Nelthath
07-21-2008, 11:50 PM
As many of you know, AoC isn't without it's share of bugs. Some are worse than others, but the two main ones I'm trying to pin down now are the following:
The infamous Out Of Memory-crash
The annoying gray map-bug
Now, there's a rumor on the official boards that when Graymap occurs, you can go into your interface options and disable/enable questmarkers for the map. This supposedly loads the map-images anew. Have so far yet to stay ingame long enough to actually test this since I crash on average every 15 to 20 minutes, depending on zone (Tarantia = 5 min then CTD).
On the OOM-crash-issue there is little solid evidence and is a tad more technical in nature. It seems to be caused by the computer running out of virtual address space, which (on 32bit XP and Vista) is the memory-tables below 2048mb RAM reserved for programs etc. The main issue with this theory is that during the testing today, I was logging all memory usage. And never did AoC use MORE than between 1.4 and 1.5gb RAM, which, even if including system services and other backgroups programs, did not go above the 2gb limit for applications. Also did a quick comparison with running the game in Windowed-mode, with the same result.
Now then. Enter some small tweaks in the system. First thing I tried was to increase the virtual address space from 2gb to 3gb through a function in Vista called BCDEdit. What this basically does is add an entry into Vista's version of the boot.ini-file you'll find on XP-computers, telling the system that it now had a gig LESS for mapping hardware (normally used in the upper part of the 4gb address space on 32bit comps). Testing proved futile, as the crashes continued much like they did before. Plus the fact that my system became sluggish and unresponsive, and I had failing services all over the place. Quickly abandoned the whole /PAE-issue. Also, cross referencing it with the long post on the official boards, this is also happening to Vista 64Bit-users, as well as both 32bit and 64bit versions of XP.
Then I took a look at some of the ingame settings. First thing that caught my eye was an option where you can set how much RAM the game uses for preloading textures. This can, unless I'm wrong, go up to close to 700mb, which would solidly bring the game up to above 2gb in physical RAM usage.Tried dialing that one back, same result. Didn't get to fiddle more with it, though, but will pull it all the way down to 0 if I can. No idea what type of impact this will have on textures and loading-speed, but it can't be worse than having the game crash every 5 minutes.
Will test more tomorrow, although I am hoping for a small miracle on patchday :(
The infamous Out Of Memory-crash
The annoying gray map-bug
Now, there's a rumor on the official boards that when Graymap occurs, you can go into your interface options and disable/enable questmarkers for the map. This supposedly loads the map-images anew. Have so far yet to stay ingame long enough to actually test this since I crash on average every 15 to 20 minutes, depending on zone (Tarantia = 5 min then CTD).
On the OOM-crash-issue there is little solid evidence and is a tad more technical in nature. It seems to be caused by the computer running out of virtual address space, which (on 32bit XP and Vista) is the memory-tables below 2048mb RAM reserved for programs etc. The main issue with this theory is that during the testing today, I was logging all memory usage. And never did AoC use MORE than between 1.4 and 1.5gb RAM, which, even if including system services and other backgroups programs, did not go above the 2gb limit for applications. Also did a quick comparison with running the game in Windowed-mode, with the same result.
Now then. Enter some small tweaks in the system. First thing I tried was to increase the virtual address space from 2gb to 3gb through a function in Vista called BCDEdit. What this basically does is add an entry into Vista's version of the boot.ini-file you'll find on XP-computers, telling the system that it now had a gig LESS for mapping hardware (normally used in the upper part of the 4gb address space on 32bit comps). Testing proved futile, as the crashes continued much like they did before. Plus the fact that my system became sluggish and unresponsive, and I had failing services all over the place. Quickly abandoned the whole /PAE-issue. Also, cross referencing it with the long post on the official boards, this is also happening to Vista 64Bit-users, as well as both 32bit and 64bit versions of XP.
Then I took a look at some of the ingame settings. First thing that caught my eye was an option where you can set how much RAM the game uses for preloading textures. This can, unless I'm wrong, go up to close to 700mb, which would solidly bring the game up to above 2gb in physical RAM usage.Tried dialing that one back, same result. Didn't get to fiddle more with it, though, but will pull it all the way down to 0 if I can. No idea what type of impact this will have on textures and loading-speed, but it can't be worse than having the game crash every 5 minutes.
Will test more tomorrow, although I am hoping for a small miracle on patchday :(