Memory leak noticed.

[King Azzole]

Sorry if this has been mentioned before but I dont have time to sift through all the threads and posts here ( i get about 5 minutes of forum time in my schedule, unless I wanna cut into my 30 mins of RTW time :P )

I think I found the source of major slowdowns when in combat. Apparantly the arrows disappear after you shoot them but they are still registered in the memory. I noticed that when I played a huge battle with no archers on either side the battle was pretty smooth throughout. But even if I only have one group of archers against just 1 other enemy many times it will slow down dramatically as if its still calculating all the arrows. I dont know if this has been addressed.

[Red Harvest]

Are you saying it gets slower as the battle progresses? Or is it just slower during the firing cycle? If it gets progressively slower then there is some sort of memory leak or some process that is not closing. If on the other hand you just have a slow down during firing, then that could be related to CPU calcs for hits, vid rendering, etc.

[King Azzole]

Slows down as the battle goes, hence the "leak."

[Thoros of Myr]

I've had this happen to me 2 times. I don't know if it was cuased by archers though but my constant 40+ FPS slowly dropped until it was a slideshow with heavy 3-4 sec lags.

I checked RTW in win task manager and it was eating up over 250,000k, but maybe that's normal?

[Osbot]

I JUST had a battle like this.

I was sieging a Parthian town, I had 6 Phalanx Pikes and 6 Archers. I sent units in through the 3 openings I knocked in and just slaughtered everything that attempted to attack my phalanxes forming up. Game ground to a horrible crawl. It got progressively worse untill eventually I think it hit the wall and couldnt get any worse. Could this be a combo of lots of archers + a siege? Perhaps its a result of running the game too long without a restart. I had fought several battles versus egypt earlier in the day with as many or more archers on both sides and it never got that bad.

[Red Harvest]

Thanks for the clarification. On subsequent battles, does the battle start slowly (indicating the memory leak was not cleaned up by closing the battle with archers?) I've not had much archery work yet, just javs and slingers.

This will be a good one for a bug report if we can get more info.

[Thoros of Myr]

I'n my case I can't say if it was cuased specificly by archers. With both the battles it happened in, niether side had many archer units and it started happening within 20-30secs of the start before arrows, javs etc were even fired. Additionally, in my current campaign as Pontus I have loads of missle troops and it's never happened during this campaign yet.

[Morindin]

Running out of disk space? Overheating CPU/Video card?

I had the same problem in LOMAC, it was because it was overheating my P4 too much and the game would progressively get slower and slower and slower.. until crash. Yay for intel :)

[SirGrotius]

I've experienced the exact opposite problem. During battles, my computer runs fine, almost too fast, actually. However, on the intorductory screen, when there is that crap going on in the background red/black, my computer runs at about 1 frame an hour. it's awful. also, when i click on the senate and get that revolving image of the forum, i get some "lag." isn't that strange. i have a pretty juiced up computer, w/ a lot of ram and my computer plays much more demanding games like clockwork.

[Morindin]

I've experienced the exact opposite problem. During battles, my computer runs fine, almost too fast, actually. However, on the intorductory screen, when there is that crap going on in the background red/black, my computer runs at about 1 frame an hour. it's awful. also, when i click on the senate and get that revolving image of the forum, i get some "lag." isn't that strange. i have a pretty juiced up computer, w/ a lot of ram and my computer plays much more demanding games like clockwork.

You got Windows Media Player 9+ ?

[Thoros of Myr]

Running out of disk space? Overheating CPU/Video card?

No. 22GB free on HD #2 that has RTW on it and 26GB free on HD#1 (OS) both defraged weekly, spyware scanned and removed daily, AV scan daily.

My computer is very well ventilated, I regularly play games for 3+ hours with no hint of excess heat..

