Sam & Max Episode 3 -- Memory leak?

Sir Lemming

This hasn't happened to me in either of the first two episodes. The game starts out playing just fine, but after a while (maybe 15 minutes or so, I'm not sure), it becomes extremely slow and Windows has a message about virtual memory being too low, and the CPU usage is at 100%. So then I have to exit, let it "cool down", and start again.

I have 512 MB RAM. I know I should get more (I had more on my old computer, although everything else about it was worse), but the game starts out just fine, and episode 2 didn't have this problem. So it seems like a bug.

crds

Same problem, I can see in the Task Manager how the game keeps taking more and more memory. Previous episodes work excellent.

OMA

Yeah, I also have this problem. I only have 512 MB, but if you have the same problem with 2 GB, then this is likely a memory leak issue. See the post I made here about this:

http://www.telltalegames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2040#post20332

ensignyu

I deleted prefs.props as mentioned in another game and it seems to work now.

Sir Lemming

Deleting prefs.props may have done the trick. Kinda hard to tell, since this playing session didn't last too long before I beat the game, but I think it worked. I think it may have boosted my performance at post-800x600 resolutions, too.

mandilarator

I had the same problem with Episode 2.

I've tried something and it kinda worked.

I use Symantec Antivirus 10.1. When I stopped the symantec antivirus service from services.msc, the game frames went up from 17-21 to 46-49 fps and the game became playable and a lot less jerky.

I'm not saying this is the right solution to the problem. It's clearly something the game programmers have to figure out and correct, but at least it will help you play the game more smoothly.

Cheers.

mothra

hi !

same here. play at 1280x960 high fullscreen and after quite some time
memory usage is at 1.00 GB and fps fall sometimes below 20.
deleting the file as mentioned in above posts did nothing do for me.
did anyone contact telltale about this directly ?
right now, i just save and restart SM3 to get better behaviour.

bye, toni

VanChris

It really lags a lot after about 5-10min.

I have windows vista and 2 GB of ram and a Ati Radeon x800 Pro.


Please help


Perhaps its a ATI only problem?

Erwin

Sir Lemming wrote: »

Deleting prefs.props may have done the trick. Kinda hard to tell, since this playing session didn't last too long before I beat the game, but I think it worked. I think it may have boosted my performance at post-800x600 resolutions, too.

What's the purpose of this file, if you can just delete it without consequences? What does it do?

--Erwin

JamWarrior

Not much new to add but adding my name to the list of people with this problem so the scale of the issue can be made clear.

No problems with previous episodes. Starts off fine but gets slower and jerkier as time goes on. Fine in conversations or scripted bits but slow when walking around. Deleting prefs.props did not help.

Hero1

I have 1 gig of ram.. and it lagged like others(didnt happen first 2 episodes) it was using abt 360 of memory when I checked

ShaggE

I'm not the only one then... I also only had this problem with 3, it sucked on my RAM like a leech, and right as the end sequence was about to start, it crashed.

Maratanos

Erwin wrote: »

What's the purpose of this file, if you can just delete it without consequences? What does it do?

--Erwin

It probably stores the personalized settings data, and deleting it just restores defaults.

So it's probably a case of some of the settings getting corrupted...

I mean, deconstruct the name:

prefs - Preferences
props - Properties

ShaggE

I always assumed the "props" file was in reference to the objects in the scenery. (often referred to as "props" in gamespeak)

Maratanos

Nah, that doesn't make sense with regards to prefs, though.

Jake

"props" files, in Telltale lingo, are property files, not stage props!

ShaggE

"Telltale Games: Thinking Outside the Filename Box" would be a great slogan

Sir Lemming

If you delete prefs.props, you have to reconfigure the display settings and stuff. So it must store those.

Illuvatar

Whatever - deleting this file did not work for me, and neither did it for most of the other users here. Additionally, I do have a Nvidia graphics card (6800 GT), so it is not an ATI specific problem, as proposed by VanChris.
I am looking forward to a solution for this, as it is hardly possible for me to play Sam&Max like this although I have 2GB of RAM.

Another interesting point may be that I am using a 64bit operating system (Vista Home Premium), and I believe several people with this problem posted they had a 64bit OS.

Jasirus

I'm having the same issues outlined in this thread but it seems to be specific to this episode. In the past I have had very little issues with previous episodes. Usually just graphic glitches. I haven't tried this episode on my other machine yet...

