Faster isn't always faster

1.11 is coming...

Published on May 7, 2006 By Draginol In GalCiv Journals

I'm on my way back from vacation. I am sitting in the Houston airport with my trustry Verizon aircard which gives me net access virtually anywhere. And as I start to look over the forums and polls, there's good news and bad news.

The good news is that people seem to really like what we did with v1.1. The bad news is that quite a few people can't run it at all due to memory usage.

One of the goals for v1.1 was to make the game even faster and more responsive to users, particularly on larger maps.

And for most people, we succeeded. But for around 9% of users (which is a lot) they not only didn't get faster performance but got crashes due to running out of memory.

What's ironic is that even with a month of public testing, we didn't find out about the memory issues until after it had been made available to the public.

One of the best ways to improve performance can be to make use of memory to avoid reading as much from disk. Just throw it in RAM and you can make the game perkier. And, if there's not enough RAM, no problem, it'll go into the swapfile which simply makes it read from disk as it would have anyway.

But what happens if you run out of swapfile? Well, now we know. You get the "Out of memory" dialog and then the game crashes. Clearly not an acceptable situatoin.

Power users on the forums have found all kinds of solutions that work for them. Cacheman XP, reducing the # of stars, playing on smaller maps (the biggest culprit is the larger the map and the more good planets, the more memory involved).

The team in my absence has been working on making what will become v1.11. It's a maintainence/bug fix version of 1.1 really. But the goal was to have all the speed increases that 1.1 had but without using extra memory to do it.

There's a test build here:

https://forums.galciv2.com/?ForumID=162&AID=116216

Whether you need this 1.11 or not really depends on whether you're running into this out of memory issue (i.e. if you experienced any CTDs then you probably ran into it in one form or other).

Some of the other memory use wasn't from the caching but from the modding underpinnings that we put in. Hopefully the team has been able to let users have their cake and eat it too. We will know soon.

Comments

Drengin

on May 07, 2006

Nice to hear from you Brad!!

As one of the beta testers i am unsure as to why we never managed to pick the memory issue up? Maybe we just didn't play the game for long enough for the memory 'bug' to take a hold. Well along with others we have been working with Cari and crew to fix the issue for all concerned (well to be honest we have used SmartException to highlight the issues and have worked to reproduce them again and again whilst Cari and crew did the real work) and i would like to publicly thank all Stardockians concerned with getting a workable 'fix' out in such a short time.
All around the forums you can see the results of these 13 fixes. For some it worked right away and for others there may still be an odd error or two here and there. Hopefully not enough now to stop them from playing

One good thing about all of this was that the 'fix testers' got to see the upcoming changes to the battle engine that BoogieBack has in store for us and they are fantastic!! I for one can hardly wait for 1.2 to come around so i get to use them again

There has been a small discussion on the possibility of 'alpha' testers for upcoming releases as well as 'beta' testers and i am all for this if it helps to save a similar situation for happening again in the future. Maybe in the future when a beta patch is released we could see a change log & an 'expected to happen' log as well. It is fine to say that X has been altered in the new patch but for the beta testers it would be handy to know what changes you expect X to accomplish so we know when to report an error or not.

Just my $0.02 on that point

Once again though as one of the members who had some issues with v1.1 i would like to thank CariElf for her and her teams outstanding effort to rectify this

Frogboy

on May 07, 2006

I agree we definitely need to have an alpha team of external users. But yea a month of beta 4 testing and it all looked good.

I suspect more users now understand how major games can get released with a "big bug". It's not that a given game was "rushed" or "not finished". It's that even with thorough testing taken over a long period of time, you can still miss things it seems.

But the important thing is, I was sunbathing in the gulf of mexico during all this.

Zerogman

on May 07, 2006

I actually get improved performance slightly if I make the pagefile (a.k.a. swap file, right?) static instead of dynamic. Also allocating a lot more than windows does helps too.