[King Azzole]

Ahhh im missing sleep trying to keep up with this thread. Im gonna run some experiments and see what I can come up with. I suggest everyone try the same cause im pretty damn sure I got it pinned down on the arrows. But then again it might be one of my detail settings mixed with the arrows giving the leak. I do know this though, there IS a leak no matter what. Once the game hits 2-4 fps no matter what settings you change it still crawls. And also CPU is FLOORED. No its not from overheating etc my comp runs at a cozy 25-30 degrees even during intense battles (I got a thermostat on the front cover of the computer). I also have a decent CPU/Vid card (2400+ and a Geforce4 ti4600).

Guys its not only this that really has me pissed bad. Its the fucking tremendous bugs that makes me feel like im playing a beta of the game. Units dont react right most of the time, town battles are micromanaging nightmares and my archers shoot my guys in the back if I dont tell them specifically where to shoot. Im literally about to uninstall the game till a patch is released. Im glad me and my brother are sharing a CD cause we wont buy another copy until this shit is resolved.

[dlundie]

Don't get too upset, i remember when Medieval was first released and i had CTD all the time, its frustrating but i am sure the patches will come for Rome.

[Turbo]

Sorry if this has been mentioned before but I dont have time to sift through all the threads and posts here ( i get about 5 minutes of forum time in my schedule, unless I wanna cut into my 30 mins of RTW time :P )

I think I found the source of major slowdowns when in combat. Apparantly the arrows disappear after you shoot them but they are still registered in the memory. I noticed that when I played a huge battle with no archers on either side the battle was pretty smooth throughout. But even if I only have one group of archers against just 1 other enemy many times it will slow down dramatically as if its still calculating all the arrows. I dont know if this has been addressed.

I had to edit my original post in which I stated that I haven't experienced a memory leak. Previously, I was playing in 1-2 hour increments. Today, I played Rome for 6 hours straight and I too am seeing a significant slowdown during battles.

[Bob the Insane]

Has anyone actually run a Perfmon trace on memory usage by the RTW exe process (whatever it is called) logging memory (private bytes and virtual bytes) usage during the running of the game????

Does that show a memory leak??

I suppose it could be more complex and the memory leak could be on your Gfx card... Don't know how you would trace that....

[d6veteran]

My group has noticed a memory leak when playing online. With each battle hosted the lag increases and viola, the memory was maxed on the host. Basically you ahve to restart after each battle (the host has to restart RTW).

I posted this in the bugs section a week ago. Haven't heard if CA has commented.

[andrewt]

I just experienced this last night. I fought Roman archers using Balearic slingers and the game lagged so much it was uncontrollable.

[Jambo]

I have a top of the range computer (3200 XP, ATI X800, 1 GB RAM) and I sometimes get major slowdowns during castle assaults, particularly when there are lots of archers and onagers firing flaming arrows or rocks... :(

EDIT: And yes, it tends to get worse the longer I play RTW at a particular sitting..

[Oaty]

Yes it gets worse for me too, on the battlefield too although battlefields are less prone but when it comes to stonewalls it is almost guaranteed to lag and the memory leak seems to be temporary,lasts as long as the battles and when I go fight another battle the problem is gone but will start all over again or it may not

[Red Harvest]

Ok, ran into this problem big time fighting a nightmare army in Scythia. It was almost entirely archers and horse archers and dealt me a narrow loss. The problem was the flaming arrows. I had seen things slow to a crawl for a few seconds before with a few volleys of flaming arrows, but it tended to recover when they stopped. This time it got really, really bad and slowed to about 1 frame per second or maybe half that. It did not recover when the fire arrows stopped so the whole battle sucked big time.

Fire arrows should be disabled. I found the following info on how to do disable the fire, but have not yet tried it:

fix by commenting out the lines:

file:
descr_arrow_trail_effects_new.txt

lines:

effect_set 2 3 4 > fiery_arrow_set
{
lod 1000
{
; fiery_arrow_smoke
}
}

effect_set fiery_arrow_set
{
lod 1000
{
; fiery_arrow
}
}
----------


My understanding is that you don't have to comment out the smoke, just the "fiery_arrow" line, and that will cure it.