Hey guys,

it's a known issue that gameguru doesnt properly flush the old levels when a new level gets loaded.

For example, I have a game with 4 Levels.
Only level 2 is lightmapped wich causes the filesize to be bigger than the other maps.
Due to the memory issues gg has, level 4 wont load for me.

Only fix would be to save at level 3, restart the game, load level 3 and continue.

This is a serious issue that holds back everyone who wants to make a serious game with gameguru. I know it's all about the dx11 update right now, but I really hope this gets fixed sometime.

Do you guys have any fix for me I dont know yet?
I have been working on my game for months and I dont want to abandon it this way....


I would like to mention the following posts and threads about the memory issues.

smallg said in another thread:

https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/217232

Also I like to draw the attention to one of wolfs threads wich was about the same issue.
https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/218923

Let's not forget about it and keep it in mind, when the voting board restarts.
-Duchenkuke

I have not verified that myself, but will do over the weekend.

But, if that observations are true, that's a major Showstopper and a potential death sentence for any serious multi-level game.

We had similar issues with FPSC, and it almost prevented the release of Into the Dark back then.

I thought this had been cured in GG but it did make me think when testing Dark Harbour that when loading a second level on some occations it battered the GPU to death resulting in having to ctl alt del out. I did manage to cure this to some extent by firing up the editor and dropping into the map changing say the grass width etc and resave then just copy the map file over to the standalone. The map then worked although it was alittle hit and miss e.g sometimes took 2 tries. Worth a go though m8
P.s the second maps were very heavy on entities anyway

That's a showstopper. I remember back in the days at an expo presenting a FPSC game I made and it wouldnt go past stage 4 out of 6. Looks like GG has a similar problem and that is very concerning.

I can just imagine what the additional PBR textures will do. Will have to use them very, very selectively if and when I understand how to, lol. But then, I've never made a complete level to date, so that's some time from now for me at least.

I can confirm that problem.
My last game had a total of 8 levels.
After level 5 GG crashed, always...
So, now it’s only a 5 level game... I’ll keep the other 3 levels for part 2.

I guess it always depends how many objects u are using... sooner or later the memory is full.
32bit problem, I guess.

For me its only because of the bigger map size of the lightmapped levels..

But if I cant lightmap my maps, I am screwed... My game depends on lightmaps and I running it with realtime shadows would kill the framerate.
I am glad that this issue is not completely unknown and I sincerly HOPE that this gets taken care of in a reasonable time.

Question then:
would it be viable to reuse assets level to level to reduce the cost of memory consumption if they're already loading in memory?

*cough* or lee could fix it nudge nudge

@bolt
Nope, even u use the same assets...
I guess the memory is not really empty when u switch from one level to the next, that's why sooner or later the mem is full.

... wouldn't be a prob. if it's a 64bit application...

Concerning this problem, i thought "lets do a little test with two levels".
So i made another level in order to see how much memory would be used after loading the second level.
The outcome is very clear as you see in the attachment, the second level is loaded over the first one and memory usage is almost at the 4 gb limit.

5 years ago, the memory modules were very cheap so i did not hesitate to choose for a 2x8gb memory kit.
But not all of us have 16gb of memory availabe and because windows itself but also other software such as antivirus or other applications that are active when the computer is started, one might not even have 3gb of system memory free for Gameguru, hence, i'm starting to think that this is causing the stuttering which some experience.

Edit: I've checked the list while running the game and advancing to the second level.
Memory usage of GG editor was 1.2 gb, after loading the second level, slightly lower at 1.1 gb.

I wrote Lee once about 64bit support and he told me its not gonna happen.
( And the reason is because ppl would not wanna wait another half year for an update.)
It's a public comment on youtube, I am not leaking anything secret here.

Users that really care about gameguru would totally agree with a longer taking update, (including myself) if that fixes one of the most crucial
things of gamemaking:
Being able to do more than 4 levels with some of them lightmapped, so it would at least look decent.

