What gets me about it is... the game already locks out certain map sizes based on your system. If you have under 6 gig of RAM, it won't let you start anything bigger than gigantic. Why not just let it lock out Insane for anything less than 16 gig?

I have a pretty nice Dell with 8 gig of RAM. I bought it in February for this game in particular, lmao. The wife actually understood. Anyway, I've had no issues, but I haven't cleared 160 turns on any Insane map yet. No issues, just wanted a different game. 

Question: Should I expect problems with an Insane map down the road? I play 25-41 factions, max planets at 300 with different combinations. Any ideas?

 

Nah, that shouldn't be a problem - with the current maximum planet settings (around 600) 8 gig should be fine for everything, more or less. But it'd be nice to have a 16gb check that allowed us to generate 2000+ habitable galaxies.

 

Yeah, expect pretty ugly performance after several hours of play. I'd recommend to save & exit and restart & load the game after every 2-3 hours of play or so.

Otherwise the game engine will start thrashing your main memory up until the point where it consumes more than 8 GB of RAM, starting to use the Virtual Memory on your Hard Disk too, after which point your computer will start to lag like hell and the game becoming totally unplayable and unstable because it seems like some of the game mechanics/UI stuff is working fine only on low latency timings and with the extremely high latency Virtual Memory UI bugs, getting stuck and/or crashes become much, much more common.

 

 

As I wrote above this is only partly true. I had 8 GB up until a week ago. This becomes a huge problem already on Gigantic maps with only the default factions being active. There seems to be something like a creepy-crawly memory leak because the game starts thrashing RAM after about 2-3 hours like crazy, using typically 3-4 GB (and more) more than it actually needs.

I figured that out after I put an additional 4 GB into my machine for a total of 12 GB now. While at first the game ran much more smoothely, but I always kept an eye on the task manager in the background and noticed that eventually at some point the game will increase RAM usage about 1-2% every 10-15 minutes. Once my system reaches 90% of RAM usage I basically restart the game and then it's back to usually only 6 GB.

I have seen other people reporting/having this issue too so I guess the memory management of the game seems to have a bug somewhere.

 

Yeah, there's some memory leaks, but nothing that isn't sorted by a quick reboot/closing the game and force-shutting through TM. There's no systemic issue with running a full game on 8gb, provided you're willing to restart the game a couple of times.

 

True. It's not like the memory leak is causing a direct crash or something. It's more like the "running out of physical memory"/"working on Virtual RAM" that eventually leads to system wide instability causing Windows to slow down to a crawl which takes 10 minutes to recover from once you killed the game, if the game doesn't crash by itself anyways because it seems like it can't handle its own awesomeness anymore at that point. xD

 

But yes, basically it's do-able on 8 GB, but I would not recommend anything beyond Gigantic Maps because sometimes I found that with huge savegame files with far advanced progress that the game already works on Virtual RAM directly after loading, exceeding the 8 GB of physical RAM and no way to prevent that even before any memory leaks further degrading performance become noticeable.

So if one wants to have some room to breath I'd recommend to have at least 12 GB in the computer, otherwise even periodically restarting the game to get rid of the memory leak won't help improving system performance.

Gigantic Maps and beyond are definitely not designed for machines having only 8 GB of RAM, the "actual" System Requirements are played down by a lot, but as I watched the latest Devstream they said anyways that they might increase the written system requirements because they don't display the truth.

 

I guess that`s why I never noticed that issue and I played for well over 5 hours or so on Huge maps. But I do have 16 gig ram.

 

as long as it is a opt in you can opt out when it goes live you`ll have to update. I`m not sure how you can stay at 1.01 and still play steam seem to force you to update. As Far As I Know.

 

Echillion what do you want exactly???

I tried 1.03 today but left the modded files from this thread in the mods folder and they over-wrote the 1.03 generation. Still getting maps with 1000 plus planets . Luckily the mod folder seems to be untouched by updates so far.

