Crashing due to memory error

[epidemic]

Hi. I'm just new to Command (25 hrs or so played so far) and am enjoying it immensely. I do, however, run into rather a lot of crashes - sometimes several per hour. Thank goodness for the autosave feature! Nonetheless, I'd like to report these frequent crashes in the hope that they can be fixed.

Lately, all of the crashes have been such that the map disappears entirely and is replaced with a giant red X on a white background.

I'm using build 479 and this latest crash (of dozens) occurred playing the Canary's Cage scenario. The crash report says that I ran out of memory. I run Windows 7, have 8 gigs of RAM, and a Radeon 7950 with 3 gigs of RAM. My multi-monitor display is set to 5760 x 1080 using Eyefinity.

I'll upload my autosave file in a following post, as I already uploaded the crash screen.

Thank you.

[epidemic]

Attached is the autosave file for the previous post.

Thanks again.

[thewood1]

Just ran at 15 and 30 to 1 time and no issues for an hour game time. I suspect that even with 8G of RAM, you are running out of video RAM at your resolution. It might be RAM, but doesn't seem likely.

Continued for another 2 hours game time and no issues.

[epidemic]

Thanks, thewood1, it was very kind of you to test it for me.

I run much more graphically intense games like DCS with my multi-monitor set-up with never a crash, so I guess I'm just a little surprised. I'm not a programmer, so I'm going out on a limb with this question... but could the memory handling of the game be improved so this sort of thing would be less likely, or is there perhaps some tweak I could apply to my video card to avoid the problem?

[thewood1]

Well, I run at on 1368 x 768. I've no reason to run higher than that. I also run two monitors with Command. My system is a very mid-range AMD A10 laptop with 8G RAM. I use a standard spinning HD. Above 1000 units my game slows a little. At 2000 it crawls.

[epidemic]

Fair enough. I guess 5760x1080 is a bit of unnecessary luxury. I'll make the main window smaller and see how that works. Thanks again.

[Dimitris]

Hello,

Did things improve on a smaller desktop area?

[epidemic]

I played for about an hour last night with the main window reduced to 1920 x 1080 on my middle monitor (of three) and the other key windows (message log window, mission editor, and database) arranged on the two monitors to either side. That is actually quite a nice comfortable set-up. There were no crashes in that hour, but I want to play a few hours longer before providing a definitive report-back.

In that time I did notice that if I had the main window, message log window, mission editor, and database all running at the same time things started to bog down a little. Not sure if that's an optimization issue, as I don't normally have trouble with four small-ish windows (or fourteen for that matter) open on my desktop. A Radeon 7950-3GB should be able to handle more than a few open windows.

Setting aside my little problem for a moment, let me commend you the developers for your support of this product thus far. I've noticed how active you are on the forums and how frequently you post new builds. I've watched that clear commitment over the last few months and it tipped me over the fence to drop the CAN$91 rather than waiting a couple of years for a more mature product. Well, that and that Baloogan fellow - he's a great support.

-edited to make more consistent use of screens, windows, and monitors-

[epidemic]

To Sunburn:

I've played another 10 hours or so with the main window reduced to 1920x1080 and I haven't had any further memory crashes. So, thewood1's idea of reducing the window size seems to have done the trick. Now, if only the main window would remain where I left it when I last exited the game.... [;)]

Almost finished Canary's Cage, which I'm finding quite satisfying. I'm looking forward to 1.02!

[thewood1]

To me, this means its most likely a VRAM issue. That high of a resolution can do a number on a windowed application using Directx.