[Linux / Windows | Bug] Rendering maps causes system wide halt

Hello,

System Specs: Core i7 870 (4 cores @ 2.93 GHZ), 4GB ram, 4GB Swap, Nvidia GT330 with 340.26 nvidia drivers.

I don't exactly know how to really state this but I'll try. When I load the game up to menu everything goes fine. Nothing terrible happens and setting up an AI skirmish goes well. The map loads to be rendered, I set up minor thing, and hit go. Takes about 15 seconds for everything to get ready and then.... Nothing. Sometimes the map renders and I see the Star of the map and somethimes the whole map and sometimes black, but I always get the same result in Linux and Windows: A system wide halt that gives me no choice to crash out (ctrl+alt+F1 / ctrl+alt+DLT) and the entire system hangs on a sound for a moment, then sound stops, then the system is stuck. The fans will spin all the way up and stay spun until I do a Hard Shutdown and reboot from there.

I have a Ubuntu Mate drive and a Windows 8 drive. On each system this happens and I have the latest drivers for my card in each system.

Now I know what some of you may be thinking. "Oh a GT330 is an office card! Pff get a real card!" I get 70 FPS in skyrim with high settings, 55 frames in Insurgency with high settings + 8x filters, and league plays at 100 FPS. Native linux games also render just fine in openGL (TF2 [90 fps], DOTA [70 FPS], etc...).

I really have no clue what this bug is. I really love this game and I have followed it from the beginning. It's like a cute command and conquer and I would hate to only be able to play it on my APU laptop.

Also asking for an out of the game from terminal is impossible as I have no real way of tabbing out while the game is running to save the script. Again everything stops and I have to hard reset.

I wish I could give more info

This reeeeaaally sounds like you are running out of memory. 4GB is the absolute minimum for PA. PA uses quite a lot. It should be ok for small systems and indeed any map on Galactic War though. Does your card have dedicated memory? If not, it will steal from the main memory.

However, you also have a really small amount of virtual memory/swap space. So it you run out of virtual memory, strange stuff will happen and system critical applications may crash. Try increasing the virtual memory to 14 GB and see if it still crashes so hard.

If you keep crashing, do you see any errors in /var/log/syslog or /var/log/dmesg.0?

My laptop has 5 GB of ram and I can play it there. In fact I have played the pax prime map with 3 friends on said laptop and I won.

Is there a way to change how much ram is used? If this is the issue it would be a big help, however just by loading a 780 MB map I dout that it would load it enough times to fill up the space after the 1.4 GB my ubuntu side idles in plus swap.

Yes, you would have enough memory to play PA, but the amount of virtual memory is really key. PA uses a lot, so the OS needs to be able to push other programs running in the background out of the main memory and into the virtual memory. If it cannot do that because the virtual memory is full, then those programs will stay in the main memory. Your laptop likely has more than 4GB of virtual memory for example. I also just loaded the PAX Prime system and landed on my planet without even having build something and PA already uses 3.0 GB. In your calculation of memory usage, you should include all of the CoherentUI_Host processes as well.

But you are right, there could be other causes. So could you perform the following test:

1. Go to the system designer
2. Create a system consisting of a single moon with a radius of 250
3. Save it and try to play an AI skirmish on it.

Does you whole computer still crash if you do that? You can also try reducing memory usage even more by running PA with the following parameter:

Code:

./PA --coherent-options="--renderer-process-limit=N"

, where you replace N with the number of CoherentUI_Host process you would like. Try 5 or 8 or something like that. I might make the UI less responsive, but it should also use less memory.

Also, how much memory does you graphics card have? You can check by running nvidia-settings and clicking on GPU-0. You can also see the memory usage there. In the PAX Prime example, I am already using 1 GB of VRAM.

Did you find anything in the two log files I mentioned? You need to check those right after the crash of course.

I booped my swap to 15 G and while yes the map loaded (after 8 minutes) the game was still unplayable. Either it unhooked my mouse from the game or the game was refusing what I was clicking on. I changed workspaces and killed it in the system monitor.

Also I didn't even use 3 G of ram, I only used 2.6 G. And it seemed that it loaded the map into swap so only about 700 MB was used there.

Also my GPU has 1 G vram. It's rather nice for getting it for free

I was just trying to run that command and now the game just refuses to start.

This was with the really small 250 radius moon?
And my goodness, 8 minutes. Yeah that does sound like PA is using swap memory...
Could you get the game running again and post the content of /proc/meminfo after your commander has landed on the planet?

Well, you paid for it when you bought the graphics card.
Also PA will use all of it, as you can probably tell from nvidia-settings during the game. Anything about the 1GB will come out of your main memory.

Do you get an error on the command-line?

No it just didn't do anything.

I was getting angry enough I decided to do the windows way of fixing things. Uninstall and reinstall. So I didn just that.

The problem, I found, was that the game wanted to run mostly on ram and a bit on swap, but when it was starting it would hang there on startup, presumeably on finding swap that wasn't there before or something.

Either way it's working now. We'll just call this a memory issue and ignore it

Huh, odd. Well good for you.
Happy PA-ing!