Spacecraft Designer - Extremely long calculations, memory leaks, crashing, oh my!

[Mal]

I'm relatively new to the designer but I've spoken with some more experienced players and this is not just something I am alone in experiencing! Sorry if this is a bit much, trying to jot down all that I can think of before I head to bed.

So three main things:

1) Extremely long calculations - It takes a very large amount of time to complete the 'refresh obstructions' phase of design, is there anything that can be done to optimize that?
The design process of wondering what the volume is going to be, pressing refresh obstructions and hoping it doesn't crash, exiting the game when it does, scaling down, repeating doesn't make much sense to me.

Suggestion: optimizations aside, maybe the volume calculation could be made separate from the 'obstructions' calculation, so that we don't have to run the latter unless we are satisfied with the volume? Having that information available to us before running 'refresh obstructions' would take much of the guesswork out of designing and make it much less painful on us and our computers.

2) Memory leaks - I have been trying to run a calculation for a larger (low poly) design and it consistently runs leaking memory until the full 16gb of my system is used up. The design is large, but I have seen larger in game and I don't really know why it isn't working for me. Is 16gb not enough for this task? Or is it a memory leak? If it isn't perhaps something can be done so that players with less than 32 gb are capable of producing larger designs.

This ultimately results in...

3) Crashing. The program hangs when doing the refresh obstructions phase, taking up more and more memory, and more often than not I find the cancel button does not work. If you don't save your work beforehand there is a good chance you'll lose it. Especially if 2) happens, which it has done every time for me with a particular design unless I scale it down significantly.

Going off my suggestion from earlier, a separate volume calculation and obstruction calculation could be useful here. Let players know when the design is too big before they run 'refresh obstructions'.

Ultimately though, the memory leak and crashing issues are pretty severe and I just felt the need to make this! Feel free to chime in with your own experiences. Are more people experiencing this? Suggestions?

[Neils Iyssada]

I had a similar problem once, a week or two ago. I made a simple 500x500x500m hull cube, then refreshed obstructions. It froze for 15 minutes, then said it was at 66% of the refresh. Then froze for the entire afternoon.

[OnePercent]

Concur with about everything in this thread.

Tip while we wait, calculate your hull obstruction/volume while online, the servers do it faster, i'm sure it's also great for gameplay too.

[zslayern]

This issue has gotten incredibly bad. Whilst calculating a 1000mx1000mx1000m cube, the game freezes for a good 20 minutes, after which the game not only CTDs, but causes a fatal error to occur, crashing my entire laptop and creating a visual artifact on my screen.

[Xantheose]

Same. It try to allocate more than 100Go memory, like any battle in arena.