Galactic Civilizations III Memory Leak and Crashes on Regular/Auto Saving

Patch 1.01

https://www.reddit.com/r/GalCiv3/comments/37qlfx/galactic_civilizations_iii_memory_leak/
from GalCiv3 Forums

Not sure if what I've written below is fixed in 1.02, as I haven't had the opportunity to download it and play it yet. If it is, please let me know. :) Also I included the link to the reddit post I made about this issue, some other players also had similar problems it seems.

Playing anywhere beyond 3-4 hours (it seems) causes the game to stutter and slow down, to the point where it is unplayable. Upon reaching the point where it is unplayable, and slowly but surely managing to exit the game, I found the GalCiv3.exe running in the Windows Task Manager for a good 3-5min after I had fully exited the game (it wasn't showing up on the desktop taskbar). It was chewing up a good 2GB+ of physical RAM, and was slowing my whole PC down (seriously, couldn't open any other applications, and I lagged my way into opening the Windows Task Manager). This seems like a pretty obvious memory leak in the game, no?

Additionally, having just passed turn 310 in my Terran Alliance campaign (playing on an Immense-Size, tight-cluster galaxy map with all available default races on the 'Challenging' difficulty), the game simply crashes every time I try to save, and doesn't actually save the game (even auto-save doesn't work).

The game at turn 310+ is also much slower and seemingly buggier (sounds not playing, random slow-downs, etc.), it's still playable, and I can still go to the next turn and do things (although quite slowly)... but like I said it crashes when I try to save. :P

Anyone here know if Stardock is aware of this? Can we expect a fix in 1.1 (or is this fixed in 1.02)?

Thanks,

~Caesar.

P.S: I know that they fixed these issues in patch 1.02 (quoted from the 'Performance' sub-section of the patch notes):

"Fixed leaking refs in gizmo gfx

Fixed leaking refs for selected component in ship designer

Fixed leaking refs for focus node in battle viewer camera updater node"

But I'm not sure what any of that means...

8,862 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

It means they've fixed some memory leaks but y there may still be others. 

Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

The problem in late game turns; with autosave and trying to save yourself crashing the game, is a problem I had too in 1.00 and 1.01. Starting a new game now to see if it occurs in 1.02 as well. But I also still have a problem with manual saves (every time I save a game, the first time the ~sign is placed in front of it making the save corrupt and I have to manually delete that ~sign and save again for it to work)

 

Not sure yet if 1.02 has solved this as I was 26+ hours in the game at turn 450+. What I found is also that the game slows down considerably, and just before my auto-save problem arises, my influence also dropped dramatically for no apparent reason (it was on all borders with other races, so no another one didn't suddenly become stronger)

 

Already send in a ticket for it: mine is as a custom race in an insane galaxy with 70+ races

Ashes of the Singularity II
Reply #3 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Okay, so I got the opportunity to opt in to 1.02. It's much better! I am able to load in my game and it has far better performance than it did on 1.01. Additionally, I can save it! Wooo! Most of the sound bugs I was getting also seem to be fixed, but I'm not sure whether or not they were related to the memory leaks and other issues I described.
Unfortunately, the game still slows down and has poor performance after extended periods of play (3-4 hours +)... but I can live with that (re-starting the game fixes it), and it's probably a good motivator to get me to take breaks. :P

Reply #4 from GalCiv3 Forums Top



Playing anywhere beyond 3-4 hours (it seems) causes the game to stutter and slow down, to the point where it is unplayable. Upon reaching the point where it is unplayable, and slowly but surely managing to exit the game, I found the GalCiv3.exe running in the Windows Task Manager for a good 3-5min after I had fully exited the game (it wasn't showing up on the desktop taskbar). It was chewing up a good 2GB+ of physical RAM, and was slowing my whole PC down (seriously, couldn't open any other applications, and I lagged my way into opening the Windows Task Manager). This seems like a pretty obvious memory leak in the game, no?
End of quote

 

Still a quite serious thing.

 

I actually had to insert another 4GB of memory for a total of 12GB now and the game still manages to thrash about 10GB of it in no time and that already on a gigantic map with all RARE settings and only the 7 base factions + mine.

 

So I don't even want to try more extreme settings because I know it will start swapping content to the virtual memory on the harddisk, thereby crippling the performance of the entire computer until the next reboot.

 

While GalCiv3 is a nice game it has some serious memory issues because 4GB min specs are far from reality. It takes at least 8GB to play with minor stuttering and 12GB recommended if you don't want any lag at all.

The devs should seriously look into that because half of the crashes I experienced are probably caused due to timeouts thanks to the slow memory response when working on virtual ram.