ALPHA 49B Questions about loading and memory usage.

Discussion in 'Clockwork Empires General' started by Cyjack, Apr 6, 2016.

  1. Cyjack

    Cyjack Member

    Despite encountering a few issues I'm concerned about, I'm really enjoying the game much more than I did a year or two ago. So much so that I'm disappointed I'm still running into something of a wall, performance wise, and can't reliably experiment with all the new late game content yet. I can play the game much, much longer than I used to be able to, but there's still a practical limit beyond which the game becomes increasingly difficult to play. My load times are *craaaazy*...around 5+ minutes on a game that's been going a while. And saving becomes increasingly unstable as the games get larger. After a certain size, the game crashes every other autosave.

    I'm assuming it's more or less the same for everyone right now. If not, let me know and Ill submit whatever info is requested.

    With 16gb of ram and a solid state drive, I should be able to handle some pretty large files. My questions are these:

    1) Is the game client 64 bit? If not, are there plans for a 64 bit version?

    2) If the client is 32 bit, is it large address aware so it can at least use up to 4gb of ram?

    Thanks!
     
    Samut likes this.
  2. Unforked

    Unforked Member

    You should definitely read today's blog post on the front page. :)

    Summary:

    It's about to get much better.
     
  3. Cyjack

    Cyjack Member

    Ah, excellent. I'd still like an answer on the 64 bit question, though.
     
    Exile likes this.
  4. Cyjack

    Cyjack Member

    Still looking for info on this. I appear to have reached a point where I can no longer reliably save the game, either manually or via auto-save. It crashes during the save process about 2 times out of three. This appears to be a different problem than the extreme load times Nicholas addressed in his blog post, but is probably still related to file size and available memory. Save functions become unstable with large files constrained by 32 bit memory limits, and I'm assuming at this point that it's a 32 bit exe--all the casual methods of telling whether a program is 32 bit or 64 bit indicate that it is.

    I would like very much to continue this game to see some of the later buildings, and was wondering if the LAA flag was enabled by default. I was going to run a 4gb patcher on it to see if that helped anything, but discovered that this was likely to cause problems with Steam, and was a much more complicated issue when Steam was involved.

    Any help? I really want to get that Bar up and running.
    .
     
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  5. Nicholas

    Nicholas Technology Director Staff Member

    - Yes, LAA is enabled by default.
    - If you can send me a save game that, after more play, fails to save correctly, that would be interesting. (I'd like it for 49C once it comes out, because we have done some work on memory usage moving forwards - which, notably, also breaks savegame compatibility.)
    - Yes, Clockwork Empires is a 32 bit EXE. I have a 64 bit build internally, and would switch to using a 64 bit executable except that there is a concern that doing so would alienate users and people who aren't running 64 bit Windows. (Bluntly, I don't really agree with this? But yolo.) I also don't want the support labour right now of maintaining both a 32 bit and a 64 bit tree. I may revisit this.
    - Yes, memory usage is still a huge mess and pissing me off. :) Working on it, though!
     
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  6. Cyjack

    Cyjack Member

    Thanks Nicholas. I certainly understand the added burden of maintaining two different versions. Is there really anyone running a gaming system on 32 bit OS anymore, though? I suppose the lingering Win XP users...

    In any event, I think a game like CE could really benefit from a 64 bit version, so I hope you revisit that at some point.

    I think I still have a copy of the game that wouldn't save, although I've come to question whether it's really a problem with memory management. I've been checking the task manager at the time of my crashes, and it's rarely getting over 1.5 gb usage.

    But there is a stage on my system where games just become functionally unplayable, either through skyrocketing instability, or unreliable saving. It usually starts to happen as I approach 50 colonists.
     
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  7. Cyjack

    Cyjack Member

    File sent via PM
     
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  8. Nicholas

    Nicholas Technology Director Staff Member

    49C is going to be up shortly (like, 5-10 minutes shortly.) If you still get this issue with 49C - and if you can actively make an effort to reproduce it in the next couple of days, that would be *awesome* - I'll take a new save file from that. (we changed a lot of the internal save mechanism between 49B and 49C so it's not as useful as one might think any more to have 49B files.)
     
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  9. dbaumgart

    dbaumgart Art Director Staff Member

    About 10% of Steam users according to http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey ; not quite a non-issue, though that number lowers as time goes on.
     
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  10. Cyjack

    Cyjack Member

    Oh, I'm sorry. I misunderstood. I'll give the new build a go and see if I hit the same wall.
     
  11. Samut

    Samut Member

    Now that CE is out, will there be a 64-bit client for the 90+% of the userbase out there with 64-bit systems?
     
    Exile likes this.
  12. Nicholas

    Nicholas Technology Director Staff Member

    I don't mind doing one? Heck, I *have* one in-house. But I'm not sure where it falls on the priority ladder.
     
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  13. Tikigod

    Tikigod Member

    Give!
     
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  14. Samut

    Samut Member

    Is there a notable improvement in performance? It seems reasonable that being able to use more RAM would help quite a bit.
     
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  15. Exile

    Exile Member

    Leave the sheep alone!