I am running a
2.6 Intel Celeron Processor
1 GB RAM
ATI Radeon 9250 - 256MB

Röksvamp

Episode 3 act very strange on my computer. After about 5 minutes of gameplay it'll lag so much that it will come almost inplayable. The strange thing is that it doesn't have any memory leak and always use about 40-50% of the CPU. The previous 2 episodes never lagged, but they both had a memory leak issue.

I'm running the game on XP with a Geforce 7900 GT, Pentium 4 3,2 Ghz and 2 GB of RAM.

Bruno83

ahem
any support?

taletell

I had the same problem. I had to restart the game whenever it started to slow down. I ended up restarting the game 5-6 times before I beat it.

The game takes up 220mb on your hard drive but it will end up using all the available memory as you play it.

Random Variable

I was noticing some lag yesterday, but today it got so bad that my computer became unresponsive and I to do a hard reboot. (I can't even remember the last time I had to do that.) I don't think it's a memory leak issue because the application never seems to be using more than 200MB of system memory. Disabling my firewall and my anti-virus didn't help, nor did setting anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing to application controlled.

I have a Core 2 Duo E6600, a X1950 Pro, and 2 GB of system memory.

LGH

Yep, add me to the list as well Turning the graphic details to "low" doesn't help, erasing the preferences file neither...

Any tipps from the support team?

Sir Lemming

Let's try to clear this up -- Are people actually having a problem where exiting the game and starting it up again doesn't help? A constant slowdown? Because that sounds like something different.

Emily

Thanks everyone for posting about your experiences. Sir Lemming is right, the more specific you can be about exactly what problem you're having, the better chance we have of figuring it out.

We are currently looking into this issue. Just because no one from the tech team has posted here with a solution does not mean we're not paying attention.

ben_ethus

I've experienced the same issue.

My experiences, specifically:

My CPU:
Pentium IV 1.4 GhZ
Radeon 9600 256MB video card
640MB RDRAM

For episodes #1 and #2, the game would play fine, albeit with some significant load times when traveling between areas, and occasional jerkiness with the animation. Having said that, it had never gotten so bad during gameplay where I would have to specifically stop and start the game over. Also, whenever I did exit #1 and #2, I would have the 'Virtual Memory' warning from Windows that others have reported. But then Windows would take care of itself, and everything would be fine.

For episode #3, things have changed for the worse. The jerkiness would continue and worsen as the game progressed to the point where it would be nearly unplayable. I would have to stop, exit, and restart the game for it to run as normal. But after resuming play, the jerkiness and slowness would resume, once again making it unplayable.

In episode #3, I first noticed it in the casino, where the game first slowed down significantly enough to be annoyed by it. I thought that was the primary area, but after shutting down and restarting the game, the slowdown occurred no matter which areas I traveled to.

In order for me to complete the game with an acceptable frame rate, I had to exit the game and restart it no less than 3 or 4 times. Sometimes at key moments when the story was getting more interesting, such that I would lose the momentum of the story, which I found exceedingly frustrating.

Although this situation did sort of occur during episodes #1 and #2, it was never bad enough to affect my enjoyment of the game. It would only cause momentary issues when I was exiting and going back to Windows after I was through playing. The issues with with the jerkiness and hideously slow loading negatively affected my ability to enjoy #3, which is extremely disappointing.

As others have suggested, this seems like it is some kind of memory leak.

Unfortunately I can't get much more specific with the symptoms other than to say that the animations of the game, the scrolling about, and the loading times for areas and events simply grinds to a screeching halt as the game goes on. It definitely gets worse the longer you play, but gets better if you exit and restart.

Hopefully this helps the programming team find and solve the problem. I'd really rather not have to deal with this issue in future installments.

Also, if the problem is found, would it be possible to modify the earlier games so that they are fixed as well when you guys ship the 'boxed edition' at the end of the season so that those of us who pre-purchased the whole season can get access to the improved version of the game. (I'm assuming you would provide fixed versions of the episodes on the web as they became available, if you were able to fix the problem.)

Thank you for your time.

LGH

Yes, exiting the game and reloading a save game does help for a short while. You notice the problem mainly when the camera is moving. Also, the mouse pointe reacts very slow. Sometimes (but fortunately not too often) the speach is interrupted for a secont or two. Generally, there seems to be much more hard disc activity than usually.

