Malloc Error Experience?

[jdude]

Hi, I'm a mapper over at The Dark Mod and I noticed your guy's latest post about the limit of collision models.  This got me to thinking, have you guy's encountered the Malloc Error for the Doom3 engine yet?  I've been trying to find ways around it with little luck.  Apparently it means that Doom3 runs out of space to allocate memory, however when I watch the memory that Doom3 allocates it usually only crashes when it reaches 1,000,000k during compile.  I haven't tested this theory during map loads.

I was thinking maybe we could share any experience or information about this nasty annoying error if you guys have seen it and maybe help figure out what leads to it.

[shaviro]

Oh yeah. Good old McMalloc :D
With the map described in the recent devblog, I got the error really often. I haven't been paying much attention to what level of memory usage is usually occurs at, though. I'm no expert on this, but I'm fairly sure programs like Doom3 can't grab more than a certain amount of memory before the OS cuts it off. I'd say this is what happens.

The most common situation I've encountered this in is after or during a compile of a large map. One way I've somewhat been dodging this is to have two instances of the game open. One for editing and one for compiling and running. I also write disconnect in the console in between each compile or map load. This minimalizes it somewhat, but Doom3 seems wasteful. It doesn't look like it cleans up the memory it's no longer using.

Beware: I know you're using your own GTKRadiant version, but if you for some reason use the Doom3 Editor; When using this dual combo, if you get to a point where you're using all of your memory (or close to it), the Doom3 editor will show an "Out of memory" error box and refuse to save your map. It's best to just close the editor when this happens and say farewell to unsaved changes. IF you somehow provoke a crash in this state, the editor will EAT your map. That's right, it will take your map and swallow it whole :O
I've had this happen to me 5 or 6 times. I'm really grateful for our SVN :P

I hope that helps a little and good luck on the Dark Mod. You're doing a great job :)

[jdude]

Ahh I bet it's the O/S cutting off Doom3!  I've had some really strange experiences with it though.  For example, for a large map I've been working on usually the .proc is around 20 mb, then when I got the Malloc Error it was over 50 mb in size!  Another time I took the map and imported a separate map, it compiled fine then when I connected the maps it got the malloc error and wouldn't work again until I completely deleted the newest map. 

I'll try freeing up lots of memory next time I compile, my computer can only support 2 gb of RAM so Doom3 using 1,000,000k in task manager. 

I'm looking forward to your guy's mod btw! :)  I've been following Phobos since the fist site went online way back when!