Ever since 1.1, I've been having the "out of memory" errors pretty regularly after about 2.5 hours of play. The Elemental.exe process was always using about 1.6-1.7GB of RAM at this point. I was curious whether it might be running up against an artificial 2GB limit (as from the 32-bit Windows days), so I used CFF Explorer (available from www.ntcore.com) to set the "app can handle more than 2GB" flag on the .exe. Ever since I did this, I haven't seen an OOM error, and have kept the game going for up to four hours (until minimizing it to check the RAM usage messed things up) and up to about 1.9GB of RAM used.
I haven't had enough time to do much testing, so I have no idea what else this might be messing up, but for now, everything seems fine. Obviously, if there's a memory leak, this isn't going to last forever (and of course you actually have to have the RAM available), but so far it's prevented these errors for as long as I can play at one stretch.
Steps to implement:
1. You have to be running 64-bit Windows (I'm using Win7 Ultimate 64-bit)
2. Download and install Explorer Suite (from ntcore.com)
3. Make a backup copy of your Elemental.exe file
4. Open up Elemental.exe in CFF Explorer
5. Click on "File Header" on the left side
6. Click the "Click Here" button on the last row on the right (should be the "Characteristics" row)
7. Check the box for "App can handle >2gb address space" and click OK, then save the file. You can overwrite the original (you DID make a backup copy, right??)
I haven't run Impulse since I did this, so I'm not sure if it will try to "fix" your exe, but it's easy enough to put back.
System specs:
Win7 Ultimate 64-bit
i7-920
6GB RAM
GeForce GTX 460 1GB (driver ver 260.99)
This is great.
I wonder what reason they have for not doing this themselves. I mean, if OOM crashes are 95% (made up number), then they can just do this and jump on fixing new bugs that happens due to doing it.
heavenfall this is another rewording of the LAA, and yes it does work for allowing longer ram leaking & therefor play, BUT it does NOT fix the ram leaks.
my guess would be that sd would enable this switch WHEN they have beaten all the ram leaks
harpo
I have nearly identical system specs as OP and see the crash what seems like more frequently then that.
I may try this is I get to more annoyed. I have 8GB and never see my total system usage go over 4GB (while playing Elemental) so maybe this will allow it to eat/leak RAM till it canna no more?
That IS why I bought more RAM than absolutely minimum.
I know it doesn't fix them, but it helps with the issue because you won't crash as often. This seems like a quick fix to reduce the average amount of crashes/hour.
Bump, just wanted to say I've run into no issues. Today for the first time I ran 400 turns late-game without crashing. And I think this fix severely helped to avoid oom crashes.
It has the potential to cause DirectX errors.
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