Memory leak and crash on Win8 (?) boxes

[miki151]

The two instances of this problem that I know of happen on Windows 8 on a laptop. Please let me know if you have this problem.

Really cool updates, but this version has stopped working on some of my computers. My desktop w i5 8gb gefc 550ti can run it no problems, but my i5 laptop which was able to easily run v.6 can not handle .7 at all. I can play for about 2 minutes, once I start imps to digging it slows to a crawl and actually locks up my machine entirely: only option is a cold reboot. When started up for the second time, the game only shows black squares instead of the game world, and locks up the machine immediately. This can be fixed by deleting game files and extracting again, but the result is the same: lockup once digging begins. Just thought I'd let you know!

[weemcast]

Mine was one of those – is there anything you would like from me to help you narrow it down? Specs or a log or anything? I've played a few times trying to see exactly when it starts tanking, but I have not found any one event that starts to trigger it yet. That said, I have only tried it 4 times at this point, with Alpha 8.

As it works fine on my desktop, I have not been messing with it much on the laptop.

[KnightZero]

I'm not sure if it's the same problem but I'm seeing something similar. I can start a game and play for a while just fine. The only odd thing at the start of the game is that my screen is black until I first move the camera. However, at some point the game abruptly drops from about 60-80 fps down to 0-10. It hobbles along briefly but then crashes. This problem is with alpha 8 only, alpha 7 ran without any problems at all on the same machine.

Like weemcast I haven't been able to find something in particular to trigger this aside from just playing for an hour or so. I tried playing with a very small number of monsters and a small dungeon but didn't notice anything different from playing with a very large and complex dungeon and as many monsters as I could get. After seeing this post I tried running the game with the Windows Task Manager open at the same time but didn't see any obvious problems with memory use. It had a very small bump at the moment it crashed but otherwise stayed level while it ran.

The only other thing I noticed is that right before the fps tanks the minimap goes white and only shows the blue dot without any of the other features.

Specs: Fully patched version of Windows 8.1, 64 bit, i7, and a GTX 670.

I hope this is helpful.

[miki151]

That's a different bug, actually someone has already reported it for Alpha7 or 6 I think. Does it happen every time you play?

[KnightZero]

It's happened every time so far. Like I said though, this only started for me with version 8.

[miki151]

Could you please try these things to see if it crashes too:
– turn on a keeper game, pause it and leave it for a while (like 1 hour, as you said it usually crashes after that time)
– turn on a keeper game, dig a small cave and leave the keeper there for while
– adventure mode

Thanks a lot!

[KnightZero]

Neither of the first two tests caused it to crash within an hour. I ran the tests with the same number/type of background applications I usually have open, just in case that was influencing the tests but even with that there wasn't any sign of a problem. However, when I tried playing a game as normal I had it crash just shy of two hours in, near turn 18,000. I'm going to repeat the first two tests for a longer period of time when I'm able.

As for the third test, I've tried but I keep catching swords with my face within the first few minutes so I might have to get better at adventure mode to really test it. Unless you mean to just leave it running?

[miki151]

If you could do #2 and leave it for a few hours that would be the best test.

Adventure mode most likely won't crash anyway ,and it's hard to do 18k turns there 🙂

[weemcast]

If you could do #2 and leave it for a few hours that would be the best test.

I'll turn on my laptop and get this started now as well.

[weemcast]

Well, that didn't take long…

Attempt 1:

Action: start > dug out cave > possessed keeper > moved in > un-possessed him > let sit

Result: Memory was at 50%  when i let sit – was good for 3 minutes at 50% memory use. at 3 minutes or so, started moving up gradually until it hit 100% 1 minute later.

Attempt 2

Action: start > pause

Result: Exactly the same as above. memory was at 50% useage from the start… some 3-4 minutes later, it decided to climb, and then spiked 1 minute later.

[miki151]

Thanks, that explains a lot. Note that it's a different bug from the one KnightZero is experiencing. Hopefully I can track both of them.

[weemcast]

Thanks, that explains a lot. Note that it's a different bug from the one KnightZero is experiencing. Hopefully I can track both of them.

Ah, right – let me know if you want me to try something different, etc

[KnightZero]

I ran the test two times, both for more than 18,000 turns, and didn't see a problem come up. At the end of both tests the frame rate was around 90 fps and the memory usage was nearly the same as it had been at the start. I did run these tests with aggressive enemies turned off which is different from how I normally play when I've seen this bug but I'm not sure if it could have an impact.

[miki151]

I've secured my cousins Windows 8 computer for the weekend to test on, we'll see if I can reproduce the bug.

The aggressive enemies on/off thing is a big clue if it's true. Let me know if you find out anything more.

[KnightZero]

I played a normal keeper game (i.e. not just stay in a hole the whole time) without enemy aggression on and ran into the same problem. It was a lot later this time though, as it only started going down after turn 21,000 but I'm not sure if that's related to the enemy aggression or if I was just lucky this play-through.

I'm still really not sure what could be triggering it. It seems related to how long the game has been going but it has a pretty wide range of crash times. I've played with dungeons of varying complexity, armies of different sizes, and nothing obvious is jumping out at me. From what I recall after starting to keep track of these crashes I was never doing anything very interesting at the time, just general dungeon/army maintenance stuff.

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