Text characters dropping out.....

[HansBolter]

Have been playing a scenario 40 game against the AI for quite some time and managed to advance the game to January 25th, 1946 where it went completely to hell.

I started playing the January 26th turn Saturday and immediately noticed text characters disappearing from every interface including the main game screen.

I reloaded and replayed the Jan 24th turn three times trying to create a new, clean save to move forward with. Each time, as I started issuing orders for the Jan 25 turn, text characters started dropping out of every interface.

At this point, it does not appear that it will be possible for me to complete the first ever game I managed to play almost to completion.

As you can imagine, I am hugely disappointed after investing so much time and effort into the scenario.

Am at work now, but will grab some screen shots tonight and upload the saved game for anyone who wants to check it out.

Does anyone know if the saved game increases in file size with each new save? Have I possibly hit some kind of limit?
Could the problem be that I am running the game on a marginally powerful enough platform?

Te mega beast machine I built a couple of years ago died a hard death and I have been playing on a marginal platform ever since.

[Korvar]

Character (text) corruption is usually the sign of one of two things: 1) a video card going bad or 2) insufficient memory. The fact you are able to replicate the problem so precisely means it is not your video card going bad. The Jan 25th '46 save definitely seems to be crossing some memory threshold.

You'll want to bring up Task Manager before you start the game. Click on the "Performance" tab where you can monitor CPU, RAM, and disk activity. You may also want to temporarily make the game a smaller window so you'll be able to watch task manager while playing (unless you have a 2nd monitor... then put task manager over there).

Then we'll need to experiment to see if the memory limit is an internal limitation of the game or a limitation of your computer.

[BBfanboy]

Some time back somebody had a problem with ships disappearing from the game when he put them in port. Turned out the problem was he exceeded the limit of 1000 ships in port! That just illustrates how much stuff the game has to keep track of if you visit every port during the turn (the details of what is there are then held in RAM). Frequent restarts or more RAM should cure that kind of thing.

[HansBolter]

Well, the 'minimal' machine I am running on is a 3ghz Core i5 with 8mbs of ram. Minimal, but should get the job done.

Checking Task Manager revealed that the 'system' and all other background programs are eating up 24% of available ram.

Only found a few processes I could disable and was still using 24% of ram after disabling them.

I did manage to get a January 25, 1946 turn running and made progress issuing orders for almost an hour without experiencing the text character loss again.

However, I did avoid the activity wherein I was experiencing the character loss before, namely examining every squadron and replacing pilots and resizing squadrons in the British carrier TFs at Adak. I tiptoed around that orders issuing effort last night, but will wade into that tonight and see if the bug rears its ugly head again.

Two turns prior I had undertaken the same task with the American CVE fleet at Nagasaki and their numbers dwarfs the British carrier fleet, but experienced no glitches while undertaking that task.

Thanks for the analytical help and suggestions guys.

[HansBolter]

ORIGINAL: BBfanboy

Some time back somebody had a problem with ships disappearing from the game when he put them in port. Turned out the problem was he exceeded the limit of 1000 ships in port! That just illustrates how much stuff the game has to keep track of if you visit every port during the turn (the details of what is there are then held in RAM). Frequent restarts or more RAM should cure that kind of thing.

I've actually lost very few ships to the AI so I have thousands upon thousands of them. Most are in TFs at this point.

I also have thousands of air squadrons. The Allied force structure in '46 is humongous.

The database the game engine has to manage must be astronomical in size.

[rustysi]

Everyone seems to be focused on RAM here, but how full is your hard drive. If its too full Windows won't have enough for the temp files it loves so much. This could also interfere with the running of your programs.

Also WitP vanilla brought my old laptop it to its knees (one reason I waited to get AE). I too had to turn off Windows 'fluff' to get it to run well. Are you sure you've turned off all you possibly can? I give some suggestions, but its been so long I don't remember.

I guess its probably not an option, but a new machine.[:D] I mean you could probably get something in-expensive in order to play your favorite game.

[witpaemail]

I have had that issue going all the way back to the beginning. Seems to crop up if you tab out of the game to do some stuff and then go back. Save the game, exit and reload and it will be fine. It is some sort of memory issue but it isnt because of a lack of memory. I stopped programming back in the 80s so Im not current, but from what little I remember about it I would say that the memory used for the text characters isnt stored in a reserved memory area and its getting corrupted. It isnt the same characters all the time and there isnt a pattern to it that I have seen, so since it cant (at least hasnt been) be repeated, its hard to fix. But it also isnt a critical game stopping bug either.

[Kull]

ORIGINAL: witpaemail

I have had that issue going all the way back to the beginning. Seems to crop up if you tab out of the game to do some stuff and then go back. Save the game, exit and reload and it will be fine. It is some sort of memory issue but it isnt because of a lack of memory. I stopped programming back in the 80s so Im not current, but from what little I remember about it I would say that the memory used for the text characters isnt stored in a reserved memory area and its getting corrupted. It isnt the same characters all the time and there isnt a pattern to it that I have seen, so since it cant (at least hasnt been) be repeated, its hard to fix. But it also isnt a critical game stopping bug either.

Interesting observation. You could test that by running the game in Windowed Mode, yes? Because that avoids the whole issue of alt-tabbing. Unless of course Hans is running his game in windowed mode, in which case...."never mind" </Rosanne Rosana Danna voice>

[Korvar]

The game seems to have much fewer graphics glitches in windowed mode. Fullscreen Windowed mode is the way to go.