120 MBs?

Kyle · November 3, 2001, 22:55

Had an odd lockup of the game just now. The game itself didn't lock up, per se, but it stopped responding. I was in the military advisor's screen (advice still scrolling by normally) and I couldn't exit out of it. Anyway, I was checking to see if the program had locked up and noticed that it was taking up 120 MB's of RAM. Is this normal for a game like this?

I'm loving the game so far, except for the slowness of it. I have a fairly high end system and it really shouldn't be like this. It's almost as bad (waiting between turns) as the load times of Crimson Skies.

Sarxis · November 3, 2001, 22:58

I hope that isn't a memory leak.

But I haven't had too much trouble with the AI turns going too slowly. Not even in the end-game, but I have only played standard maps and 8 civs.

I think I will go bigger next time.

Asher · November 4, 2001, 00:31

I don't think it's a memory leak, cause mine always uses ~115-120MB of RAM.

Diety · November 4, 2001, 01:30

No leak there, always > 100 MB with me

Eli · November 4, 2001, 01:32

How do you check how much RAM it uses?

Diety · November 4, 2001, 01:35

You need a memory program for that. Get one at TUCOWS or some site like that.

Asher · November 4, 2001, 01:47

Or if you have Win2K/XP, click the Processes tab on the CTRL-ALT-DEL screen (or you can right click on 'Civilization III' under Tasks, and select 'Go to process'.

Diety · November 4, 2001, 01:48

You need a memory program for that. Get one at TUCOWS or some site like that.

Asher · November 4, 2001, 02:05

Off the crack, man.

Kyle · November 4, 2001, 13:02

I do believe this is the cause of the slowness. I have 256 MB of RAM. Half of which is taken by Windows (and all the services that includes) and the additional startup programs (which aren't that many), while the rest of the memory is taken up by Civ3.

I've basically been running on virtual memory from the harddrive.

Love the game Firaxis, but that's very, very bad.

Transcend · November 4, 2001, 13:52

CPU speed is not too important for Civ3. I'm using a PIII-500, but have 512MB RAM. The game is running very smoothly and has not crashed once in 30+ hours of playing time.

Patricio · November 5, 2001, 00:12

I have 64 MB RAM, and when I started playing the game, it worked fine initially. However, as the game continued, the performance started to go down, and eventually crashed.

I turned the music off, and it started to work fine again. So if this slowness occurs, try this to save RAM.

Does anyone else know other ways to save RAM?

Dale · November 5, 2001, 00:32

You could try forcing ya virtual memory to something like:
- min: 150 MB
- max: 250 MB

That should help in keeping a lot of windows/system memory on the hard disk.

Diety · November 5, 2001, 01:33

Two possible solutions :
- turn off your virtual memory (yep). If you got enough RAM this will speed up things. Or when that doesn't work, turn it to 1 MB min and 1 MB max.

- give your virtual memory a fixed size (200MB min and 200 MB max) That prevents the computer from constantly swapping the size.

Oh and ofcours, do the defrag thingy

Alkarion · November 15, 2001, 08:13

There definitly _has_ to be a problem with virtual memory. I'm playing Civ 3 on a considerably slow system: AMD K6-2 350, 4 MB PCI Matrox...
The game runs slow but playable in the ancient era and gets even a bit slower in the modern era. But sometimes, without apparent cause, the game starts a hard drive orgy even though I have 380 MB of RAM (it seems to happen more often if the music is turned on). This almost every time concludes in a Windows (Win 2k) error stating I haven't enough virtual memory. If i quit and load again, I can play for hours and nothing unusual happens.

Alkarion · November 15, 2001, 08:25

I forgot to add that I have set virtual memory to 1 GB (sic)!

SerapisIV · November 15, 2001, 08:48

Quote:

Originally posted by Patricio
I have 64 MB RAM, and when I started playing the game, it worked fine initially. However, as the game continued, the performance started to go down, and eventually crashed.

I turned the music off, and it started to work fine again. So if this slowness occurs, try this to save RAM.

Does anyone else know other ways to save RAM?

Same thing here, my (64mb) game's slows to an unplayable crawl with music. Once I turn that off, no problem. Even unit animations don't cause any trouble. Game loads take a minute or two, but I can't complain that much as I know I'm on the bottom of the barrel hardware wise. I just wish that naval ships weren't twice the decibel level of every other unit in the game, it's really obnoxious.

Best thing to do...kill the game music. Even opening up the sound options menu takes forever with me. Must be some memory issues going on with the sound system if opening up a few volume sliders takes almost as long a game load.

Umber · November 15, 2001, 10:12

I am pretty sure there is some kind of memory leak...

I am never able to start civ3 more than two or three times, before I ave to restart my computer.

Programs like "CleanMyMemory" has no effect.

Also, after playing for a while (mostly when I have started the game a couple of times since last reboot) I get a low (virtual) memory warning, and everything slows down.

I am running the game on a 700 - 256, so there should be no problem...

Dev · November 15, 2001, 11:12

I gave up on the music the third time it decided to play the same 10 sec sequence for 10 mins.....

Civ3 might not be broken but the music surely is :P

/dev