Sins Entrenchment v1.01 mini-dump crash – One Possible Explaination and “Fix”
I’m seeing a lot of this posted on the Sins of a Solar Empire beta and tech support board (hell, there’s even a post by me complaining about this very same issue before I applied common sense to my list of acquired problem solving skills)
For those of you who have played Sins of a Solar Empire and, like me, enjoy engaging in epic battles for all of space against nine other opponents in a system with the upwards of one hundred planets, you’ve probably had your parade abruptly shat on by the delightful Windows error sound accompanied by a message saying something about a mini-dump. At first you think nothing of it. “A mere fluke”, says I. Surely it shan’t happen again and dissuade me from conquering the galaxy from my remaining opponents; to which Sins replies with yet another Windows error sound, which at this point sounds like evil snickering, and the word “mini-dump” sticking out like a Star Trek fan at a Victoria’s Secret fashion show. What is the meaning of this travesty! Is there a glitch in this epic game that is preventing me from playing matches on an “unrivaled scale”? Well… yes and no.
Here’s the deal. Sins is a huge game (obviously). If you’re running a 32 bit Operating System, Sins is restricted to 2GB of virtual memory. This is a limitation of the 32 bit (x86) operating systems (The Microsoft consumer ones, anyway…). 32 bit OSes (Vista in particular) can only see 4GB of RAM in your box, and only reports 3GB to the user. Why? Because there aren’t enough bits in 32… bits to access memory addresses past 4GB. Well, then you’re asking yourself “why is vista telling me I only have 3GB?”. Because vista is reserving 1GB for hardware addressing. Now you’re probably thinking “Why the hell am I still reading this blog entry?” (because you find my attempts at humorous sincerity amusing) and if you’re not, you’re probably thinking “Alright, then shouldn’t Sins be able to use the 3GB of memory that Vista is telling me I have?”. Short answer “No”, long answer “No.” The other gig is used for Vista’s kernel processes, leaving 2GB for user applications.
If you’re playing a game of Sins on the largest map possible with as many players as possible and everyone has fleets of 200 ships and you’re running on the highest detail settings across the board, your mini-dump crashes are probably due to Sins running out of memory to store that scout frigate you just built. Test it. Launch Sins in windowed mode and open up task manager and start playing. Just watch the Memory Usage of the sins executable climb as you continue to play. Oh yes, it will drop here and there, but if everybody is building fast enough, the memory well dries up quicker than a Scotsman’s beer glass.
The “fix”? Lower all of your detail settings to “High” instead of “Highest” (except “Planet Detail”, leave that at “Highest”, otherwise the planets and main menu look like ass). It’s not really a fix per-say, but it’s the best thing that will let you finish that epic battle for galactic conquest. Besides, it’s really hard to tell the difference between High and Highest when your micromanaging your 7 choke points. Another possible fix is to just switch to a 64 bit operating system, where Sins will have 8GB of virtual memory to play around with.
Addendum: For those of you wondering how an application can use more memory that you physically have in your computer (if you only have 2GB of RAM for example), here’s how:
Wikipedia on Virtual Memory
Wikipedia on Paging