What ways are there to reduce memory usage that don't change gameplay?

[fluffy465]

Considering the size of this mod and the 4GB limit imposed by 32-bit executables, It seems pretty important to reduce the memory usage. Usually the advice is to reduce the map size, number of turns, or number of civs. While that does work it might change the experience of the game.

What I'm mainly curious about is how much the texture resolution affects the memory usage. If I were to enable the low texture resolution in the settings, how much memory does it save? Also, does it affect the resolution of the icons associated with different techs, buildings, etc.? I would hope it does, because I suspect those images take up quite a bit of memory.

I should make it clear that I don't expect there to be a setting that will magically allow for gigantic maps with 100 civs at eternity speed to never crash. I'm just curious what non-gameplay changes that could be made to reduce the chance of running out of memory.

 

[VCrakeV]

Change SHOW_BUILDINGS_LEVEL to 2 in A_New_Dawn_GlobalDefines... this will prevent most (all?) building models from showing up in the city center on map and city screen.

Do not use frozen animations or low graphics setting; they cause bugs, and the latter unintuitively slows down the game (pkay on medium instead).

If you really don't care, you can toggle bare map to hide unit models, though it hides flags too, so you have to hover your cursor over a tile to see what if any units are there.

If you want to speed the game up a bit, you can use satellite mode (alt+f), but I don't think it affects memory. It also makes it difficult to differentiate between your own units and others (looking straight down, you can't see flags). Zooming in can boost your FPS.

Viewports help reduce memory usage on larger maps, but they are buggy and inconvenient. This option is in the general BUG options screen. To the left of it in the options screen is a check box for off-screen paging, which reduces memory usage (I have had no problem with this option).