LARRY, I've fixed Intense-x.

In a nutshell, make your NEXUS 400 for standoff, and no problems!

Like I said we have 6 games ready to go without the random crashes, So I looked into it further.

I loaded a fresh standoff from intense-x templates.
Ran the game and got random errors. Crash in "Is node total"
Crash in "Play actions", and the bad guys just stand there like dummies.

So I then re-built the backyard level as a Simple map A7.80. (Turned off radiosity and didn't create meshes)

Ran the game again, and now I get "Nexus to small". Upped the Nexus to 400 and no more problems.
The thing is with our projects we've been developing since day 1 on A7.50 - A7.80. And I guess we got the Nexus too small at some stage and upped it accordingly. So we don't have the random crashes.

I then made another new standoff project and run your supplied map with a nexus of 400 and it works also.

So your supplied backyard.wmb gives random crashes instead of nexus too small errors.
But works perfectly when you give it a 400 nexus.

JCL can you shine some light on this please. The manual states that A7 will alocate more memory when the nexus runs out.
Where is Aris's structs being created, in the games Nexus area or outside of this?

Jethro.

You can't "fix" a bug by just increasing the nexus.

When a bug occurs, you must locate it in the code or in the files, and fix it there. Also, you should not distribute a game with a nexus of 400. First find out what for you need that huge memory size. Even big commercial games should normally be well below 200 MB nexus, and if you need more, you should know why.

A7 does not always allocate more memory when the nexus runs out - this only goes up to a certain limit. You can see the memory situation in the F11 panel.

I did some tests, initially with intense-x the reason for the huge nexus is the models of the player and enemies, they have 1800 frames of animation. Could this be an A7 bug I remember there was a problem with bones recently found, causing large nexus requirements. Although these models have vertex animation, as soon as you add them to a project the nexus requirements go through the roof.

I'm only reporting what fixed the problem. I don't know if it's intense-x or A7's problem. But the problem with bones and models and nexus leads me possibly to think A7 also has issues with vertex animations and large amounts of animation frames.

Jethro.

A7 has no such "issues", but 1800 vertex frames explain the nexus problem. Normally you won't have models with 1800 vertex frames in a commercial game. You'd use bones animation.

But this is unrelated to the original problem, which was a random crash. 1800 vertex frames can make the game unplayable on low end machines, but won't cause random crashes. There's still a different reason.

- Nexus = 300 Random crash.
- Nexus = 400 Works perfectly.
- Rebuild map with A7.80.
- Nexus = 300 NEXUS TO SMALL error. Ah Ha.. no wonder we were getting random crashs.
Surely if the nexus is too small, but the engine doesn't pick this up, it will cause a random crash.
It's black and white to me.

There is nothing wrong with the code if the memory is available for it.
The original wmb somehow confused the engine, that there was enough nexus when in fact there wasn't so memory was being overwritten that shouldn't have been, thus causeing random crashes. (my theory)

I have an old P4 3.2 Gig Toshiba laptop with 1Gig of ram running XP about 5 years old. And the game runs fine with a nexus of 400 and yes 2 different models with about 1800 vertex frames each. One of them the enemy used many time throughout each level.
Give your engine more credit JCL, it doesn't struggle on this hardware, yet we consider it a minimum system these days.

Jethro.