9/17/2011 - Opening of the Dev Blog. [+out of memory error fixed]

Marc15yo [Admin] Sat Sep 17, 2011 11:17 pm

Hey everyone. With TAOW back on a roll, I've opened up the Dev Blog where you can see all the goodies I'm working on. I won't be holding anything back anymore. Before this Dev blog all our work went on under the radar in our own Private Forums for admins and team members. But with the renewal of the mod and almost everyone gone I have no reason to withhold any information from you guys. Of course I'm going to keep most of the work to myself study

But I will post many updates here.

To begin today's blog entry 9/17/2011, I'm going to show you some revolutionary thing that I fixed today. Any/every CNC3 modder must of experienced this issue at some point:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Out of memory
8 addresses:
(unknown)(0): Worldbuilder.exe+825384 (unknown)
(unknown)(0): Worldbuilder.exe+798965 (unknown)
(unknown)(0): Worldbuilder.exe+793330 (unknown)
(unknown)(0): Worldbuilder.exe+793277 (unknown)
(unknown)(0): Worldbuilder.exe+799637 (unknown)
(unknown)(0): Worldbuilder.exe+666356 (unknown)
(unknown)(0): Worldbuilder.exe+664774 (unknown)
(unknown)(0): Worldbuilder.exe+723505 (unknown)

Because of the severity of this error the game will now exit.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Myself I've encountered this dreadful error message so many times. It's forced me to lose a lot of progress I was doing on new maps. Mad

This bug is so enraging that one time I threw my computer out of the window . . . I lied, I would never do that. Anyways Here is my research and revolutionary fix for this bug. Most of you have heard of lowering the "LOD" setting in World builder. Sure this is a temporary 'solution' for it but nowhere does it solve the problem. As many of you who have used this 'fix' have noticed if you spend a reasonable amount of time in the editor the crash comes back. And low lod greatly reduces efficiency in map making where seeing the detail is extremely important for the perfection of some map.

HAVE NO FEAR MARC IS HERE (along with my favorite emote-> mr. afro man afro

)

Hi everyone I fixed the out of memory error with worldbuilder for CNC3 Tiberium Wars.

The Problem + Explanation:
World builder is a 32 bit application. It was designed to run on 32 bit OS. 32 bit operating systems allow their programs to only use ~2gb total memory. With windows XP most people using world builder never had this out of memory issue.

But users running a 64 bit OS (Win7 or Vista) Encountered this bug. The reason is world builder loads all objects/textures into ram from the start so they can be streamed easily while editing. All this data can amount to over 2gb. Once the 2gb line is crossed or approaching, world builder will return an error "Out of memory".

64 bit programs in Win7 and Vista can easily read more than 2gb (up to 4gb) without any issues because they are compiled as "Large Address Aware". This allows them to allocate more memory for whatever they are doing.

The fix:
I did some research and found this great utility. A simple one time fix . Normally to make a program become LAA (Large Address Aware) you would need to edit some properties while compiling/assembling the program itself from source code. BUT some geniuses down at techpower up figured out a way to enable it without rewriting the program.

http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=112556

Instructions:
1)Follow instructions on the link above, when choosing which program browse to CNC3 World builder exe file, tick the box for LAA and hit save changes.
2) Done, there is no second step. Just run world builder like you would normally.

result:
With the program now running in LAA mode it can access more than 2gb of ram. In fact you can now do ANYTHING without ever fearing out of memory crashes. Go ahead set the LOD to ultra high, enable bump mapped terrain, create the largest map ever. NO CRASH.

Another note, this also improves performance if you are not using the pagefile since all the streaming is being done in ram objects textures terrain forming all happens instantly and smooth. no hiccups. This can be used for any other game or game utility you have so if this happens with anything else go ahead and use this program again it should fix it. ;p

hope this is useful, I'm a modder, you probably have never seen my name around but I'm the creater of "The Art of War" mod and im still working on it (using the CNC3 engine) and this was a big problem for me. Since my mod has tons and tons of custom objects terrain textures and all maps are 500x500 to 750x750(max). In fact im even planning on figuring out how to force CNC3 to create larger maps and higher object count. Once i do tho i'll be sure to tell you guys how.

anyways PEACE and
You are welcome
-marc15yo

I was going to distribute my post to many other CNC3 communities but I got lazy and instead saved the post in notepad. Now with the re-opening of the dev blog I'm sharing it. Anyways peace out and will see you tomorrow for more Basketball