Any work-around for "Out of Memory" CTD?

While using 1.19a, playing on a large map with max opponents, I am about 63.  The game CTD with the "Out of Memory" window.  If I play a smaller game or with less opponents, do I fair a better chance of being able to finish a game?

I pre-ordered it back before it came out but haven't been able to finish a game.  So, I come back and try to play every month or so.

Anyone been able to trouble shoot a work-around?  I want to finish a game.

15,496 views 16 replies
Reply #1 Top

"Cloth Map Only" reduces memory usage some.

Keep fog of war off too (its off by default).

Both of those effect memory  usage.  They make the difference for me between never OOM-ing and what you describe.

Reply #2 Top

Thanks Lord for the quick reply, I currently only use the graphics (vs Cloth) to see where the beaches are, then turn it off.  I also don't use the Fog of War. 

Any other ideas?

Reply #3 Top

Set the auto save to every 2 turns so if you CTD you lose hardly anything. Or every other turn if you are fully paranoid.

Reply #4 Top

After you turn the graphics off, I don't think you recover the memory until you exit and restart.  Other than that nothing to help you...

...but, since you're not the only one to turn graphics on to find beaches, how about a big hint to the devs that beaches should be visible even in cloth-map mode (somebody requested it months ago too).

Reply #5 Top

ive never had a oom error ever but my friend has and his computer is the same as mine cause i built them both.the only difference is he had set his vurtual memory to 0 because he thought 4 gigs was enough after i turned it back on and set it to 5024 megs and he has not seen an oom error yet and he plays everyday i dont know if it will help u but thats all i got the other thing i noticed is disabling windows defender on win 7 and vista makes a big diff as far as mem usage..

Reply #6 Top

My last OOM happened with 6gigs available memory out of 8.

Reply #7 Top

Elemental may not be able to use more than 2gb? - may be something to do with 32 bit aplication/operating system - not sure but that may provide a clue.

Reply #8 Top

My personal work-around is.... wait.

 

I find the current state of the game not particularly "fun" to play. So i'm hoping they'll fix the OOM bugs when they patch it up with fun content.

Reply #9 Top

yes best way to 100% avoid the CTD is not to play the game. Works really well. Sad but true

Reply #10 Top

Quoting Ahara, reply 8
I find the current state of the game not particularly "fun" to play. So i'm hoping they'll fix the OOM bugs when they patch it up with fun content.
End of Ahara's quote

I don't find this. What gets me so very horked off about this issue is the very fact that the game is finally starting to be really fun. I want to play, I get maybe 1/3 though a nice big map, and then it starts crashing every 5-6 turns with OOM. Updated drivers, nothing else running, reasonably fast machine, etc. (EDIT: just tried a last-ditch effort with a tiny game, and OOM CTD. Weak.)

I got the special edition before "gold", but there were too many problems, including interface, content, mechanics, responsiveness and CTD memory leak bugs. There are still a number of poor interface choices and responsiveness problems (related to OOM, I hope), and more content would be welcome (spells and hero abilities come to mind), but I'm very disappointed to discover that there are still major memory leak issues.

I'm sure Brad and co. are working furiously to deal with this issue, but they were doing that in August, too. Please, guys! I still have a large and disparate group of friends who are waiting for a green light to try this game! They've been primed since I started telling them about it in July (many old MoM fans, mostly), but I can't trot the current version out for them.

Fingers crossed for 1.2?

Reply #11 Top

How about not adding ANYTHING until there are no more crash bugs?  No point in adding new content if you can't play a game from start to finish.

As a professional games developer, I cannot get over the fact that there is still crash bugs this far after shipping. 

Ever time I see a box of Elemental on the store shelves I think "Some poor smuck is gonna buy that only to have it crash on him repeatedly".

Reply #13 Top

The new content caused many of the bugs. Its a process and its not for everyone.  :D

Reply #14 Top

Quoting Delmoroth, reply 12
Dunno if this still works, been a while since i looked at it or needed such a thing.

https://forums.elementalgame.com/393090
End of Delmoroth's quote

 

quoting: "If you have a 64bit OS then all you need to do is patch your game." I know, I wasn't specific in my post, but playing games with how much memory is accessible isn't really a fix anyway.

 

Ok, ok - thank you though, that was thoughtful.

Reply #15 Top

Quoting seanw3, reply 13
The new content caused many of the bugs. Its a process and its not for everyone. 
End of seanw3's quote

 

The CTD I get is the same one I have gotten from the very first version I played. There have been times when the betas versions added so many CTDS that it was a relief to get back to the old true and faithful OOM CTD. It always happens on large maps with lots of opponents(it happens quicker that is). And it happens later in the game more and more often.

It makes it a real chore to finish any game, I get mad and rage quit. It sucks to half to replay fights because of a crash. And half the time it crashes right when I hit quick save. And to top it off the game is really bland, tactical combat is really not that great at all. The enemy AI is little more than a guided homing missile that makes a path to your least armored weakest unit and they path there oblivious to anything. Basically walk to target A and hit with attack skill. The AI is that simple. We can't have fortify, or formations, or fortifications.....because the AI is so simple it can't handle it.

What is starting to settle in, is the fact that Stardock is unable to fix the crash, I dpn;t think they understand their own game engine enough to deal with the problems. I don't know if it was poorly coded or what, but really there seems to be a real problem here. And all their future games are going to be based on this same engine? Maybe this is not good.

If the community could get the source code, they could weed out the crashes, I really would like to see this game become stable so that maybe the mod community could develop and fix the glaring problems with the game play.

Reply #16 Top

I've noticed the out of memory error (for me) only occurs on turns where the game autosaves - sometimes it even happens when I save the game myself.  While there may be other versions of this error, at least *one* version of it occurs on saving the game.


Workaround for me is to turn off auto-saves and never save - I've yet to get an OOM error when I do.  However, I don't like to play without saves, so I'm dealing with the OOM issue rather than having a stable game without saving.

 

EDIT:  Sometimes the system will just hang when loading saved games as well - it doesn't CTD or give an OOM message, it simply stops responding.  Definitely an issue with saving/loading on my computer.  Other games have similar issues though - Civ 5 *used* to occassionaly crash / out of memory on saves, but they seem to have finally fixed that issue; the problem *is* fixable. 

Strangely enough for Civ 5, I was able to fix my other crashes (mostly related to panning/zooming) myself by manually setting the number of threads to no more than my number of physical cores (3 in my case - cheap 3 core AMD processor) in the config.ini file, turning tesselation off, and turning off hotloading.  Since doing that in Civ, I've had zero crashes - is there any way to do something similar for Elemental?