It could be a leak, something we will discover next month. It could also be memory fragmentation that will slowly chop up your contiguous areas of fresh untouched memory, and slowly make it harder for Windows to page in and out the memory it needs as fast as a fresh boot would. There are things I can do for V1, however the volume of memory you deal with when testing the game is still considerable and I have no easy way of hiding it. The two big offenders are textures and character entities. The later eats memory through the huge model and animation data chunks it needs. The only idea I had to reduce this effect in test game was to use dummy textures and models, but this made everything look visually poor and was not very useful in a test game environment. Some suggestions though:
When testing your game and want to keep memory hits low:
1. Switch texture quality to LOW. If you stay out of preferences altogether, you can go one stage further and open up the SETUP.INI file in the root folder, change the DIVIDETEXTURE field from 4 (which is LOW) to 16 (which will make most textures 32x32).
2. Leave adding characters until last (when your scene is finished), as this will speed up test performance and loading times.
3. Switch off lightmapping as this adds memory and a considerable amount of loading time each time you click TEST GAME.
I hope this helps, and if you coder boffs have any ideas how the test game can be configured to reduce the memory hit, shoot!
"We are the knights who say...eki eki eki fatang loopzoing, zanziga....ni"
