I resent this comment: I have a potato PC, and I have only experienced the black screen on exiting the game before it was fixed.
Potato PCs unite!
Elite Dangerous Odyssey Issues still not fixed.
- Thread starter dedevel
- Start date
Potato PCs unite!
It happens to me often on long sessions. Like, if the client has been running overnight it's almost guaranteed to blackscreen on exit. It's a minor annoyance, though. Long sessions with the FPS limiter also gradually grind the framerate into the dirt, jumping to a different system fixes it.
Ian Phillips
Volunteer Moderator
It must have escaped several peoples notice, but this forum is for Elite Dangerous discussions and we do have a dedicated thread for discussing Star Citizen.
Have pruned the off topic stuff. Please keep the discussion separate.
Thanks.
Have pruned the off topic stuff. Please keep the discussion separate.
Thanks.
Nope, in fact it's happening far less these days, for three issues listed in the OP;
1) Never happened, not in the Alpha test, not before and not since.
2) Never happened, not in the Alpha test, not before and not since.
3a) Never on starting the game ever since I first started playing.
3b) Exiting Elite Dangerous yes, most often on update days so I think that's server related, but that doesn't bother me since I have finished playing anyway if I am exiting the game!
So no it doesn't appear to be a common problem, at least not a universal one.
Ah then, I suggest checking memory usage, I have noticed after long sessions memory usage climbs to what can only be called ludicrous levels, sometimes up close to memory limit, I use a utility to free up unused memory and it improves performance remarkably, it's surprising how much memory utilities and swapping out to check EDSM and other stuff which then fail to release it, I suspect Elite Dangerous doesn't like using a paging file and this may cause an issue with extended running.
This system has 64GiB and paging disabled so it's not swapping to death. Would have just crashed if it was eating infinite ram, but I'll check next time. The FPS limiter issue is probably bad timing code allowing it to drift. Might even be floating point accuracy depending on how they time things.
Don't disable paging! That's the wrong way to do it, you should never disable paging no matter how much memory you have, some program are designed to expect a paging file to be present. And no it doesn't "just crash", I run mine for many hours and it never crashes getting in and out of SRV or ship, ever, it has never done that once!
Paging is an antiquated concept from back when RAM was expensive. Today, it's a much better idea to disable it as it's better to quickly crash and recover a program that has runaway RAM use than to let it bring the whole system to a crawl and eventually crash anyway. This is especially important on servers relying on failover as swap delays how long it will take to recover.
Really? Some programs expect a paging file to be present even if they don't use it, it's an operating system thing, and the fact you are still using windows means it's still a thing, the affordability of RAM may have changed, but windows is still windows no matter how much they dress it up and it still expects to find a paging file!
Funny that you say "it's better to quickly crash and recover a program that has runaway RAM use than to let it bring the whole system to a crawl" and yet here you are complaining that ED crashes regularly, going by your idea surely it's a good that ED crashes regularly, so I don't really know why you are complaining! And no, servers are better just running than crashing, servers on other OS's run for years without crashing, windows still needs a page file!
And no, the game doesn't crash regularly for other player when getting in and out of SRV and ships so maybe you do really need to look at the way you have your PC set up rather than blaming it all on FDEV.
They shouldn't. Some poorly written programs overcommit but modern operating systems just give them pages that aren't backed by anything and sort that out when they're actually used. I don't know of anything that deliberately grinds into swap as part of normal operation, it's extremely inefficient as it's constantly faulting small pages.
You're mixing up different topics. But regarding paging, you've probably experienced a Windows box getting unresponsive and having to struggle to get task manager up to kill some process that's gone insane and eaten all your RAM, right? The outcome is still a dead process whether you have a page file or don't, but you suffered through the whole box grinding to a halt because of the page file. If you have a large amount of RAM on a box relative to what you're running, the only thing a page file is going to do is create the possibility of that happening.
Crashing is normal operation for servers. Hardware fails, software fails, humans fail. Instead of attempting the impossible, making nothing ever crash, things are designed to tolerate and recover from crashes. Any problem can be converted into a crash at worst to reuse that fault-tolerant design. Where it gets tricky is when things degrade without obvious signs of failure (or signs you were checking), and that's what makes swap a big risk on servers. Like, imagine a video game authentication service, some database / web cluster handing out tokens. I'd rather one of the database boxes crash or be crashed and immediately failover to a slave than for the master to start going slower than it can serve users, leading to users posting about hamsters until someone manually fixes it. Servers are not better just running.
Also, Windows doesn't need a page file. You can disable it.
Windows cannot allocate memory, at least not contiguous memory, that isn't backed by anything. The commit charge is limited to the physical memory, plus any page files.
This is the overriding reason to not disable the page file on Windows, unless you have way more physical memory than you'd ever need, and in that case it's a waste, because you'd almost certainly need way less physical memory if you had enough commit charge for Windows to properly manage it.
If you have enough physical memory, almost nothing will ever actually be paged out, even if sloppy apps demand huge chunks of contiguous memory far in excess of their physical memory needs. Windows will just allocate all the virtual memory addresses required, assuming they fit in the commit charge, then maps those to physical address as actually needed.
On my Windows systems, I frequently see 2-5x as much commited memory as physical memory used, with no memory compression, and nothing being paged out at all.
You shouldn't be crashing, even in EDO. If it happens at all frequently on a system without a page file, and you're reasonably certain it's not hardware instability, reenabling the page file is one of the first things I'd try. It may not fix the issue, but it's not going to hurt anything either...the scenario you cite as reason for disabling it should be extremely rare.
Last edited:
I ran an IT business for 10 years, the only computers I have seen that were unresponsive or struggling to kill programs using the the task manager were customers badly maintained and incorrectly set up rigs full of malware and spyware, I have never had those sorts of problems with my own PC's because I know how to use and maintain them properly. Your problem is sounding more and more like a poorly configured system, but unless you are prepared to start addressing the fact it's not Odyssey causing your game to crash every time you enter or leave a ship or SRV then you will never make any headway. I would suggest for most users they have rarely if ever had that issue.
As of this post, I've been playing Odyssey for 20 minutes and it's committed/reserved ~15GiB of memory, while only using ~3GiB of physical RAM.
If I were doing what I'm doing on my 16GiB system and had no page file, the game would have crashed and Windows would have thrown an out of memory error despite having 9-10GiB of physical memory available.
If I were doing what I'm doing on my 16GiB system and had no page file, the game would have crashed and Windows would have thrown an out of memory error despite having 9-10GiB of physical memory available.
Yes I have often seen memory usage up in low 90%, ideally you don't want that to happen ever, but if it does and you have no paging file then you are going to have issues. Windows expects a paging file as part of its memory management process, if it isn't there, even if it isn't being used, then unexpected things can happen. Just because you can disable something doesn't mean you should!
If enabling the paging file doesn't help then I would suggest a comprehensive memory check, if ED is using a lot of memory it may accessing some faulty memory that no other program even tries to access so you may not notce it under normal use but only when the game is running, and getting into and out of vehicles is where it will be doing a lot of memory access going on.
Last edited:
I've not had issues loading/exiting, but I have had the screen turn black and it seemed like the game froze when entering my ship. It's happened two or three times, but no more than that.
Months ago I got in the habit of rebooting my PC prior to launching Ody. In general it has cut down drastically on my CTDs...but I do still get 1 or 2 per week or so...