This needs to be adressed sooner or later. Its an issue for everyone. You cant talk it away.

It would help already, if he would look again at the memory management.
Empty the mem after leaving the level.

yeah thats basically all. I would be more than happy

There have been various reasons mentioned by Lee for not having 64bit support, another one was that stats showed that a significant portion of steam users still used 32bit operating systems, and to avoid losing customers he would need to have two clients, one for 32bit, and another for 64bit, and they couldn't justify the cost and work load of having to have and update two different clients. Which is understandable.

absolutely. I dont need 64bit gg, I just want to be able to make a game better than average.

Whatever the reason it will have to be looked at at some point,unless everybody stays with two level games .

Dave

64Bit = GameGuru 2.... Not before, not for this GG version.... I guess...

64bit is not a reason to paper over missing something like clearing the memory's slate between maps.
I can see if there was some method of reusing models for efficiencies sake but this is just a bug, pure and simple - and a mission critical one to boot. It needs resolved, asap.

I am just glad I'm not the only one thinking like that.

Yep. This is a very big problem, indeed.

I agree that it should be resolved ASAP.

This is the most important thread in all of the Game Guru forums.

I was a bit naive when i started fooling around in Game Guru. Not really understanding what was happening under the hood. Just randomly throwing down endless trees, rocks and other things. Game Guru presents itself as this big sandbox you can mess around with, to make large outdoor environments to walk around in and play around in. Something never really brought out to a standalone fashion, apart from maybe one map for testing. So i think we were more concerned about the performance of our maps and never really considered the major barrier in creating an actual game with GG.

The majority of us have not yet experimented enough with creating a full fledged standalone game with Game Guru. Even some of those big projects you see that look amazing that a lot of us praise, are mostly just in engine maps not yet tested from start to end, in a standalone export; Because there is this assumption they will just work as long as the performance is okay.

This is where the issues arise that remind me a lot of FPSC. We all had to cut down on assets and even remove entire levels. Which often led to games being no bigger than 3 or 4 levels/stages/maps. This had nothing to do with performance but would allow for players to play from start to end without a crash/freeze or error generated from a 2GB memory cap.

In Game Guru, I was focused on optimization in order to improve performance and keep a steady FPS count. I never even considered the issues that would come from attempting to make a full game with Game Guru. So interesting enough the more i focused on optimizing my maps for performance, the more memory i was actually consuming from the over all game. For example using LOD stages would ADD meshes to the memory and actually increase the likely hood of hitting the memory cap. While LOD stages were helping with performance and FPS rates, they do not help those that wish to make a full game with more than a couple stages.

I also was a bit naive thinking it was safe to use textures as large as 1024 and 2048. Since the stock items, some of them used textures just as large and models with a fair amount of polys to them. Considering Game Guru is running under a 32 bit system its very easy to hit the memory cap. Especially since the memory between stages loaded in a completed standalone game are not being cleared. So it just builds up to the point of a crash.

When reviewing 32 bit systems -- its interesting to point out that these games like Fallout 3 and Skyrim (standard) use only 512x512 sized textures and not large 2048x2048 textures. People generally complain a lot about the load times in tose games.. but i think the reason why they are so long is that they are clearing memory and rebuilding each time you exit and reenter a map. There are a few variables retained to ensure certain actions in the game are remembered; like objectives met and player stats and etc. Game Guru may not be clearing properly at all. So things like meshes and textures are still stored, taking up space.

I need to really reconsider how I design my levels. They need to be smaller, use less polys, smaller textures, compressed mono audio and figure out what to do with the lights that uses the least amount of memory. I think for anyone that plans on making a game in Game Guru and not just a map to fool around in... they are going to have to face reality, that this is not going to be an easy process and there is a lot consider.

I think its not fair to say that Game Guru requires no technical knowledge. As this is only the case for those that wish to fool around with making a sandbox map to share with their friends and family but not the case for anyone looking to complete something for delivery on a platform like Steam or alike.

