Dark Avatar has started crashing for me

from GalCiv2 Forums
Hey everyone.

The last 3-4 games, I've been having trouble with DA crashing on me.

My screen will go black and I will get the 'Gal Civ II Dark Avatar needs to close blah blah blah' message.

Recently I've been getting a lot of errors telling me that my virtual memory is low. I'm not sure if this is what causes the game to crash, but I figured I'd mention it since it may just be a case of needing more RAM.

I can't tell much about my system since I'm a novice user, but I'll give what info I can...

Operating System: Windows XP Home Edition SP2

CPU: Pentium 4 2.60 GHZ 2.60 GHZ (I think it's double or something)

RAM: 512 MB

If anybody needs to know anything else, let me know and I'll have a dig around.
3,200 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Sounds like there's a number of people that have this happening. Game was working fine until recently also and now it crashes and locks up for me at random times. Started by just crashing when I tried playing as the Krynn specifically but it's moved on to crashing whenever it feels like.

I've seen at least 6 other people posting the same problem. Game's been working fine but now just crashes for apparently no reason that anyone has gotten help with on how to fix it.

The best guess I can come up with is this, you installed a new Windows update and that's messing up something. I had an update install overnight, on the 9th, and started experiencing the crashes then. How to revert the update and check, I don't know. Sorry it's not any real useful information but thought I'd toss this out there.
Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Bumps are helpful, lol.

That makes sense to me. I thought it could be something to do with higher AI levels using up more memory and my PC crashing, but other games don't crash that use up a lot of juice.

I might try uninstalling the latest windows update or rolling my system back to see if that helps. But I'll put up with the crashing for now until we can maybe get some specifics on what the problem is.
Ashes of the Singularity II
Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I've done some research on the autosave/memory error & crash, which may be related to your problem depending on the galaxy size and your low amount of memory (512MB)...what I gather is due to the fact that each process can only have at max 2 gigs of memory allocated to it (RAM + Paging File), and that on gigantic/abundant maps it exceeds that limit occasionally, it causes the game to crash out.

This cap is due to the game being 32-bit, and the way Microsoft memory management handles 32-bit applications (A hard cap of 2 gigs per process is imposed). I also read something about your video card memory having the textures duplicated into the RAM under that process...so for example a 512MB video card would automatically eat up 512MB of RAM from that 2GB cap per process. Don't know if I phrased that quite right, but hopefully I'm close enough to accurate on that.

Since there's no real "solution" to this problem...I just play smaller maps and don't get the error anymore.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but when I was researching the error a couple months ago that is all I could find.

Your specific problem could be that the game bugs out when windows tries to nudge your paging file up higher (due to your low amount of RAM). I'd suggest for testing purposes to jack your paging file up to 4-6 gigs, and set it static (not telling the OS to adjust it as it sees fit). See if your error goes away.

Let me know what the results are.

This problem only started happening to me once I upgraded from XP to Vista...although I see posts about the error from people who have XP as well.