONFIG (I think). The cheapest route of course is to have fewer planets. It happened after capturing Mars from those pesky Terrans! Just one too many things going on.

So. Close other apps!
Taco_Bob

P.S. Did you know a planet class could be as high as 55?  

Supergeek,
I never exit the game...ok, hardley ever. I auto save every turn and when the going get tough and I don't want to lose anything i save to a named file that i rotate. But, since beta 4 i haven't had a bad save. But I play only large maps. SO, it appears its still a memory issue for larger maps and the accumulative effect of long play has at least been mitigated.

I hate to see flames too....fortunately, there aren't many of them....

I've not had too many problems with save failures. In this case, I thought it odd that I had not reached the 2GB mark. I monitor memory usage in real time as well as temps and what not. I have run this game for far longer than 3 days without a crash.

I don't really mind reloading my game after such an event since they made it load so much faster (or is that just the opteron?) and decreased the frequency of the crashes. Many titles on the market now don't react well to long sessions.


Thats why it is a fun performance and stability test.

Cari: The memory optimizations and unloading unused textures has really improved the memory footprint. Thanks for the hard work!

Good to hear you guys are working on this.

I've learned to deal with it since it's something farily predictable and has been a problem since day 1. I can get an out-of-memory error when saving after just a few hours during a heavy invasion. However, I never encounter the problem otherwise. What I do is save *multiple* instances of a game before starting an invasion and do at least 2 saves periodically throughout the turn. If I get the error, I restart the game with my backup save. One of the big problems is the way it blows away the original save when the error occurs. If you don't have a backup save, you just lost your game, ouch! If nothing else, I'm really glad to hear this will be fixed.

Second that!