You asked:
Zeal wrote:Could you explain to me how changing my graphics settings will change anything?
Here's answer:
Currently most crashes happen because of memory leaks. Reasons: this game is 32 bit(thus limited with 4 Gb RAM on
any 64 bit system(doesn't matter you have 16 Gb!), and 2 Gb on 32 bit systems), uses quite a lot of memory (my savegame eats 2 Gb to just load it, I hope it will be fixed), has memory leaks(that will be fixed someday, is being fixed now: last two patches made a
huge progress) and possibly video memory leaks (not confirmed, but if there are, they will be fixed someday too).
Lowering texture quality will increase amount of free video memory (most video cards use RAM if graphical video memory is not enough, and RAM used to supplement video memory goes into game's RAM usage too), and possibly RAM (not tested) and thus will increase time before memory leaks will make your game crash.
For me starting a game with worst textures and highest textures give about 800 Mb of RAM difference! And that's like another half an hour of playing without crashing I think.
You can only prevent crashes manually for now: check RAM used by game and restart game if it gets too high (can easily check when it crashes, just don't click "OK" on crash dump message, go to task manager and see how many RAM it uses currently).
For me safe mark is about 3600-3700 Mb used by game. It can crash if it uses more.
That's theory.
If your crash happens on entirely different RAM used numbers, then it's another bug and disregard this post, also I recommend to inform devs about that.
P.S. don't forget this game is alpha and was developed by only one person in the beginning. It's awesome it made it this far, really. I never thought it was possible.
EDIT: I forgot about shadows. I've not seen shadows cause any crashes yet, but they do use video memory, and that's some more memory to leak.