All I wanted was the base amounts for stars and habitable planets to remain the same as 1.0 or 1.01 so I could play up to 100 opponents on a insane map without us all only having 5-6 planets with only 1 shipyard each. ( I have 16GB ram and did test it during the beta's and 1.0 so it runs fine) I've been waiting for the game to be more stable before I started a proper insane sized map as I didn't want to have to constantly redesign my ships like Rand Johnson had to during the beta releases. Hopefully we wont be stuck with this nerf but if we are I'll have to learn how to mod the files.

Just use Buck's, it does pretty much what you want.

 

Steam lets me opt-in and opt-out of beta patches, but I have to have release patches, those are unavoidable. Steam re-downloads the other fork's files (just the differentials, not the whole lot). However, after I told Buck about this he said his didn't work the first time he'd tried it - and then did after I suggested it. So it may be an intermittent steam bug (I know, I know - Steam's so universally popular and reliable! Who'd think it might do something like this).

 

any thing in your mod folders she not be touch by an update. but that does not mean that they`ll show or work after ward I`ve had to update my mapsizedefs a few times!

True. Don't worry, I'll come running to you or Buck if they break hehe

 

LOL don`t Run to me ATM my mods are broke after update!

 

Be glad to help when I can!!

that goes for every one!!

 

Can anyone confirm that this fix is still working as of 1.0.3 opt-in?  I've seen some reports of some mods breaking and I wanted to see if this one still works.  I'd check myself, but I've been taking a bit of a break from GC III this week.

 

form what I seen the custom races made with the editor are working. Any made like made form the factiondefs and put in the mod folder are not working. the game seem to be skipping the mods again!

I just tried a new game and the map mod is broke....*sigh* I don't know what they did in the patch last night, but it did indeed break it. I have a saved game with 1000 planets from when the mod was working before last night's update/change to patch 1.03, but I haven't tried it yet to see if it'll load. As soon as I saw reports that some mods were broken I tested generating a new universe though and Immense was back to only a few hundred planets. In the initial/previous 1.03 before the second change to it last night it still worked fine. This morning it doesn't.

 

yeah it should work OK the Dev`s are working on this as I write this!! they`ll fix it soon!

Just loaded up my turn 1 saved game, glad I kept that, it still works. I hope they fix this today though because Buck's nifty map mod is broke and not being able to generate new maps the size I like to play makes me a unhappy camper.

All my modded pictures/art assets seem to work fine. Just downloaded some new ship designs this morning however and now I'm afraid to try them..lol.

Thanks.  Guess I'll have to boot into Windows and see what is going on.

EDIT::: After checking the Mods Broke master thread, looks like this has already been fixed.  Potentially at least.  So I'll check it out later after things settle down a bit.

Yeap, should be no worries by then. It still works in the save game I'm playing on anyway, just not for new generation, but they should have it patched shortly so I wouldn't worry about it. Adding your map pack to the Compendium too

It`s probably a bad time to be making Mods while Patches are coming this fast.

On big stuff, yeah I'd tend to agree. This is just a edit to two xmls to add stars and planets, nothing major. It wasn't the mod that broke anyway but a bug on their end. Still yeah, with patches and tweaks being made for good time to come, major modding will probably take a back seat while changes are going on. So far though it's only been minor edits to most things. Custom pictures never stopped working and races made with the in-game creator kept working and for the most part aside from ship designs that's what people are sticking with.

It's been pretty much a neverending stream of patches since the beginning of April. I've just learned to accept it.

If anyone is still using the mod I created here it looks like it is causing a CTD on map generation when using the Snathi DLC race as a faction in the game.  It was working perfectly yesterday, and it seems to still work today when only non-Snathi DLC races are chosen.  But something in the Snathi DLC is causing this to CTD when it is used.  Their home system is my best guess.

I'll take a look at this in a bit and see just exactly what is going on and if there is anything I can do to fix it.