With a lot of focus on making things look better in Game Guru, i think this issue might have been overlooked. Since Game Guru doesn't really show many resources for how to make a complete game from start to end. It seems to bill itself as a map editing sandbox instead. Noticed there is no build dialogue box options in GG.

With Game Guru, I spend 80% of my time doing work-arounds for issues i have with it. This is a very big problem to try to work around. For anyone that wants to challenge me on my post here by saying well this person was able to create this or that, let me tell you that I've already spoken to all of those members in the community and they've all had to this issue and had to work around it or were stopped by it completely.

--

I'll share a small story. I once exhibited a game I made at an expo once. A game made in FPSC called Key Suspect. At the expo whenever someone reached the 3rd or 4th level, the game would crash due to a memory cap. Not being able to load the next 2 levels out of the 6. It was embarrassing. I fear to experience anything like that again. Especially if i was to bring anything to a commercial front.

I can now understand the Steam community calling Game Guru a "map editor" and not a "game maker". Very easy to create a working map. Difficult to create a working game.

Teabone, Certainly i would not have thought about the thin line between performance tweaks and thus a greater use of recourses.
But then again, i'm fairly new to all this.
But if the previous level is properly flushed from the memory then it should be possible to go all the way to level 110 if we have to.
Or am i missing something?

No, absolutely right ! It's really like that.

(deleted doublepost)

No, you are not. This is something we call Blocker in games business, something that hinders the entire shipment of a product.

And, as stated, it has nothing to do with 32 vs 64 bit (except for the workarounds, which shouldn't be needed at all).



As said in another thread, half of the grey hair on my head is caused by the fight against the memory cap on Into the Dark (which has 12 levels in the final steam version)

I can easily live with a 2 gig v-ram limit per map. Or even 1 gig. However, the memory must be flushed upon loading another level or the software is basically useless for making full games: Its purpose.



Quite precisely.

I found out about this after trying the build of my second game release. I am glad I did it as it spawned this discussion. What happened was that for many users either in Level 2 or 3 media or entire map chunks where simply not there. I only repeat this to illustrate what a severe issue this is. I believe only few of us intend to make single-level games.

Thanks for the write up @T-Bone!

Read other topic here!

Thanks @Duchenkuke for bringing this to the Product chat board. Its still true that this has the most traffic.

And special thanks to 25 Watts for his detailed analysis.



-Wolf

As with you guys I've struggled with this for example i started making a map in the beta which led on to a game of sorts (yes i was quite aware of the risks) 2 of the 4 maps i had problems with both these maps contained 6k plus entities, i then reduced the texture size to 512 which had some but little effect in the end i just about cut the maps in half but still had problems on anything less than an i5. Ive just converted over vcity which actually has around 12 maps but only a quarter of the size and these seem to run fine apart from some texture isssues and entities turning into firework displays :/

This leads me to conclude that its not actually the amount of maps we are using but the way in which GG is unloading the maps e.g maps with 5k entities+ GG is strugling to laod and unload 3-4k entities it seems fine. so im alittle unsure as to whether its a cap problem or an allocation problem.

To give you an example GG seemed to fill the GPU memory first and the vmem on the graphics card then use the Ram? i would have thought that should be the other way around as the graphics card dies before its even used all the RAM allocation. I could be wrong of course but that seemed to be the case for me on the bigger maps as i said the smaller Vcity maps dont seem to struggle but the only use a quater of the terrain size.

so maybe its GG allocating memory in the wrong order? dunno just an observation

This has obviously also been the problem which nuncio encountered, he saw his third attempt like the previous two attempts fail last year after many months of work.
Don't know if he is still present.

Last time I talked to nuncio, I had the impression that he is loosely observing GG for a general and significant turn to the better of GG, especially in the areas GG back-stabbed him so badly .

He has an uncanny knack of bringing forward hard to defeat idiosyncrasies of other Game Engines to bar the success he definitely deserves, though, and the forums of those other engines seem to be less helpful/friendly than GGs, at least, if you don't play high in the payment's leagues.

