Gothic 3 - no CP - out of memory error

[Revenant]

Lately I've been playing Gothic 3 WITHOUT THE COMMUNITY PATCH and the game keeps crashing with an "Out of memory. Please free some memory and click Retry" error. I know that installing the CP fixes this, but that is not an option (if you have to know, I hate the CP because it ruins the texture of the paladin's armor). I tried setting

ResourceCache.u32SpeedTreeMaxMemUsage_High=1000000

but it doesn't help.

It has to be noted that I am running the game in Wine, but I suspect this is not a Wine issue because there are plenty of people reporting the same error in Windows. More likely, the error occurs on 64 bit systems in general and I am running a 64 bit system.

So, if you know any ini tweaks or hacks that can fix this problem, let me know.

 

[Tolknaz]

Wait, what? You hate a 1,5 gigabyte patch with thousands of visible changes to the game world and invisible changes to the framework, because it messes with one texture you liked? Talk about extreme autism. Wouldn't it be easier to just restore the offending texture and move on? The positive changes that CP makes to the engine and framework would probably be much harder to replicate you know.

As for the error, how much memory do you have? Have you tried to make the game executable large address aware and tweak other cache values besides Speedtree?

Edit: ah, you have Wine. I'm not exactly sure if largeaddressaware flag does anything at all in this case.

 

[Revenant]

I don't care about "positive" changes like alternate balancing which fuck up many enjoyable things present in vanilla Gothic 3. For instance, in vanilla G3 you need 50 reputation points with the rebels to get paladin's armor, which is just barely possible without liberating towns and it feels very rewarding when you get it. In the CP, you need 60 rep. points, which means you won't get the paladin's armor until the very end of the game. This plain sucks. Besides, I'm used to vanilla skill costs and alternate balancing just confuses me and makes me to learn to play the game all over again. Furthermore, they even dared to mess with loading screens adding some totally unrelated artwork into it. No, thank you, the community patch can go fuck itself.

And I don't feel like messing with data files to alter the textures, either. I like vanilla 1.12 G3 just fine and I want to play this version of the game.

 

[Tolknaz]

I like vanilla 1.12 G3 just fine and I want to play this version of the game.

Including the skills and perks, that don´t work, many quests that aren't completable, various performance problems etc? Alternative balance can be switched off, but a broken game is forever you know.

Edit: maybe just try an older version, one that doesn't have the changes you dislike? Like maybe 1.6, the one that Spellbound guys worked on. That one had probably the largest amount of technical and performance affecting stuff done for it anyway.

 

[Revenant]

Including the skills and perks, that don´t work, many quests that aren't completable, various performance problems etc? Alternative balance can be switched off, but a broken game is forever you know.

I have beaten G3 v. 1.12 a few years ago and ran into broken stuff only once, when king Rhobar disappeared after I saved the game near him (and this is fixable via a console command IIRC). I never experienced any other bugs whatsoever, and I don't give a damn that robe protection skill doesn"t work because armor stats are not of much consequence in G3 anyway.

Edit: maybe just try an older version, one that doesn't have the changes you dislike? Like maybe 1.6, the one that Spellbound guys worked on. That one had probably the largest amount of technical and performance affecting stuff done for it anyway.

In no way am I tainting Gothic 3, one of the greatest games ever, with code from the force responsible for Arcania

 

[Tolknaz]

In no way am I tainting Gothic 3, one of the greatest games ever, with code from the force responsible for Arcania

1.The force responsible for Arcania was Jowood (The same force responsible for rushing Gothic 3 and the sucker punch also known as Forsaken Bugs). Spellbound can be a competent dev as evidenced by their Desperados and Robin Hood games. Why they weren't asked to make a decent game i don't know, but Jowood probably hoped to sell out when they dumb the game down enough.
2. They were working on the engine stuff only, mostly fixing memory management (the very thing you have a problem with probably). From CP changelog for 1.6:

