Boosting memory allocation for Roller Coaster Tycoon 3
Posted: Sun Aug 21, 2011 8:51 pm
From time to time I like to fire up Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, and I have a particularly large park full of custom, player-made scenery objects that I've been working on (think of this as the rough equivalent to custom skins/models in Source games). While my machine runs the game beautifully and never dips below 30FPS when displaying particularly visually-intense areas (it gets 60+ much of the time), it has an issue of crashing with the dreaded "RCT3.exe has stopped working" error when too much data is stored in the memory (i.e. when I have looked at too much of my park in a single session - it will not load an area of the park into the RAM until it is first made visible on-screen during that play session). This strikes me as odd, because my computer has 8GB of memory - well beyond the amount the game should need to run my park.
Today I started it up to perform an experiment: I opened the Task Manager and observed RCT3's memory usage throughout my session. The session was, of course, cut short by a crash. The final memory usage, and the peak the game reached, was ~1.75GB. My PC had 4GB of memory available on top of the combined total of RCT3 and all other processes (other processes amounted to just over 2GB). My conclusion is that this might possibly be a default cap at which RCT3 is not allowed to use more memory, probably to avoid overloading the memory of the system it's on - the game was released in 2005, after all, at a time when 2GB RAM was considered a large amount, and would have required 100% usage to run RCT3.
My question is this: Is there any way to allocate more memory to the game when it's running, so it doesn't overflow and give the "Stopped Working" error? Can I do so without compromising normal system operations? Or, am I possibly barking up the wrong tree here, and my problem lies somewhere else entirely? I've confirmed already that the problem isn't any of the custom content I have - I've tested each and every piece and confirmed them all not to be the source of the issue.
I'm running Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium, which I'm sure is important in finding the solution.
Today I started it up to perform an experiment: I opened the Task Manager and observed RCT3's memory usage throughout my session. The session was, of course, cut short by a crash. The final memory usage, and the peak the game reached, was ~1.75GB. My PC had 4GB of memory available on top of the combined total of RCT3 and all other processes (other processes amounted to just over 2GB). My conclusion is that this might possibly be a default cap at which RCT3 is not allowed to use more memory, probably to avoid overloading the memory of the system it's on - the game was released in 2005, after all, at a time when 2GB RAM was considered a large amount, and would have required 100% usage to run RCT3.
My question is this: Is there any way to allocate more memory to the game when it's running, so it doesn't overflow and give the "Stopped Working" error? Can I do so without compromising normal system operations? Or, am I possibly barking up the wrong tree here, and my problem lies somewhere else entirely? I've confirmed already that the problem isn't any of the custom content I have - I've tested each and every piece and confirmed them all not to be the source of the issue.
I'm running Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium, which I'm sure is important in finding the solution.