As stated before, I didn't have this problem at all with Episodes 1 & 2.

By the way, I've finished the (excellent!!!) game by now, but I'd still love to play it in a more fluent way the next 17-18 I will replay this masterpiece

Illuvatar

The description of ben_ethus describes my situation quite well, but there's a few things I want to add:

• In episodes 1 and 2 I have never had problems like this. Here is what I did in the time between ep. 2 and 3: I formatted my hard disks; I installed Windows Vista Home Premium 64bit instead of XP Home SP2 32bit; and I installed a new sound card, a Creative Soundblaster X-Fi Extreme Audio.
• In a certain point, ben_ethus' description fits what happened for me amazingly well: I first noticed the slowdown when I first got to the casino, but after that, it occurs always and everywhere.
• I noticed that the lag depends on whether Max is running around or not! While he is just looking around, it is much better - sometimes I am trying to slap Max out of the game, because then the frame rate will go up a few seconds, until Max is back again. During talking or ingame video sequences, the frame rate is better either.
• Vista has a nice new tool named "resource monitor". Once I alt+tabbed out, when it got really bad, and watched that monitor. The interesting point ist, that the game used only ~200MB RAM (the amount increased by about 0.4MB per second for quite a while, then remained constant), but it had allocated more than 700MB!

Erwin

I do experience some slowdown after a while, but my system hasn't come to a screeching halt (yet?).

--Erwin

Erwin

Illuvatar wrote: »

[*]Vista has a nice new tool named "resource monitor". Once I alt+tabbed out, when it got really bad, and watched that monitor. The interesting point ist, that the game used only ~200MB RAM (the amount increased by about 0.4MB per second for quite a while, then remained constant), but it had allocated more than 700MB![/list]

I heard you can assign a max. value of memory to an application in Vista. Might be worth checking out. You could, for example, force the game not to take more than 200 MB. I wonder what would happen.

--Erwin

abdallah

I had a terrible lag as well. Deleting that file fixed it. I just had to configure the gfx settings again when I restarted the game, but it ran well.

ReverendTed

The first two episodes ran fine for me, this one began to lag and stutter after about 5-10 minutes of gameplay, regardless of resolution. (I have 1.5GB of RAM, if that's useful.) If I saved, closed, and reloaded, the episode would run smoothly for another few minutes.
I also had my first crash - the first time I played, coming back from the casino. When I played through the area again after reloading the application - no crash.
Another problem I'd never had with previous episodes showed up as well: someone else had complained of poor-quality speech - a hissing lisp of sorts. I got this when speaking to Sybill in this episode.

Extended computer stats, for what it's worth:
Windows XP Pro, AMD XP 2500+, 1.5GB PC2700 RAM, ATI Radeon X800 PRO (AGP, 256MB), SB Audigy2ZS.
The only background applications running (to my knowledge): Gaim, Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition, Motherboard Monitor 5.

(Oh, and as with the previous two episodes, the game hung after the end credits, requiring an ALT-F4.)

matan

For me it happened when I first left Sybil's office. The game started lagging, and it got worse and worse until finally it halted. I then restarted the game and the second time it was fine. The animations were a bit jerky but not in an unplayable way.

Emily

Hi guys,

I think we've nailed down the problem - the version of Software Passport (the copy protection / activation software) that we were using had a memory leak in it. We're currently testing a fix.

ReverendTed

Oh, man. I'm glad it looks like you've got it nailed down, but...yeah.
I understand that from a developer's perspective it's a necessary(?) evil, but sometimes copy protection schemes are just too evil for anyone's good.
Thanks for keeping us posted on the bug hunt!

mothra

I'm glad you found it. let's hope the fix works and I can play ep3 in
unjerkiness !

Narwaffle

Telltale's ability to fix problems quickly never ceases to amaze me.

ben_ethus

This is fantastic news. I haven't been able to bring myself to replay #3 after all the problems with slowdown that I had. Hopefully the fix you guys have made will work for the new episodes and the old games can be updated with it. Thanks for all your hard work, Tell Tale.

bnf

I had the slowdowns and virtual memory increase too. They didn't really impact my game because the slowdowns were really short for me and then the game went back to normal and at the time I attributed the slowdowns to other programs running in the background before stumbling upon this thread.