Game Crashing

Hello,

I wanted to come up with a topic that has been discussed many times in the past, and whom represent a really big frustration for any of the Runes of Magic players. That is, the game crashing caused by the memory leaks

I've read the existent topics, which most of the times stated that you could lower the game crashes by lowering graphics, removing interface load, using external software which cleans the memory, and so on. Those solutions will not grant the fix, they will just delay the crashing

What I would love to see from the Runes of Magic technical team is a more comprehensive, more technical answer regarding the problem. I understand that, at a specific level, there are security risks in revealing technical informations, but if there is anything the official team can share, maybe someone can come up with advices in solving the problem. I heard there are private Runes of Magic servers that managed to fix the problem, so why are the officials not able to do so ?

I work in the Software Engineering industry, and i'd love to contribute in solving this problem, if possible.

Quote from Ainz

we assume that GF has no rights to change the Client-Code by themself since runewaker is the developer. so most likely no one from gf can say anything about that problem other than "we forwarded it to rw"

I understand that. The community will state problems to GF. GF are, then, responsible for forwarding the problems and provide answers back to the community.

For me, it's unclear if something has been done in those years to fix the problem. If any budget was allocated in researching and fixing this problem, or it has just been ignored all this time. I personally need some answers, and I will not spend any more dollars until I don't get some answers that something has been done in regard of solving the game crashing

Up, I'm still looking forward for a discussion about this topic

Quote from Fossilo

Hello, I will make sure to forward again this topic to the RoM team.

Just a little background, 3 years ago we had a Client Stability improvement patch which helped substantially with the crashes, but it is possible that with the current state of the game and the client other problems will occur, so we will investigate

Hello Fossilo,

Thank you for your reply. I read about the client stability improvement. Unfortunatelly, it is not mentioned what the client stability improvement means, in a more detailed and technical way. Also, the improvement may have not fixed the memory leak in the end.

I am looking forward with excitement to hear more about this topic

Quote from Grumpdaddy

The "Stability improvement" was admitted by the RoM team to be only a "reduced amount of crashes, especially in the cities." I have been able to achieve more stability than the "fix" did by massively increasing Vram and Dram

The client should work properly on the specified hardware requirements. Depends on your upgrade. But, in my case, I have an RX 6750XT of 12GB VRAM and 32GB RAM @3200MHz. One client uses 3%-5% of my RAM and VRAM, and the crashes are still going on.

I am not sure how bad was it before the client stability improvement, but there's this test case which always crashes my PC: transporting back and forth to OS, Dalanis, AKR will eventually crash the client.

Technically speaking, I see 2 potential problems:

1. The client caches too many variables, that will exceed the memory limit at some point. I'd think this is not the case with the client. This can be probably fixed with a better management of the allocated memory, or just increasing the client allocated memory

2. The client does not deallocate variables at their lifecycle end, so the memory keeps growing and growing, as new variables are being allocated, like a snowball. This is not fixable with more memory allocation. I'll be curious to monitor how the memory is growing when transporting between OS, Dalanis and AKR

Quote from Diogenes

Quote from pescaru98

Quote from Grumpdaddy

The "Stability improvement" was admitted by the RoM team to be only a "reduced amount of crashes, especially in the cities." I have been able to achieve more stability than the "fix" did by massively increasing Vram and Dram

The client should work properly on the specified hardware requirements. Depends on your upgrade. But, in my case, I have an RX 6750XT of 12GB VRAM and 32GB RAM @3200MHz. One client uses 3%-5% of my RAM and VRAM, and the crashes are still going on.

I am not sure how bad was it before the client stability improvement, but there's this test case which always crashes my PC: transporting back and forth to OS, Dalanis, AKR will eventually crash the client.

Technically speaking, I see 2 potential problems:

1. The client caches too many variables, that will exceed the memory limit at some point. I'd think this is not the case with the client. This can be probably fixed with a better management of the allocated memory, or just increasing the client allocated memory

2. The client does not deallocate variables at their lifecycle end, so the memory keeps growing and growing, as new variables are being allocated, like a snowball. This is not fixable with more memory allocation. I'll be curious to monitor how the memory is growing when transporting between OS, Dalanis and AKR

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Runes of Magic is still running of a 32bit client and having issues with memory leak.

