That darn Runtime Error

    Heya,


    I've posted these rants in the Steam forum, And now I shall put them here, so we might find a solution to this :smile:


    Here goes:


    Renaissance crashes frequently at random intervals. The cause of the crash seems to be some sort of runtime error, and If the game crashes while saving, the whole savegame vanishes.


    I've managed to get rid of the RUNTIME error with the 3GB code thingie, but it only changed the crash to bluescreen one...


    I really don't get it. No Guild game before ever crashed like this...


    I took away the code from that .ini-file, and now it works for a while, but then crashes (no bluescreen though). What I've seen from taskmanager, the game at first eats up 1,1 gigabytes of memory and it gradually increases. When it hits 1,5 gigs, the crashes begin (I think, don't know if it's related to that...)


    And what I've seen from the callstack, it does not say anything about memory, but the error seems to be some access violation and it says it's with ntdll.dll.


    "
    Exception code: C0000005 ACCESS_VIOLATION
    Fault address: 7C911689 01:00010689 C:\WINDOWS\system32\ntdll.dll
    "


    Sorry to be such a pain in the butt, but I really would like this game to work.


    Hopefully someone might know a way to sort out the crashing, since it's a bit annoying. And I'm running the game under XP.


    P.S.


    I have a screenshot about that crash "window", if that is any help at all.

    Hmm, I remember you said that you used the USERVA-value 2800. Microsoft support says that a number below 2800 does not make much sense, but maybe in your case it does.
    If you try to set it to ~2500 or 2600, does that help for the runtime errors without provoking bluescreens? I think the bluescreen was caused by some driver not getting enough memory. Maybe also your pagefile isn't big enough, how's your pagefile and how much RAM does your machine have?

    Yeah, I used the 2800 value. What does that even mean?


    Anyway, my computer has 4 gigs of memory, and as I have 32bit windows, it can see about 3 gigs of that.


    Pagefile? Have no idea what that is, since I'm not that great of IT guru :smile:


    So where can I check that value?

    Ok, since you have 4 GB of RAM it isn't very important how big your pagefile is.


    To explain the USERVA-value: Every 32bit OS like Windows grants an application (no matter what application, an editor gets the same amount of memory like a game) 2GB of memory (not RAM, but virtual memory which is combined of RAM and pagefile). Renaissance needs a bit more than these 2GB and the /3GB-switch extends the amount to 3GB. But 3GB may be too much because a 32bit system can't handle more than about 3.5GB of memory at all, so there's not much memory for important things like drivers or kernel left. Therefore the amount can be set to a lesser number like 2990 or 2800 in order to reserve more memory for vital things like drivers.

    Well isn't this nice, the bluescreens are back. I've even tried putting the value to 2500 and even 2400, but no, it keeps dying on me.


    Anyway, I think I give up. I can live with the runtime error, since it doesn't crash the whole computer.


    I'll play the game until the memory usage hits about 1,4 gigs, then save/quit, restart the game and load the save. It resets the memory usage to about 1,1-1,2 gigs. Then I can play about 15 minutes until I do the drill again. A bit pain in the butt, but that's the only way to play the game :smile:


    Unless you guys have some miracle cure, that is :ouch:

    Now I'm curios.. Can you upload your dxdiag.txt-file? You get it if you click on start->run and type "dxdiag" in the field. Then press "enter" and choose "save all information as" (or similar). Attach your saved file to one of your posts, maybe the cause for the error can be found there.

    Okay, deactivating the page file and adding the code with value of 2600 seems to help quite a bit, since the memory usage struck well over 1,5 gigs and the game didn't crash. And it seems to run a bit smoother and loads quicker.


    So, for heaven's sake, let's hope that did the trick :smile:

    Sorry to still babble with this, but I'm curious.


    Does anyone know WHY turning off the pagefile helped here? I always thought with the idea "the more the better", but in this case, turning it off completely salvaged the game.


    There has been no problem before with pagefile....

    I didn't expect that it will have an influence that big on your gaming experience, but since your system has more physical memory (RAM) than it can handle it is unnecessary to set up a pagefile which is significantly slower than the physical memory. Maybe the blue screens occured because Windows tried to load some driver into the page file instead of RAM and it was loaded too slow or something similar..