Processing time on HUGE games

[Craighallworth]

Hey, has anyone played a HUGE game, and if so hows the processing time? I remember that was one thing I didnt like about civ 3 was that you could never play a HUGE map becuase it would take like 10 minutes between turns once the map was filled.

[LordShiva]

My Pentium 3 1GHz (mobile) and 32mb GeForce2 Go isn't doing too bad a job. But then again, I'm still in the Medieval age.

[Artuero]

I just finished a huge game. Processing time was not awful (3 GHz, 1 GB RAM), not as bad as Civ 3 anyway. Nowhere near ten minutes. Maybe 30 seconds or thereabouts towards the end of the game.

The game would get bogged down sometimes-- on graphics or what I don't know. I would restart my computer and then it would go fast again.

[Jolard]

There seems to be a memory leak that really slows things down at the end game on a huge map. You will constantly have to stop, save, restart in order to keep performance ok. When you do, the performance is remarkably good, but the memory leak has to be fixed.

[vee4473]

Do you mean restart just civ 4 or reboot the entire system?

[Mace]

Well vee4473 he would mean restart the whole system. That's how you solve memory leaks.

I have yet to notice any memory leak problem, but I'll be on the lookout for it.

[ljw1004]

Originally posted by Mace
Well vee4473 he would mean restart the whole system. That's how you solve memory leaks.

That's wrong. In Windows, when you quit an application, then Windows will reclaim all memory leaked by that application.

(but if windows itself is leaking memory,then yes you have to restart Windows to reclaim that leak.)

[sophist]

In any operating system with protected memory, that will be the case. It gets tricky if you have to deal with shared libraries and the like, but you can assume in general that exiting the leaky app will fix the problem.

[Mace]

Originally posted by ljw1004


That's wrong. In Windows, when you quit an application, then Windows will reclaim all memory leaked by that application.

(but if windows itself is leaking memory,then yes you have to restart Windows to reclaim that leak.)

Well, that's exactly the scenario I was talking about, so I was not wrong. Some apps do not clean themselves up properly, keeping DLL's and such in memory, and when that happens the OS does not reclaim all of the memory. That is why I always advise a full reboot.

[Sartaq]

I've noticed the memory leak. I can't play a full game on huge because of it. If I even bring up a diplomacy screen once on a huge map the entire game crawls when just prior to that it was running smoothly. If I restart the game it's back to normal but it's too impractical to try to play a game like that.

[ljw1004]

Originally posted by Mace
Well, that's exactly the scenario I was talking about, so I was not wrong. Some apps do not clean themselves up properly, keeping DLL's and such in memory

"Keeping DLLs in memory"? That's technically impossible (for NT/Win2000/WinXP).

The only entities that exist are "processes". Each process consists of the main EXE, plus any DLLs that it has loaded, plus any memory it has allocated. When the process terminates, its DLL is unloaded and its memory is (always & automatically) freed.

A process can create global resources which are identified by handle. But when the last process to use that handle is closed, then the resource is freed.

The ONLY way for a process to leak is if it creates a resource, then gives a handle for the resource to the system, and the system fails to close it.

There is NO way for a DLL to remain behind if the processes that use it have closed.

[Craighallworth]

so what are you guys saying? That playing a civ4 huge world is playable (less than 1 minute between turns) but you have to restart the application periodically?

If so, what is the recommended period...1/2 hour?

Craig