First, some system specs:
Gigabyte 965P-DS3 v1.0
C2D Q6600
4GB Corsair DDR2800
ATi Radeon 3870 (Cat 08.6)
SoundBlaster Audigy 2 ZS
Windows XP SP2 32bit
hey all.
i'll skip all my diagnosing and trial and error runs and just post up what i've been able to gather so far:
problem: first, it was crashing before the menu even came up. opening movies played fine (except for one which showed some minor corruption -- this was my clue to the problem) up until it tried to do something _after_ the movies played. vpu recover would pop up until i force close sins and, consequently, reboot my system.
diagnosis: something was upsetting my video card. play with user.settings until i find it.
fix: in user.settings, multisampling type was set to "2" by default(?) which is "Non-Maskable," as stated in the in-game options. this seemed to upset my video card. setting it to 0 (None) helped me get into the game and i could manual set antialiasing to 2 or 4 samples without errors.
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after being able to finally get into the game somewhat, i started setting up the game. 1680x1050, windowed, highest details, up the volume a bit.. now to fire off the tutorial so i can learn how to play.
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problem: after a few seconds, the game crashed during the load and took a minidump in my temp dir. alright - freak accident. tried it again, the "map" loaded and i was displayed with an awesome view of a planet and some ships. second crash and another dump. at this point in time, i'm upset because i just want to play the game.
diagnosis: if the game tries to use anything more than 2gb of physical memory, it will die. remember -- i'm on a 32bit system. those with 64bit oses shouldn't be affected by this (theoretically).
fix: turn down the details. turn them down _really low_. using 2gb vs 4gb in the system didn't affect the problem.
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at all low details in the first tutorial map, my memory usage is 1.03GB.
at all low details with Planets Detail on Highest, my memory usage is 1.66GB. about 300MB per detail.
that's almost 700mb just for planet detail on highest (the rest on low).
all in all, it looks like if i want to play this game, i may have to keep details on "low".
i sure hope the game is worth having the planets looking like ugly brusies instead of .. planets. D:
