hmm, what you stated about the reloads are only true if there is a variable that carries over after i shut off the game. As soon as i start the game, i can always depend on it to go out of memory on the 4th save.

Hmm...well that is obviously not the case for me.  Would you please e-mail your prefs.ini and debug.err from My Documents\My Games\GC2DarkAvatar to me at [email protected]

 

no prob cari just sent it to you and hope it helps.

Getting out of memory errors in TA now as well...grrr...gigantic galaxy, an incredible amount of time invested, and now it cant/wont save, so...After reading the above it seems its a chronic problem. I thought that reduced memory graphics in TA for planets and ships would help, but...for all practical purposes, it seems I am limited to playing smaller games, though my machine exceeds recommended specs by far.

I think i may have come across something in that the less anomalies there are on the map the more saves i can make. With the enacting of a UN law that forbade others from exploring the anamolies in ur territory caused the game to have ridiculous amounts of those things. After conquering much of the galaxy im slowly getting rid of it and i can go up to 6 saves without a out of memory error.

I'm running Vista Business with 2 Gig's RAM. I got the Out of Memory error.
I clicked Ok to close the dialogue and watched in task manager watches the usage of the game go down to 500Mb, then re-entered and manually saved.

I just thought I'd give my 2 cents worth of what is causing this error.
It looks like the game uses all the available physical RAM, once the autosave kicks in there is not enough RAM to do the serialization of the physical objects.

ie: I have 2Gig, task manager showed that GalCiv2 was using 1100Mb when I finally got to the desktop. This cleared up to +-600Mb after watching it for a while, then I continued playing the game.

Maybe if before autosaving a test can run to determine if there is enough physical RAM to perform the serialization could prevent this. Free up enough RAM or whatever else might need doing.

ALthough this is assuming that the OoM error only occurs during an autosave which is the only time I have encountered it.

It is possible to get the Out Of Memory error when not saving as well. It just happens the most when saving.  GalCiv2 does attempt to determine if there is enough memory available before saving; it saves the size of the previous save game and asks for that amount of memory at the beginning of the next save.  However, if it needs more memory, it has to ask for an increased amount, then copy all the currently saved data to the new memory.  So if there's not enough room in memory for the current block of memory and the new one, the error will still occur mid-save.

Unfortunately, the memory management in GalCiv2's code base is almost nil.  I'll be nice and not pick on the developer who wrote the 3D engine despite the fact that he no longer works here, but the fact is that we'd have to pretty much re-write the engine to get more control (or even more information) over the memory usage.  I tried introducing the memory tracker that we're using for the fantasy game, but I couldn't even get Dark Avatar to compile with it, so it was pretty much a waste of two days during the 1.7 beta.

I'm not saying that I'm giving up on the out of memory issue, but I am saying that it's been incredibly frustrating for me to try and find the cause.

We're planning on putting up the 1.8g that's been up as a test build this week so that it at least takes care of the pathfinding issues and the metaverse error 12. 

 

Hey Cari,

Just wanted to say that I just got the 1.80G and have the weekend off, I'm taking a break from modding and playing another Stock DA game to test things out...

I know some people are saying that aren't using Vista...but I have had a few problems outside of the DA game that I think could potential be related that I never had with XP... I'm no developer so I could be WAY off base, and I think most people think I'm crazy when I mention this but here it goes:

While doing modding for GC2: DA I do a lot of saving over old files, and copying to and fro of files and mod folders to create .zip and upload them.

One thing I've noticed recently with Vista is that it is not recognizing the fact that I'm saving the files if I'm doing it in a file that has the same file name...

IE: I alter the S0_Colony.shipcfg file to read another hull and Save (or Save As...) the file into the same directory path as it was previously. After I close the item, and open it back up, I get the file I had PRIOR to saving. If I save (or Save As..) the file and then copy it somewhere else, when I open the file in the new directory I get the same file PRIOR to saving... Now if I Save As... the file into a brand new directory that never had that file before, close and reopen the file, I get the NEW updated file...

I can't explain it, but it happens all the time.

Also, even after I delete my Pref.ini file and restart GalCiv2/DA games, when it reads the Mods folder it will read all mods I ever had in there, even if they have been deleted and the system completely shut down and restarted. This does not happen only to GalCiv2/DA. If I delete files and then go to Save As... into that directory with the same file name, I have to tell it to Overwrite...but when I go to view it through My Computer... it doesn't show anything there....

So I know there is a problem with Vista...

The way I think its related...Well, it appears that for some reason Vista isn't clearing all parts of its memory files correctly for some people (maybe just me?). So maybe it's not clearing out the memory like you guys planned it do, because of the problem I just explained.

