Age of Decadence - April Update

Iron Tower has a new monthly development update for you to read.

Memory leaks and loading:

We tried different things, including reviving Torque Memory Manager, but to no avail. We updated the engine to the latest version (March 2013), which comes with some bug fixes and neat features, but sadly does nothing about the memory problem.  

We used a 3rd party memory leak detector, which doesn’t show anything “leaking”. Torque eats a lot of resources by default and uses more every time you load a game, which is about 50MB per load. The base memory load-out is about 1.5GB, so ten reloads will push it to 2GB.

When Windows feels that it had enough, it refuses to throw more memory at  and it crushes ignobly.

Nick decided to attack the problem from a different angle and wrote some code to support level specific datablocks loading, which reduced the overall memory usage to 1GB on the biggest locations and reduced the loading times by 50 to 90%, depending on what we’re loading, which makes a hell of a difference. Coincidentally, it reduced the memory per load to 10MB instead of 50, which should help a lot.

Wait, what about the beta-test?

Planning to start beta-testing Maadoran, related locations, and system changes in early June.