Ungraceful out-of-memory handling Thread - Sky Alchemist

Hello,

I was nearing the end of my free level, and about to get 50 full crates, with the board full of minerals, when the game decided to die from "gc error: too many heap sections". Goodbye, 100k credits. It was the first time I had so many active elements in the game.

Unfortunately I wasn't fast enough to open the TM and check memory usage. It might not even be your code's fault, but reporting anyway. Is there a known or fixed limit to the number of items on the board ?

Oh, and kudos for an absolutely awesome game, by the way

Oh my god, fifty crates! So far there is no fixed limit to the objects on the board; but I am almost sure that none of our testers so far had that many crates.
From the way this works I am quite sure that the pure amount of crates does not affect the game's memory/cpu usage; I assume you filled them in shifts and not all at the same time. But this is definitively something we need to look into.
Thanks for notifying us about this.
Alexandra

fyi...I also have had near this amount of crates when grinding through a platinum haul. It did not cause an out of memory issue, but my guess is that would happen from too many element sprites rather than crates.

Yes, I think that is a valid explanation - now that I think about it: If you want to fill 50 crates you probably need to let in a lot of matter at the same time (opening all doors), perhaps channeling it so that a lot of matter stays on the board. I think this could in some cases get the system to the limit.

Maybe it's worth mentioning the gameplay issue that led me to crate bulimia: maybe i'm doing something wrong, but missions tend to bring in quite limited amounts of cash compared to the price of the higher end tools, and repaying the ship at this rythm seems an infeasible goal.

So, when I had the chance to hit a mission with platinium and silver, I made a streamlined circuit to accumulate pure minerals in buffer zones in front of collectors without human intervention, then let the game run alone for a while, and only after that started filling crates one after the other by rewiring the tubes. In the middle of my game, at the moment I started filling the crates, there were many many more sprites on screen than when it crashed, where most of my buffer storage had been soaked up.

Wow, I am not sure exactly what caused that, but usually if you run out of heap it is because of some race condition. Can you tell me the stats for your machine, b00fh? I think we may have a bug in our crate filling that might be causing the issue you saw. However, I think we might also need to limit the crate quantity I'm sending you a beta invite so you can see if you run into a similar issue.

Keep in mind you can replay free missions as many times as you want until the time runs out, so maybe you should stick to filling 10 crates at a time or so

This has happened to me, and the reason we don't like leaving the mission with empty containers is it takes a while to set up our setups

Tried again in 1.1, didn't see it crash yet.

I noticed that before I could reliably fill all vessel with 101 units, and now they seem sometimes capped at 100 and sometimes at 101. I have the impression the 101 only happened for elements with high troughput, where I let a lot of pieces accumulate in front of the collector and fill the vessel almost at once.

Yes, using dozens of crates feel like an exploit, but there are many incentives to it:
- crates are dirt cheap and you are guaranteed to amortize their purchase cost in one run. How about increasing the price of tools proportionately to the amount of that tool you already own ?
- high-valued elements are overpowered, making some missions way better than others. Should platinium be nerfed ?
- once the mission is launched there is no timer, so if the free mission timer is close to expiry, you better let it run until you have filled every single vessel with that precious 12x element. Should free missions have a game timer ?
- setups aren't preserved across free missions, as soundlogic already said.

@b00fh, you are touching on gameplay issues that I am thinking quite a lot about at the moment. I know actually of quite a few people (including myself) who play it exactly like you described. I am just not patient enough to set up that many containers.

The 101 units miracle with the containers went to the issue list.
Even if I am not able to respond to each suggestion in detail: I am at the moment collecting all suggestions/feedback that are getting to me in the forum and by mail into "stories" on our backlog. I hope that, after some investigation into feasibility and how they would go with the general gameplay ideas we have in store, I can publish a roadmap that shows where we are headed.