Ryandor.com

I'm trying to compile my map with dragon and I only get about 48% of it back. As I cross a particular x-coordinate in my map everything just turns to garbage and the client locks up. This used to happen when I didn't have enough RAM, or at least that's what I assume was the issue. Now I have 512 RAM and plenty of processing speed (if that's also an issue).

I removed all the scripts thinking maybe those were overloading the computer. Now it just reads in the BMP, creates a RAW map, and saves the MUL. Still the same problem. I removed all the elevations in the map thinking maybe that was too much but still no luck.

Here's the funny part... just a few weeks ago it was compiling on this machine. It doesn't seem like it broke all at once, because for a while I had to compile two or three times to get a map that compiled beyond that particular x-coordinate.

I'm using Mod9+Dragon with Windows 98. Maybe Windows is having issues with allocating that much RAM to a single program? Windows does recognise all my 512 though. I'll try to download a newer version of Dragon in the meantime but since it worked with this version before... I'm still confused =/

Thanks for any help you can give! :)

-SnowCarve

You've run into the only show stopping bug with Dragon, and there's no easy solution. Others have reformated and reinstalled windows to solve, others it's just magically started working again after deleting Dragon and the map0.mul.

The best I can offer is to try another harddrive if you have one, as that's how I got it to work at one point.

-Ryandor

Thanks a lot. Your ability to answer questions and help out without uncontrollable rage never ceases to amaze me, Ryandor :)

Reinstallation of Dragon didn't help. Luckily I have a spare HD laying around. I'll have to try that...

-SnowCarve

Well you are correct about the RAM:
1: Not enough RAM will cause Dragon to fail to finish compiling. How much is enough? I know I had that problem with 128MB if I had other programs open and just on the odd occassion. I know I didn't have that problem again with 384MB unless I had adobe open with a bunch of large image, running other programs in background, etc. I never have the problem now with 1GB no matter what I have open.
2: Windows 98 will use up to 512MB of RAM. Any more than that is wasted.

I know this isn't overly helpful but just confirming those 2 points so you can eliminate them as potential problems. I would check out what else is running in the background. Do you have a lot of other tasks running? Try to eliminate unneccessary background tasks and see if that helps. Is there anything you have recently installed that might be taking up memory?

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I remember back when I was compiling maps on a PII-233 with 96MB of ram. It did work for me, but I didn't have anything else open. A full detailed map took ages.. like 20 minutes or so.

-Ryandor

An NT based operating system (NT, 2000, XP Pro) also helps because it manages system resource much better than a 9x operating system. They are also less prone to application crashes.

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