Originally Posted by richardphat
I don't think this strategy will work. We are losing player, because of the massive play during event time . People are tired and will stop once the event is done. It's been a vicious circle here on kaiser.
I believe the better solution would be to advertise and FIXING the faulty game engine leading to massive crash .
Also, off topic, I have been told that you get no crash at all for Windows 98. Anyone could confirm this?
No, it still crashes. (tested with intel 925x chipset, Pentium 4 3ghz, 2gb ram, 20gb hdd partition)
One of the reasons NF crashes is because of memory management. NF will utilize a lot of RAM when many sprites are active.
All versions of Windows use different memory management techniques from windows 98. Essentially, the safest bet is using windows XP 32 bit with 4gb of RAM to experience the fewest crashes.
Why? Windows 98 used a "cache" system, which used a good deal of hard drive space, and when low/out of ram would brutally slow a system down. When running NF, windows will cache most of the game to the hard drive.
Windows XP introduced a better management algorithm, and coined the "swap file" which allocated more ram to the highest priority processes and actively cached unused blocks of memory. It was also designed with a smaller memory footprint.
Windows Vista again changed its mem management, but had a much larger footprint due to all of the "security" and additional processes. 64-bit versions of Vista improved this, however, allowing for more RAM. But, without 64-bit, or over 4gb ram, Windows will give NF a high priority when running and continuously feed it RAM.... until something else needs ram. Then, elements of NF will be both cached and in the current working set blocks, which, depending on the coding of NF, could be an issue. Occasionally, this can lead to fault delays (iirc), and crashes NF.
Windows 7 was again improved, but NF engine is old. Windows does not recognize the age of NF, and treats it like most other programs. Though better managed, and PCs running windows 7 have better hardware, NF is executed 32bit. In 32 bit, the program is emulated by win7 64, and gets separate memory blocks. Again, the OS will cache both 32 and 64 bit files in the pagefile, but will still feed NF memory despite other system needs.
So, the solution I have found to work with NF has been to use 64 bit Windows 7 and increase memory beyond 4gb, and disable the page file. (or set it to 4gb+)
With no pagefile, and 16gb of RAM...NF ran pretty well (despite using up to 1.9gb of ram)
