I've been sick for the past week and haven't been on the forums as much as I'd like. I even missed a couple of days from work, which is unlike me. I'm still under the weather, but getting stronger. I might not be able to finish the day out at work, but there are certain things I can only do from the office.

I apologize if I've missed any of the banter that I should be responding to.

I'm doing a gigantic map in DA now and the main challenge is keeping the game going through the memory crashes and slowdowns. I know it's been talked to death in the bug reports area, but I haven't noticed any actual fixes there. I might be overlooking them, but seeing the same responses over and over (submit your debug.err or email a saved game) doesn't give me a warm fuzzy about actually being able to play the game. Any real advice would be appreciated.



Am I in trouble now, DA?    That's ok. I'm married, so that's familiar ground.   

hmmm,.. What's your systems specs? I'm not really understanding all the OOM issues people are having with DA. I have a weak system as most people know and have not had this gig. DA game I'm on even come close to running out of memory. I only have 1GB of Ram and I'm 5 years into it without issue. I do turn off all the gfx options and I do get slowdown at times, but nothing too bad. Turn changes can take awhile when you have 60+ fleets heading for 8 rally points, but that's expected. I did have it freeze once, but that was right after refocusing it from doing other things. I did notice the memory use go up a tad with each ensuing invasion, but it was so slight I would of had to of invaded a couple of hundred planets in one session to make a difference. As soon as I load it up again it is back down to using the preinvasion amount of memory. It just seems some people systems have an issue with it and some don't. Not sure beyond that.

I don't have all of the specs with me here at work, but here's what I remember on that PC...

It's an ASUS Socket 775 AGP MB. I don't remember the exact model, but it was a pretty high end one for its day.

Intel Dual Core 940 at 3.2 GHZ with a Scythe Ninja Cooler.

ATI X1950 Pro AGP Video.

4 GB of matched RAM.

Western Digital 120GB SATA x 2 and 120GB EIDE x 1 HDs.

CoolMax 600W Power Supply.

WinXP Pro SP2.

I'm using a memory manager that I only need when I'm playing GalCiv2. I tried the game without it and it would crash continuously, early in the game. That even happened sometimes in DL though.

It slows down and freezes a little during every turn now (middle of year 3). The freezes happen throughout the turn, but also every time a ship is destroyed. The battle screen freezes a lot.

The crashes occur randomly, but it would also crash every time I tried to upgrade a particular morale mining starbase with a constructor. I destroyed the mine and rebuilt it and those crashes stopped. It had a fleet rally point on top of it, if that makes a difference. The rally point is still there now without any problems.

It was crashing during the quick saves for a while and when it did that, it would erase the previous quick save. Luckily, I have the game saving every turn, so I only had to replay the last turn each time that happened.

It also crashed and erased the autosave once, but I had a good quick save for that one. I've been relatively lucky on that.

Needless to say, the frustration level rises on every crash. Maybe I need a slower/older computer with less memory?

Those specs kick my PCs ass. I guess some of the obvious things you've already done, drivers, latest game ver.(1.8g) and all that. I did have alot of trouble running the game pre-1.7, but it is significantly improved since. I keep a pretty close eye on my memory usage. Been using FreeRAm xp lately just for it's monitoring ability(I don't ever use force freeup of ram)and DA does get into the swap file a little, but has yet to report over 1.1GB of total usage. Now when I say that I turn the graphics down, I mean I disable damn near everything and turn Specular intensity to nill and Planet surface variety to like 10%. I do have a few nebula and stars, but not much. Since It's in icon view 99% of the time, I figure there's no use having all the effects and textures in any way loaded.
Also one other thing I do is run at absolute minimal processes. No AV(or at least ensure it is not real-time scanning the games folders and such)and I shut down about any other extra processes. That may be a little extreme, because I have run the game and ObjectDock, Maxthon(browser), Yahoo IM and Winamp all during this game without issue as well.
Maybe the game just doesn't like certain hardware, because with an AMD XP3000(2.1Ghz single core), 1GB of PC-2700RAM and a 128MB GeForce 6800, there is no way I should be running the game as well as you.



The battle screen has always been a little jittery for me, even on DL, and the explosions will absolutely stop it for a second or two. That's why those get turned off as well.

Sorry I've been gone so long. The F$#$%%%$ing goverenment seized all my bank accounts. Nothing got paid, including internet. Had to open up new business account under some other friends name.

Where is our forum? No swearing here, though I am very mild mannered.

Eamped kind of crashed and burned, so Neilo had to get a new one. You can find it
Here

@DA - I'm running 1.6. I'm a little concerned about updating since all of the MV error issues I've been reading about. If that's what I have to do though, I guess I should take that chance.

When I get home, I'll re-read your answers and set my game up accordingly. Thanks for your help. Maybe I can get this game in before I have to upgrade. If I upgrade now, I'll lose everything I've done up to this point.

In DL, the battle screens went along fine and in-game slowdowns weren't as bad. I thought they were bad until I started up DA. I guess it's a matter of perspective.

I had CTDs before I started using the memory manager. These OOMs are new to me since I started DA. I think it's FreeRAM XP too. I have it set to force a freeup when it hits 512MB.

I'll go over there and set you up once you apply. We have no word censor there except for some racial and sexual orientation ones. They might be expanded a little, but swearing is OK there.

At one time, I had censored the word "good" and changed it to "EVOL! Mwahahaha!", but it made some posts kinda hard to read.   

Sorry to hear about the gov thing. They can be pretty intrusive.

motti, as i go over some over your posts about DA, are you using 1.6x?

Yes. I haven't upgraded yet. I'm kinda gunshy with all the posts about MV errors and such.

ok, well thats a BIG part of your problem. 1.6x had a lot of issues just by accident. As soon as you can make sure you upgrade to 1.8g

I ran into some OOMs myself when playing on a Giga, though admittedly I was in windowed mode with a lot of background programs and all the GFx on max in-game. Since I usually play in strategic icon mode, I turned those all off and have noticed a marked difference in game play and stability.

Yea, With 1.6 I had trouble with it playing smoothly on even medium maps with the Gfx on. That's one reason I stuck to DL for so long, just was waiting for a better performing DA and I have it now.

Hmm...Should I abandon my current game and upgrade or is there a chance that I'll be able to finish this one? I don't want to spend too much time on it just to find out it won't let me complete it.

you might be able to still play it once you upgrade, I think the 1.6 was able to transfer over. I can't say I remember for sure.

But I will say the difference that the upgrade will give you, will make up for any time you did "lose" on playing the older build.

Well that depends on; How much frustration you enduring versus time invested in the game versus how much more time and frustration it would take to complete. Ultimately, You are probably the only one that can answer that one.