From what I was told you can't fix the root cause of it without rewriting the entire client, so instead GF tries to mitigate the issue with other changes.

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Hello Diogenes,

Thank you for the reply!

Unfortunatelly, this reason of rewritting the client is kind of a very broad explanation. Is there any possibility to understand better why do the development team has to rewrite the client entirely ? A memory leak can origin from a line or a few lines of code, as well as from an error which propagates throughout the entire software project

Quote from Ainz

Quote from pescaru98

Hello Diogenes,

Thank you for the reply!

Unfortunatelly, this reason of rewritting the client is kind of a very broad explanation. Is there any possibility to understand better why do the development team has to rewrite the client entirely ? A memory leak can origin from a line or a few lines of code, as well as from an error which propagates throughout the entire software project

why do you ask this gameforge and not runewaker? runewaker has the rights on their code so gameforge has no right to know this or even if they did, to answer such questions

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Hello,

By now, I thought GF owns the intellectual property for the game, but seems that RW does. If RW is both the product owner and the game developer, it might be easier to provide answers to the community

I have written an email to Runewaker, as well

Hello,

Do we have any updates on this topic?

Quote from Ainz

idk, have you an answer from runewaker? xD

Nope

Quote from Fahrenheit

Your efforts in all honour, but it's not as if Runewaker isn't capable of fixing the problem, it's simply not worth it. They are a profit orientated company and therefore only offer limited support for RoM as they make their money from mobile gaming. Runes of Magic is a cash cow for Gameforge and without financial motivation Runewaker will never fix the game.

I have the exact same perspective as you. OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoO

And yes, as every company that exists, they try to do profit. It's perfectly normal, but normal it is not when you're earning money (as I've heard, a pretty good amount), and not offering support for critical problems, as this memory leak which affects literally everyone. Runewaker should remember that the business model of this game is based on diamond payers (and they should not be mocked). That's probably the only source of income.

Personally (and I think most of the players think the same), I would accept a delay from the next content, and see the memory leak, as well as the problems with the itemshop, solved.

Looking forward for further answers from the official team with new updates regarding this problem

Post edited

Diogenes

Quote from Grumpdaddy

Quote from pescaru98

But, in my case, I have an RX 6750XT of 12GB VRAM and 32GB RAM @3200MHz. One client uses 3%-5% of my RAM and VRAM, and the crashes are still going on.

I have 96gb ram on a Dark Hero MB. I am still crashing, particularly after I portal from anywhere to anywhere. I suspect the system is still hanging on to data from the zone you leave. I'm not saying I have stopped crashing, only that it happens less.

Hello,

Regarding moving back and forth through zones, I mentioned in a post on this topic, too. I found here 2 potential problems:

1. The client caches, purposely, data about all zones he is going through, untill the allocated client memory exceeds

2. The client is simply not aware to completely clear unnecessary data when a zone is left, and does not even reuse this data when you come back to that zone. It's simply "leaked".

Also, I've noticed that running the game on "high" graphics will throw the "too-high memory usage" warning very early.

From my experience, projects that last so much (16 years) are a completely mess. Why? Because of low-budget/high-expectations (which pressures many functionalities in a short amount of time), because of lazy or unexperienced developers, or because of bad technical leading / bad planning. Usually, there's a cocktail of all these

Such projects need to be remastered. In this case, the game uses RENA game engine, which is a proprietary Runewaker game engine. Maybe 16 years ago, creating a game engine was the only solution. But now, we have open source game engines which are great designed. But of course, remastering such game as RoM will cost alot.

I understand the difficulty of patching problems, considering the actual state of the game. But. it still generates income, so it should get the deserved support

Quote from Grumpdaddy

I suspect they get the same payment from GF per month regardless of how much they spend

I am not quite sure how this business model works, regarding the above quote. I am thinking that GF is just a platform (just like Steam), where the game was posted, for more exposure. I'd think that RW is paying GF for having the game posted on their platform. Isn't that so ?