To do this, go to your control panel, open "System", go to the "Advanced" tab, click the "Settings" button in the box labelled "Performance". Once the new window opens, go to the "Advanced" tab, at the bottom should be a "Set" button next to your current allocation of page file (a.k.a. Virtual memory, a.k.a. Swap File, or am I wrong?). Check the button for "Custom" so you can set the Max/Min on your own. To make it static, set the max and min as the same. For people with 2GB or more of RAM, I'd recommend at least 1.5 times the amount of your RAM. (i.e. 2 Gb RAM = 3 Gb page file) If you have less than 2 Gb RAM, I'd recommend at least 2 times the amount of your RAM. Unfortunately this requires more hard drive space since windows usually allocates 768 Mb to 1536 Mb. Making it static though helps speed things up since Windows will no longer need to readjust its size anymore.

I may be mixing up page file with swap file, and if so, how does one adjust swap file usage?

Drengin

on May 07, 2006

Both the same

Martimus

on May 07, 2006

I was a beta tester as well, but I didn't get the crashes until the final release. I think it was something put out in the last beta, or in the release version.

DanNeely

on May 07, 2006

Maybe we just didn't play the game for long enough for the memory 'bug' to take a hold.

That was it on my end, frequent restarts due to new patches, combined with playing in a med galaxy for the whole time. Ti took me a week in a large before the slowdown got significant enough that I looked at what was going on in the taskmangler.

Moosetek13

on May 07, 2006

I have 3Gb of ram with a 768MB static swap file, and the game runs great. I have never been one for large swap files, and only recently set it up when one of the test builds began crashing on my system. It didn't help by the way. It was the combat mod conflicting with the Control_N function, or something, ad nothing to do with my swap file size.

Setting it so large only invites Windows to use it more. If I get out of memory crashes with it set low I can always increase it, but until then the programs can make do with the physical ram in the system.

I'll be setting it back down to its original 128MB pretty soon here.

Quitch

on May 07, 2006

Actually, I suspect many people put crashes down to "it's a betas" and never reported it, expecting it to be fixed, without thinking that people actually needed to report it for it to be fixed.

After all, how many crash reports were swiftly shot down by forum dwellers who got as far as establishing that the OP didn't know what a beta was and then providng the "roll back" solution?

Taverius

on May 07, 2006

Yey cake

...

And yup, many people will use a beta but wont actually file bugreports...

Drengin

on May 07, 2006

And yup, many people will use a beta but wont actually file bug reports...

That is exactly why Cari and i briefly touched on the Alpha testers idea

That way Frogboy and crew get a 'core' number of testers who will report all and any issues with a new build before it goes to the beta stage. That way if the alpha testers miss anything hopefully the beta testers will pick it up. This would work especially well as long as the alpha testers get the 'expected to do X' list as well as the change log.

e-stab

on May 07, 2006

Once again though as one of the members who had some issues with v1.1 i would like to thank CariElf for her and her teams outstanding effort to rectify this

Fully agreed, that was outstanding!
It didn't take much time to get a response in chat and for the test builds to come out, excellent work!

prophetau2006

on May 08, 2006

Hi,

Re Speed issue. I noted that it took the computer longer to start a new game after retiring than restart ing game after quitting (not that I was trying to cheat by trying to get a planet with good bonus tiles). My comp had a 3.06CPU, 2MB Ram, and 512VidRAM.

Thanks.

harperbrad

on May 08, 2006

Actually, I've seen several posts during the betas that people got "out of virtual memory" complaints from windows. I ran into this myself. I posted on a couple of threads about it. I never crashed due to the memory leaks, but I did find myself rebooting the machine every couple of days when performance started to tank.

--Brad

os2wiz

on May 12, 2006

Yes that is exactly it. The crashes do not occurr even in a huge universe until you can build huge ships with many weapon and defense arrays. That is after MANY, Many hours of play.

Mordachai

on May 16, 2006

Frogboy - if you choose the "Alpha" testers route, then one thing that may assist you is to get an agreement from your testers that they run and send you the SmartException reports - perhaps it could even be configured to auto-send for crashes out of GalCiv2?

I certainly had a number of CTDs, and sent a couple of smart exception reports without hearing anything back... not sure if the address SmartException provided got the reports to the right place.

1.11 still has the occassional CTD, and graphics glitch, etc., as well as an assortment of more minor logical bugs. How much feedback are you still wanting? And since I'm not in the cateogry of "upgrade your video driver you doorknob!" - where is the best place to post them?

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