I'm pretty good with computers and have tried everything, including refreshing my RAM, deleting all temp files on the computer, deleting all refresh points(shadow files), and it doesn't help with the problem I have.

It's a stretch, but if you are truely that frustrated I figure anything may help if it leads to the cause.

Hey Cari

I've had to live with worse error's in some of my favorite other games and this doesn't occur very often, so it's no biggy in my book.

Thanks for all the great work you guys are doing. I'm so hooked that I haven't played Mass Effect for two weeks.   

Have a great christmas all.  

Hey Cari,

I run Vista and also have the memory bug. It always runs out of memory while saving. Last time I checked the task manager Dark Avatar was using 1,399,999 kb or so of memory. This is an annoying bug but not too bad seeing as I can play for an average of an hour before it chokes. I'm pretty sure I did not have this problem until the most recent update but I could be wrong. Thanks again for looking into this issue.

A Merry Christmas to all.

Hi all! I'm new to the world of Stardock (and GalCiv2), I also run GalCiv2 on my computer and, unfortunately, I also get that out of memory bug which racks my nerves.*sigh* So I'd like to know if there is anything that can help me continue this game since? Since the last answer in this thread was written in 2007 I thought it'd be time to ask again for a solution to this problem. Greetings!

I have noticed that I get memory errors when I play Gigantic games more than any other. Some times along with the out of memory message I get a second message from my program debugger reporting a "Pure virtual call error".

The larger the number of objects created the more errors I get. The game also slows down so much that a constructor takes 4 seconds to cross one sector on the grid. A turn can take upward to 20 minutes before it returns control to me. I can play 3 or four turns than I get another memory error.

Hope this is helpfull?

I CAN NOT PLAY ANY MORE.

Same VM error saving as posted here, but I cannot play anything and save the game.
Sometimes I get back in and can quick save or the civ engine crashes too.
I have to re-boot, play my turn and save, 1 out of 5 it saves.

GC ver-1.80e
Vista Home Prem, AMD 64 X2 Duel 5000+ 2.6ghz
3Gb mem 7Gb VM

I'm using 1.80g and get the error periodically, usually after several hours. It will try to autosave, then freeze and CTD. Lately, I've been playing Gigantic games. While I'm here, its not a bug per se but I've noticed the game runs much smoother and loads quicker, both new and saved games, if I use task manager to increase the priority of the game when it starts, but I only get a few seconds to do so. Does anyone know of a way to modify the game or windows XP to increase the default priority?

You can use Prio to save the priorities you set for applications, in addition to adding a couple of other task manager enhancements.

And I'd say the OOM is most common with multiple hours of gigantic games in one sitting. While it's annoying, it's far from a "killer" bug, in that instance.

I've been getting this problem as well. Using 1.80g, generally a large galaxy with uncommon planets and common habitable worlds. It happens during an auto save or a quicksave fairly often near the late game phase.

I, too, have encountered this problem.

Here's what I can tell of what was going on when it happened.

1. It happened when the game tried to autosave. Incidentally, I have set it up to autosave every turn because I was having random crashes that would make me lose several turns if I didn't remember to save. Setting up the autosave every turn was easier than trying to remember to save myself.

2. I play on a gigantic galaxy pretty much exclusively with abundant planets. I can see that such a game would require quite a few system resources, but I've never had problems before with this particular error. I can send my other settings from the Prefs file if I need to (and/or the debug ERR file).

3. I have loaded games from within games on a couple occasions because I accidentally loaded the wrong saved game. This was true of the session that I received the Out of Memory Error.

4. The session that received the error was a fairly long play session, my guess about 4 or 5 hours, again with an autosave every turn because of what I said in number 1.

5. I don't often reboot my system as it stays on overnight to do maintenance routines like virus scans and the like while I'm sleeping. This doesn't occur every night, but I've just gotten into the habit of not bothering to turn it off/reboot. I do reboot at least ten times a month though, for various reasons, but it's not often and not necessarily between play sessions.

6. I run Windows XP Home Edition, SP2 with all the latest security updates downloaded when they come available. If there's a file associated with my system settings, I would be happy to provide that as well.

Thanks for any help that can be provided in regards to this issue. I have yet to play the game since I got this error. I'm eagerly awaiting a fix so I can continue to play one of my favorite games once again.

I am having the same sort of out of memory issues.  This was not a problem on XP but I recently got a new computer with Windows 7.  I have an AMD A6 APU with 8GB of memory.  I play Dark Avatar with gigantic galaxies auto saving every turn (I was having problems with crashes on XP as well, so I too started auto saving every turn).  I should have plenty of resources with this machine even with everything on high in the game, and the game works fine except for during auto saves.  Has this problem been resolved?

On Windows 7 you may have to set GalCiv 2 to be aware of large memory addressing.  See here.