Two memory leaks in this game

[Snarfy]

There are at least two major memory leaks in this game.

1. Animated talking leader heads.

2. "Trading world maps" with other countries.

#1 seems to be an incremental memory leak that doesnt lead to crashes until the endgame. this may be more severe for people with small amounts of memory.

#2 is quite serious on huge world sizes, and i've got a lot of memory. On my machine, doing one of these near the end of a game when a lot has been constructed results in a crash the next turn. Doing two of these always results in a crash.

You really need to get your QA dudes to check for memory leaks in long games. Wow. Talk about QA 101.

 

[dreary79]

I have the same crashes.

AMD 64 3200+
6800 256MB
1GB RAM

 

[MagnumPI]

stick this in the bug report section?

 

[Old Dood]

Snarfy...how much is allot of memory? 1Gb...2Gb? I have played 3 games so far on a huge map...no problems yet. I never trade world maps so I do not know if that protects me or not.

Reason I ask is because I am wondering if I will have problems later on during a multi player. Allot of users have said this game hogs up to 800megs of ram while playing as well. I have 2Gb of Ram so I feel I am protected some from the memory leaks.

 

[Tempete]

Snarfy...how much is allot of memory? 1Gb...2Gb? I have played 3 games so far on a huge map...no problems yet. I never trade world maps so I do not know if that protects me or not.

Reason I ask is because I am wondering if I will have problems later on during a multi player. Allot of users have said this game hogs up to 800megs of ram while playing as well. I have 2Gb of Ram so I feel I am protected some from the memory leaks.

Yeah 2GB is a lot, but I bet if you play the game for six hours straight then it's due for a crash

 

[1c0n]

i have had only a few CTD's but always in endgame.
i have Nvidia GF440MX 81.85 drivers
P4 2.53 @ 3.06 and 1.5 GB of ram

throughout the game i monitored memory usage. it went as far as having only 200mb free! thats over 1 GB of memory used. there must be a mem leak somewhere because it progressively gets worse, not just from the start tho, when i save and exit, then reload, mem use is high, but not that bad. but in end game it gets worse quickly (10 turns) and its back up over 800 Mb used

 

[Undisclosed]

Same things happen to me..

 

[Turtleneck]

Seriously, it's like they used recursion in their programming.
For those that don't know what this is, it's an incredibly inefficient way of doing things. It has a function call itself until a certain condition is met, rather than loop, so there are many instances running at the same time.

 

[Ruffin]

When you get CTD are you getting a slowdown before that, or does it run smoothly until it just crashes?

I'm not getting any CTD, but it's so slow after a few turns that I'm restarting, not giving it the chance to crash.

 

[logical_psycho]

Seriously, it's like they used recursion in their programming.
For those that don't know what this is, it's an incredibly inefficient way of doing things. It has a function call itself until a certain condition is met, rather than loop, so there are many instances running at the same time.

Recursion is fine, just clear your instances after you've stopped using them (which they didn't do in this game).


I definitely hope this will get fixed, because my computer is running slow as hell now after playing for a couple of hours. Definitely heavy on the HD as well since it's using so much virtual memory.

 

[theim]

I'm playing on a laptop and with a "Huge" size map.

Trading a world map with another civ caused the game to slow to the point of unplayability.

 

[agoodfella]

Talking Heads def. memory leak for me - crashed - but only after about 7 straight hours!

man, i am a lucky sunofagun that this works on my tiny Sony VAIO TR (Intel Integrated)

 

[crazypooljunkie]

Has anybody else had problems with using the Military Advisor? I haven't crashed using it yet but it always takes very long amounts of time to get into, upwards of 2 or 3 minutes. The leaderheads don't actually display for me and have yet to cause a crash. Also the map trading sometimes takes a while but its not to horrible for me, but the military advisor for some reason is horrible, despite the fact that I may only have maybe 10-15 units.

 

[Thorek]

Map trading does take alot of time over here, and going in to the military advisor takes awhile aswell, so thats not new, but it doesnt crash.

 

[Ravenor6]

I too believe there's a memory leak within the game, which hit me very close to the end game (Game graphics corrupted, music got stuck in a loop and the computer completely froze up and I had to do a hard reboot)

P4 3400
2 Gig DDR RAM
XFX 6800 Ultra 256 Meg
DirextX 9.0c
NVIDIA Drivers 77.77

 

[logical_psycho]

You might want to get the latest drivers. 77.77 isn't the most recent now.

 

[alamo]

If trading maps makes it worse then it must have something to do with event displays.

@agoodfella: How do you handle T+L?

 

[Zertez]

Most of the advisors take some time to open but the military advisor is by far the worse. I can almost smoke a cig in the time it takes to get it open, luckily I havent found the advisors that helpful in civ4.

 

[Stuie]

Most of the advisors take some time to open but the military advisor is by far the worse.

What makes me sad about this is that Civ 3 had the exact same issue out of the box. You'd think something like that would get caught this time around...

 

[Abegweit]

Seriously, it's like they used recursion in their programming.
For those that don't know what this is, it's an incredibly inefficient way of doing things. It has a function call itself until a certain condition is met, rather than loop, so there are many instances running at the same time.

Of course they used recursion. This is a game, after all. For those who don't know, recursion is an incredibly elegant way of modeling state changes. And, in modern processors (e.g. those less than 20 years old), it is not much slower than the inelegant methods.

Recursion has nothing per se to do with memory leaks. You can get leaks with or without elegance, although elegant programs tend to be more solid.

You sound like someone whose programming experience comes from Apple Basic.