b) Fixes made by Spellbound:
----------------------------
- conflict between Bink and Fmod fixed so video sounds are played under Vista again.
- New memory manager implemented to improve performance and stability.
- Error handling in memory pool improved.
- Fixed memory allocation error when saving.
- Memory is now freed correctly.
- Improved memory allocation for memory streams in file system/streams.
- Fixed a potential memory leak which would result when an insert operation fails.
- Fixed memory leak which produces 84+20 bytes leaks for each save game when entering the load screen.
- Remaining memory impact during save/load reduced from >100MB in some cases to typically less than 1,5MB - thus increasing game stability significantly.
- Fixed memory leak in Script_Game.
- Fixed some potential memory leaks in scripts.
- Several shader enhancements to improve memory usage.
- Fixed several uninitialized memory reads (potentially resulting in unstable or unpredictable runtime behaviour).
- Improvements to the memory logging system - giving more detailed protocols of memory allocation activities.
- Improved caching.
- Unload caches before game restart (further reduction on memory leaks while saving/loading).
- Purged all regular caches before loading a save game - further reducing the memory leak during save/load.
- Fixed access violation exception on program termination - crash during exit.
- Fixed a crash bug where entities were cached out even though they were still in use.
- Fixed crash bug in physics and character controller - occurs potentially during main gameplay.
- Fixed crash bug within entity manager - occurs potentially during main gameplay.
- Fixed one crash bug when using teleport stone.
- Changed control order for Prefetcher Job destruction to avoid deadlocks (and possible crashes).
- Fmodex.dll updated to version 4.10.01 (fixing freezes or crashes).
- Changes to the file system for Fmodex to avoid file format errors.
- Memory performance improvements in the mesh renderer.
- Fixed some memory fragmentation for performance improvements.
- Performance and memory improvements to the container templates.
- Slight performance improvements in ThreadPool.
- Reused vertex buffer declarations in several locations.
- Error handling in vertex processors improved.
- Created vertex buffers in default pool instead of managed pool if managed pool fails.
- Fixed memory overwrites in the shader module.
- Fixed rendering of zero or less vertices.
- Fixed DX9 issue complaining about different vertex stream strides for lightmap.
- Fixed DX9 issue about impossible MIP filtering.
- Various small cosmetic fixes for the world.
- Some fixes to avoid playing sounds with empty filenames.
- Fixed bug where objects could be off color.
- Looted corpses don't get into the hero's focus anymore.
- Illumination error regarding vegetation fixed.
- More information for user when perking/skilling (pult, quest, teaching).
- Ini/dx9error.txt at application start removed.
- Memory handling improved during teleports making the game more stable as a result.
- Made Teleport more stable.
- Fixed visual artifacts during teleport behaviour resulting from former fixes.
- Crash Fix when entering "/" at console.
- Threads used during caching were disabled as various multithreading requirements are not met.
- Memory leak fixed when file reading fails.
- Memory requirement reduced and performance improved during pack file loading.
- Fixed one major problem in memory pool where larger blocks could not be allocated.
- Potential crash in ge_dx9device.cpp fixed.
- Threaded loading disabled as modules using the feature were not thread safe.
- Rare Synchronization crash bug in ge_pvscellitem.cpp, ge_entityadmin.cpp, ge_frustumfilter.cpp, ge_frustumdatabase.cpp fixed.
- 160MB Heap in membase.cpp removed.

 

[Revenant]

So it appears that fixing the memory leak requires the source code of the game. In that case, I'm probably out of luck. Oh well, the crashes don't make the game unplayable anyway, I just have to save often. It's just annoying because I never had this problem back when I was using 32 bit Windows XP.

 

[Raghar]

Including the skills and perks, that don´t work, many quests that aren't completable, various performance problems etc? Alternative balance can be switched off, but a broken game is forever you know.

What skills didn't work?

 

[Tolknaz]

Brew poison wasn't learnable for example.

 

[titus]

Use the CP or get more ram then use the 2 gm memory limit exe fixer(No idea if it will work though, but the CP surely works)

 

[Clockwork Knight]

(if you have to know, I hate the CP because it ruins the texture of the paladin's armor).

It has to be noted that I am running the game in Wine, but I suspect this is not a Wine issue because there are plenty of people reporting the same error in Windows. More likely, the error occurs on 64 bit systems in general and I am running a 64 bit system.

So, if you know any ini tweaks or hacks that can fix this problem, let me know.

In this case, try this.

http://www.ntcore.com/4gb_patch.php

I originally wrote this tool for a friend of mine who needed it. This very little tool patches x86 executables in order to let them have 4GB (instead of only 2) of virtual memory on x64 platforms.

 

[Morkar Left]

For CP; textures and balancing is optional.

 

[Revenant]

It has to be noted that I am running the game in Wine, but I suspect this is not a Wine issue because there are plenty of people reporting the same error in Windows. More likely, the error occurs on 64 bit systems in general and I am running a 64 bit system.

So, if you know any ini tweaks or hacks that can fix this problem, let me know.

In this case, try this.

http://www.ntcore.com/4gb_patch.php

I originally wrote this tool for a friend of mine who needed it. This very little tool patches x86 executables in order to let them have 4GB (instead of only 2) of virtual memory on x64 platforms.

Hey, thanks, apparently this patch works! I've been running and teleporting around the game world for 15 minutes or so and no crashes so far. Great!

For CP; textures and balancing is optional.

Interesting, I didn't find where to switch textures when I tried the CP. Unless the option is one of the graphical options sliders, I maxed those out without thought.