Still getting the exact same OOM crashes umpteen patches later

from Elemental Forums

Not trying to be rude but I don't think Stardock will ever get rid of the memory leaks. Every time I see patch notes it talks about eliminating memory leaks, yet the same crashes happen over and over. I don't really think that Stardock can fix this with the current engine, and that means anything using this engine is something I ought to avoid. I have been just letting the game crash, but figured I drop in and at least let Stardock know that the crashes are still happening with the same frequency.

 

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Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

To be fair, there doesn't have to be a memory leak in order to go OOM. That's the fastest and surest way, but there are cases where stuff just needs a ton of memory and ends up goofing up as the game goes on and on. To give you an idea of how weird it can be, I once had a completely strange crash in Sins of a Solar Empire that I didn't get - I sent them the minidump, and they got back to me saying the game ran out of memory when trying to draw the movement arrows for my fleet (it crashed when I gave a move order).

Memory management for big games is very tough, and it's not always a leak that causes the crash.

Anyway, while this suggestion isn't exactly a "solution", you can look into enabling Large Addressing Aware on the game executable. This allows the OS to give it more wiggle room (up to about 3 GB of memory, up from 2) assuming you're on a 64-bit OS. You can either search the forums and someone had a thread on how to do it, or you can also google for "3gb enabler", many games had communities who created quick scripts to enable LAA, and the process is the same regardless of what .exe you're doing it on, so they'll work for Elemental as well (you might just have to rename Elemental.exe if they expect a specific name, then change it back).

I've done this myself in earlier versions of Elemental and it helped incredibly much, I could play for hours on large maps without going OOM.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Memory crashes has to go, I don't care what the reason is. A game crashing is a failure that the developers are responsible for. I respect that it is a complex issue. I am also aware that other games function without these problems. Elemental should do the same.

Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

I'm not claiming otherwise :P

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

I still suffer from OOM's and stopped playing the game for the moment. The game crashes every time it hits 2gb meaning I can barely play anything beyond a small map with a few AI opponents. When I play TBS games like Civilization and Elemental, I want to play on the hardest setting with a world full of AI's. I run Civ V with full AI's and 28 city states and have no issues, so I can't wait to be able to run Elemental with a full cast on the huge maps.

I understand that it's a complex issue to track down memory leaks, and there are less and less every time around with patching. I've gone from being able to play 10-20 turns into a large world game to 250, but by that time the game is so sluggish and it is so close to 2GB I save every turn to make sure I don't lose progress on the turn change. By the time I hit 300 turns, it's taking 2-4 minutes per turn.

The game is far closer to fully playable than it was, but I agree that there are still a lot of memory leaks within the engine. Or at least one or two that are severely causing issues.