BC booster addon?

[King Class Scout]

I may have found a booster for BC on older or less mem loaded comps.

I was reading through a faq for yet another Activision brand game with notorious memory leak problems.  Vampire the Masquerade:Bloodlines (which, apparently, has as many, if not more problems as BC does). I have the previous game in the line (VtM:Redemption), and wanted to read the plot.  I ran into this performance booster first thing in the faq.

to the shortcut properties (where you manually add the "-TestMode" line) add -heapsize XXXXXX.  the X's are half your mem size.  i put this in, and had less trouble than usual with some ships that have a high poly/mesh count (ships/ship packs over 10 meg compressed generally make me hitch).  can someone else try this out to see if it works?

[tiqhud]

hmmmm, sounds promiseing, might be good but cant right yet, I dont have that big ships.
Shouldnt be to bad since I use Mleo's logging tool more now, than the console reports. Have to give it a go.

you said the Xs are half your Memory is that your ram.

[King Class Scout]

for me, it's mostly Baz's newer ships, or those that use a lot of different meshes.  a couple betas I've tested give me giga slowdowns.  even Vladko's Yorktowns behave a bit.

[tiqhud]

Just thought , We dont need really High ships for the test, just major disruptor\pulse and torpedo fire , every single one is a texture, the computer most display and keep track of.


I'll be honest here, I got 2gb ram , but my math is terrible, and I've always had a rough time going from gb to mb, so Help me out what would I write in -heapsize???????????.

[Nebula]

1024 MB is 1 GB

[Morgan]

Ok so first I'll post my system specs here to give everyone an idea of how BC normally runs for me:

Windows XP Home SP3
AMD Athalon 64 Single Core 2.2GHz
2GB of RAM
512MB ATI Radeon HD 4350 GPU

With all the high-poly 2048 texture stuff my install doesn't do well for very long with NanoFX 2. I tested this fix on an install with NFX 2 and low poly models first in a pretty large Borg battle and got pretty good results, afterwords I moved onto a second install with higher poly models and no NFX 2. I ran 3 of Lint's Negh'var's against 2 DJ Venture's and me in the CG Sovereign and didn't notice any slowdown at all. As soon as that was over I decided to up the ante and added another Negh'var and Venture. Game still did excellent. I also have both of those installs with the CE Background pack and run it with the KM star field and both are set to 32 bit color depth so I think it's safe to say this fix works.

[King Class Scout]

Tiq: actually, you have to specify the BYTES, not the megabytes.  a 2 gig ram would require "-heapsize 1000000"  note that there is a space between heapsize and the number !  Also, I have to run in high mode for everything, otherwise, my install strangely crashes if I switch to "low" or "medium" format.

again, the game from which this tip came is by activision and uses even the same "console" format (setting up ~ as a console report device).  it is basically a rushed public beta with numerous patches added.

I believe I have figured out why the numerous crashes with high poly ships have occured. the game was developed on ME/2k machines, sold on early XP SP1's.  almost all ships have been developed on user machines with a minimum of Vista in mind.

Edit: Vladko's Yorktowns still crash despite this trick.