System Memory Problem

I am having problems getting the System Memory consumption down, Right now I have a 3D menu and it is taking up around 256MB of RAM by itself. I have tried removing all the entities and only have them created when needed then removed again when they are not on the screen but this is not affecting the memory consumption can someone please help me out here. I need to get the system requirements down.

Hi,

could you tell us a bit about the menu, what it consist, how many images are in such...

old_bill

Actually after working on it some more I am bringing it down a little bit but still it seems rather high. The menu is made up of all entities quite a few though most of the textures are 256 x 256. I think it will be ok once I am done but if there is another way to bring the RAM usage down it would be great...There are a lot of paths in the menu but I wouldn't think that would take up a lot of memory.

Hm,
what about the skin of the models, are they 256x256 too?
I can't imagine, that just a few models and som textures can cause 256 MB Video RAM use, there must be something else??
Could you publish the level that we could have a look at it?

old_bill

The nexus is how much system ram it uses. If you set it to 256 it will take 256 megs of SYSTEM ram when it loads. I believe the default is a nexus of 30 so that would take 30 megs of SYSTEM ram when it loads. Also, I believe (could be wrong) each model loaded counts for ~1 meg of SYSTEM ram minimum (two entities using the same model would only take 1 meg). A terrain with a lot of vertices (like 130,000 polygons) will take up much more than 1 meg of SYSTEM ram however.

Each model has around 30 skins which I have been using to change textures when the user mouse is over a certain entity. Also a lot of menu items use the same model just uses different skins. The nexus is set to 128 which I thought would be plenty and it worked but if I look at the resources being used by the menu it was around 260. So far with further optimizations I have brought it down to 184, and I still have work to do. When the game loads it actually only has to load 8 entities. I was a little worried before which is why I wrote in here because I was setting the nexus to 128 and it was taking up about double that. But now that it is starting to go down more and more I think it will be fine.

Most people these days have about 256 MB to 512 MB of RAM anyway I think, I hope. I would like to share the current build so that I could get help but there is no copyright on the title yet which limits me to what I can discuss in the forums. The game is supposed to go retail in 1 week and we still have so much work to do. This memory problem has delayed us quite a bit. Hopefully though we have it figured out.

So in a couple weeks you can see what I was talking about better I will post up a demo in Showcase 2 or you will be able to go to our distributors site and download a demo. I appreciate the assistance you have provided.

1) What size textures are you using? Using TGAs will require more memory than PCXs.

2) Remove all level_load, ent_create code, nexus settings and max_entities settings. The amount of memory used should be less than 50Meg. Work your way up from there by adding ent_creates and level_loads in and check memory usage. You should get an error message if you are exceeding limits.

3) Do your customers a favor and forget about the 1 week release date; if you are losing memory somewhere and don't know where it's obviously not at a release stage yet. A (c) sign is not necessary to have copyright though it is helpful of course.

1) Texture sizes average 256 x 256...PCX's

2) I have done this and now I am at this point I am starting to see where the memory is actually going, shouldn't really be a problem now. I am not sure why memory wasn't addressed earlier than this.

3) We have a contract with a distributor and I am not sure they are going to be willing to wait. We set a date figuring we had plenty of time. The game itself is pretty much done few minor things to do. But I was given a month for the menu after the memory is fixed we are back on track.