First of all, even though 32bit Vista only sees around 3.6GB or ram, applications and games see all of it, and will use it accordingly. High end hardware, like 8800 GTX's will also use it.

Anyway, yeah. Another crash victim here. Here are the details:

1) 4 players (2 humans, 2 CPU).
2) Fully legit, patched (1.2), copies of the game. (NO MODS)
3) It is occurring on a 1 Star, 35 planet map.
4) It starts happening about hour 8.
5) It only occurs on multi-player games.
6) This is on a Giga-bit, hardwired Cat 6 based network, with an HP 6108 Fiber Switch.
7) Both computers are high end. My computer (the host) is an OC'd E6850 Dual Core, 4 GB of Corsair 6400 C4 Pro XMS2, 2 Raptor X SATA 10,000rpm hard drives, Nvidia 8800 GTX, I could go on... (In other words, it's not the computer)


Here is the story:

I was originally running all the graphics in the game on very high, but was having a ton of crashes in the MP game when I was hosting. They were random and not in any set pattern. I turned everything down to high, and those crashes stopped.

We started up a game last night, and played 8 hours straight without a stutter or problem. Got up to 30 save games until it started to get bad. It's crashed so much at the same point that we've figured out what was causing it.

First of all, the lag on his end is so bad, that it's displaying things on his screen that occured over 20 minutes previously. We've reloaded many times, the lag is still there. In other words, what is on his screen is TOTALLY different than what it on mine, yet he can send me money and resources, and interact with me on a real time level. Just what he sees is not right.

The first crash occurs when I select 10 Enforcers and send them to any of my planets. The result: He crashes.

The second crash occurs when he sends ANY of his fleet to the center star. The result: I crash.

This crash cites no specific file other than the main executable and is ALWAYS accompanied by a mini-dump.

Currently, the only way to progress the game is for him to sit there and do nothing. If he tries to make anything, or move his fleet, I crash. If I make fleet or move my fleet to any one of my planets, he crashes. The only way we can attack anything right now, is by using one of our AI allies and targeting the enemy bases and telling our AI ally to attack it.

Now keep in mind, this is nearly the 9th hour. All of us (including the 2 AI) have incredibly large fleet.

I've been in IT for 17 years, been playing games since the Atari came out, and even been involved with development on a few occasions. No offense to Stardock (LOVE their stuff), but this looks like a problem with their network code. I mean, it's only occurring in multi-player. The longer a game goes, the bigger it gets, the more the game's network code is put under stress. Apparently it doesn't handle big multi-player games that well, causing lag to the clients, and then something as simple as sending 10 ships to a planet causes a fatal exception with the game's exe, which mini-dumps and crashes.

I really hope they fix this, because after spending 9 hours playing this game with your friends where you finally have all the "end game" upgrades and fleet, and then not being able to actually use it all without crashing, really blows.

PS. Can't post any reports right now. I'm at work, and all those reports are on my computer at home.

N

I feel your pain, but others have been running large multiplayer games for quite some time without similar problems. I don't think it's just the game's network code at work here.

Yeah.. hoping for a fix

Where does the game memory get sotred and how can I delete it! Cause I read that the game after a long time occupies alot of memory. What memory? Where can I increase this? etc.

Here's big question that no one here has answered:

Is every copy of the game each player is running legit? That means: is each person running their own copy of the game that they either purchased online or through retail?

Yes .. but it shouldn't matter. The game supports 2 players per serial key via LAN play.

I get the same issue, it's not a memory build up, as the first system to crash in the first game was the 4GB Vista Home Premium machine. The second game was the 2GB Vista Ultimate, Vista Home Premium,and 3GB Windows XP.
Also the second game was much smaller than the first one, and we didn't crash on the first one for 5 hours. The second one we crashed at one hour, after a restart.

I patched to 1.02 before I even played the game, right after installation, so I don't think that's it. But hey, keep the ideas coming. Until they fix it, it's all we got.

Another thing to help. Tryp updating your drivers everyone or try this:(yeah i know im preaching it but it worked for me and a buddy)

boost your page file size to 4 gb(max ammount in windows XP)

Me and a friend running COMPLETELY different hardware were doing comp stomps against a full game of hards and mediums. Midgame we would crash. Me, being the curious cat and the hands on type of guy. i HAD to look for a solution so i woke up sunday morning, did some research and testing and found out that by boosting the pagefile it solved the problem for my PC AND my friends laptop, we resumed a huge game that had saved just before the crash and we were able top resume it smoothly AND finish it without ANY problems.

Oh and

for those running mods or custom downloaded maps, under XP they have to be in:

documents and settings/username/local settings(hidden folder)/application data/ironclad games/sins of a solar empire/galaxy(for maps) or Mods(for mods lol)


Instead of quitting the game, be like me and try stuff lol

BTW, this isn't to say that there aren't memory issues or hardware issues AS WELL - just that the types of crash that most of the people on this thread are reporting sound an awful lot like undetected de-syncs by their description of the symptoms.

well, i have the problem in singleplayer, but i had my virtual page file set to a minimum (100MB to 800MB)

For me the crash came rather early, maybe to a max of 45minutes within the game.
I've now increased it, and will test it again.

Just to throw in my experience here.

I've had crashing problems ever since I updated to 1.2. However, I get these in single player and while running the Distant Stars mod or Mars Effect mod. I'll go ahead and try turning off the autosave, cause it does seem to like to die at that point. I've sent my mini dump reports and dxdiag off to the devs.

I know it's not very fair to ask Ironclad to help if we've modified the game, but it is in their best interest to do so, otherwise their modding tools were kind of a waste.

Great game though!