The way I see him and GG's status at the time, I wouldn't expect him to turn back actively here before mid 2018, at the earliest, and I also think he won't be able to use much of his heretofore produce.
But clearly, he's not afraid of a lot of work if his tools don't take the mickey out of him.

Most of the problem for Nuncio was, from what i was seeing, that he was mostly hitting issues with GameGuru that nobody else was seeing, there were a few "common" issues that he had like these memory issues, but a good chunk of them seemed to be exclusive to him, so nobody could help him, and Lee was finding it impossible to diagnose, which is such a shame because that must have frustrated him no end.

Even if the personal resources were available, there were no use for 32 and a 64 Bit version. The far predominant reason for 64 Bit is the removal of memory shortages. How could that be ported down to 32 Bit at all ? So, most functionality would be not only limited, but actually different in the 32Bit version. And going 64 bit from a 32bit application and system is no easy task in itself, it's not done by throwing one single compile mode switch.

Yet, I still think it would have been a wiser move to first go 64 bit only FIRST, then DX11, taking the memory limits yoke off of many existing GG developers, reducing the respective complaints in the forum even for the DX9 version and taking the notion away that those memory bottlenecks won't be removed any time soon. Anybody expect that using FBX and PBR is going to reduce memory requirements ? Not ? So, the problem is going to hit everybody.

And I really doubt that all to many (new) would be customers are so eager for 32Bit OS Versions.

But, things are as they are. Or, as THAT American usually has it "so sad"....

Guys, the bottom line is, we need to remeber this when the voting board restarts and make our voices count. The community needs to be aware of this.
This is a MUST FIX.

I doubt that 64 bit is going to take away the limit because so many systems have only 8gb of system memory of which halfe is already in use.

If a previous level is flushed from the memory before loading the next level, then we should not be experiencing this problem unless the particular level is to big.
But that is something we can test by making a stand alone of the particular lightmapped level.

Yes.
But actually, this should not be an item for the voting board, this is a core showstopper.

Yeah honestly, I hope Lee fixes it regardless what the voting board says..

Absolutely agree, things like this aren't features, they're core engine mechanics, and they should ALWAYS be addressed ahead of any feature additions or changes.

Yep. This should be priority numero uno.

Indeed. I can not stress this enough. Either this is fixed or there is no game guru.

If i understand this correct GG do not free up memory from the previous level before the new level is 100% loaded ?



If so could you try to make a intermediate level 4 that ONLY have 1 house that perhaps include a new gun for the player , and then just sent the player to "level 4" now level 5 ?

This is just a test but should work then , sure GG should release memory before loading a new level.

Hi Preben, see the attachment.

the houses of map1 are present on map2.

Edit: video.

not tested this myself but as (yet) another work around, attach a script to the winzone or whatever triggers the next level to loop through and destroy all entities you no longer want for the next level.

Earthling45: Thats prove that its not unloaded

Bored of the Rings: Suggestion workarounds in a threat like this, could get us in bad standing, i nearly did not have the guts to post a workaround ( kidding)

No if you could test, if just adding a house with nothing else to your level 4 , and it works i think that would help Lee find the real problem.

Just tested my latest game... 10 levels (standalone).
I was able to play all 10 levels until the end. I'm using a lot of trees and vegeation.
But...

At level 9 & 10 the framerate was much lower than before in the GG test mode.
Have to add a few more things before it's ready for the final test. I hope it will not crash somewhere in the middle...

Those pics look great MooKai,good luck with your test .

Dave

thanks, I hope it will not crash... I will find it out tonight.

let me know too !

@MooKai..
WOW that's some impressive screenies ..

My game Hunted: One Step Too Far as also something like 10 levels. And it works too!
The thing is with lightmaps ! You only have these issues when you use lightmaps ! Thats very important...

Oh! So perhaps its only the lightmapping data that is not clearing?

MooKai did you use any lightmapping? Also are you using the public preview version when making your standalone build?