I picked up PA this weekend thanks to the Steam deal and was geeked up pretty hard. My first launch was a bit of a disaster and subsequent were no better. I had to install something or other just get it to launch and let me play-- then I had problems with basic control. Installed some other shiznit and was able to play, so it appeared. I began running into Coherent UI crashes in games that lasted for any real period of time (15+ mins) and it was really really frustrating. After much searching, I found a suggestion to increase your pagefile size. I have 16gigs of ram and a large SSD and have for years, one of the common 'best practices' for systems like this is to minimize or completely remove the pagefile, hence why mine was restricted to 2gb. I upped it to 16 and am now able to play a game of any length without running into UI crashes. Obviously, it wasn't the length of the game specifically that was causing the crash, it was the complexity of the game. The Coherent UI is a pretty controlling (in my mind too controlling) subsystem and can still run into odd behaviors from time to time but they are mostly issues you can overcome. I have actually had to disconnect and reconnect my keyboard mid-game once to reclaim control. No game or UI shouldn't be so intrusive. Game pre-requisites: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=8109 http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34429 http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30679 Pagefile adjustment information: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/change-virtual-memory-size#1TC=windows-7 It would probably do Uber Entertainment some good if they were to publish info relating to pagefile size requirements / suggested sizes. This was an odd issue to track down and many savvy users would scoff at the idea of increasing their pagefile after they just read from a hardware site that to optimize you need to reduce or eliminate it. Happy planet crashing!
Since you own PA you can post links with no issue. I fixed the links to work correctly, it had parsed the (dot) as part of the URL Nice that you took the time to report your findings. Personally I've been playing with 2GB swap and 16GB myself with no issues though. No idea what's up with that.
Hi eskaryo, My name is Hristo and I'm one of the engineers at Coherent Labs. I actually played PA with 1gb pagefile and did not get any crashes. It seems that this is something specific to your system. Could you send a ticket to our support team at support@coherent-labs.com with your OS and Hardware specs and the Coherent UI log file (it is in the main directory of the game)?
Just so you know I (along with quite a few others) have been helping many new users with issues with the game and the 'increase the page-file' requirement isn't a unique issue. I can't be sure if it's specificity something relating to coherent or a more complex interaction with PA however I'd say this case doesn't appear to be totally isolated. It might actually related to how coherent operates with Steam? There appears to be many more issues with the Steam version of the game (which is odd as they should be the same)...
I think the reason why that is suggested because PA uses more RAM than any other game people usually play and people are not used anymore to deal with "you're out of memory"-issues as 8gb was easily enough before PA. With 16gb it's weird though, but I guess it can be explained with a rather wasteful usage pattern.
I was under the impression that irrespective of how much main system ram you have, PA likes to use the page file for the texture streaming system it uses, so playing *with no page file at all* isn't possible on any system (I may be wrong though, @varrak or @bgolus could probably elaborate further if they have time?)
I've played with no page file at all for month on 16GB ram. I only stopped doing that once I started to fiddle with 2 instances of PA at once, often not restarting (but restarting the match) them for a while, memory leaking my system into random process death due to being completely out of memory. Now I have 2GB of swap as a little extra buffer. I don't think a program should even know about the page file. That's just part of "the memory" for it.
Hi all, I was able to reproduce such a crash only under some extreme conditions. I used a system with 8 gb of RAM memory and no page file. I started playing PA and at the same time started a bunch of other applications (steam, web browser with multiple tabs, media player, messengers, etc). Furthermore I started a C++ application that allocated additionally 2GB of ram. Only then I started getting "Your computer is low on memory" warnings from Windows. I ignored the warnings and continued playing and got a crash. However actually the issue is neither with PA nor with Coherent UI. When your computer runs of memory any application that tries to allocate memory will crash. You were running PA with Coherent UI at that time and it's normal that they crashed. If you tried running for example Skype or Windows media player it would have been a Skype or Windows media player crash respectively. It's not an individual application's issue but it's a system configuration one. To avoid such issues Windows by default has page file enabled and it's typically the size of your RAM. I believe any proper guide for custom page file settings has a section that explains that if you disable the page file or make is smaller you might get application crashes due to low memory. If you still prefer not to use a page file then you if like you can just try to run as little applications as needed at the same time. You can use the Windows Task manager or SysInternals VMmap http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/dd535533.aspx to track the memory usage of each application.
I believe this is not needed -- it is a developer package to generate a redistributable package for their product that contains the subset of DirectX DLLs that they need. The other link should provide all the DLLs for DirectX that's needed by PA or Coherent.
Yes, but I believe that June 2010 *is* included in 9.0c. See this KB article, under the heading "List of file failures that the DirectX End-User Runtime package fixes": https://support.microsoft.com/kb/179113/ It lists d3dx9_43.dll and D3DCompiler_43.dll, and the article links to the 9.0c DirectX end-user runtime.
Ah, so they are. Heh, I never knew that. Funny they put it like that on the Coherent website. By the way, is there any particular reason not to include those two DLLs with the launcher and PA itself? The absence of those two files seem to cause some grieve for new users. I believe the launcher just crashes when those two files are not present rather than state that they are missing.
Actually Jorgen works on new installer at moment and it's should include everything launcher and PA need. On Steam everything was automatically installed on first run for long time.
