My Lands: Black Gem Hunting

Why does a simple game like this consume almost 200k of memory?
Via the flashplayerplugin that is...

Leave it running a while. It consumes a lot more than that. There are issues with memory management and it leaks like a sieve. Leave it running 48 hours, and it's eating 2Gig of ram.

whoa....


there is actually two different flashplugins running at the same time. Is this normal?

Yes, an obvious leak...
i was in my city mode, then changed to map mode, waited for 5 seconds and then
changed back to the city mode. I did this 6 times, here is how the usage of ram
by the flashplayerplugin behaved:

First it was

698.350K -> then map -> then back to city
716.036K
726.628K
727.040K
727.084K
728.028K


So what do we learnt:
don't jump back and forth from the city view to the map view.

don't ask me how to play it then.....

You play it by letting the flash player crash out regularly.

I'm not certain, as I haven't gone at the client with a resource editor (nor am I likely to, too much enjoyment of the game to risk that) but it would make sense that the second flash program is a scanner, monitoring the first program, and looking for evidence of cracking attempts. They are common on a lot of this type of collaborative program, particularly the firms who haven't the processing resources to move all of the cheatable processes to the server where they are secure.

I'm basing some of that suspicion on observation on how the client has to interrupt the play progression periodically to "save the game". This is a serverside process, not a clientside one at all, so it should not need to interrupt the players to save the game state if they are running a server replication process. The second server (with no players logged onto it and a continual data drip from the first) basically does the saving for backup purposes so the first server's load is considerably lessened and never has to pause like that.

The fact that they have to pause the clients to save the server status, along with quite a few other such 'niggly' issues that keep cropping up strongly suggest that the developers are not using the most efficient or structurally sound architectures in either hardware or software. It is quite likely that this is their first commercial product and they are still learning the ropes as it were.

The game has been available in Russia for about 2 year before it was available in England I believe.

Anyway, yes huge memory leaks I think. Although you don't need to wait for it to crash. Just refresh the page dumps the memory from the flash app. So I just try to remember to do that every hour or so when I am on the game. If I forget then I get the horrible crash thrashing my HD for 5mins before I can go on. And thats usually right when I am trying to do something

KingKano, was it the first product they launched in Russia? Because if it was, then this is still their first product - I doubt very much that they recoded it just to launch in a new country. More likely they just reskinned it with help from a (cheap) tranlator. Most likely a native Russian translator who also understands English, rather than a native English person who also understands Russian. I say this because the language you grew up speaking does have a distinct effect on how your brain wires itself, and thus how you would structure sentences. The English of this game was definitely not written by a native English speaker. The emphasis is completely off for that.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the developers are not from an affluent background. The game makes them a lot of money, but they did not grow up being used to being surrounded by money, so there's a psychological aspect of fear in the game's development, in that there is a niggling fear of being without money again in an unspecified future, so they are pricing things up in response to that fear. You see similar things in other projects where the project management did not come from a background of money, and suddenly find themselves having money.

As to your HD thrashing KingKano, that sounds worrisome. Have you checked your drive for bad sectors, and defragged it recently? A crashing flash plug-in should not cause that amount of trouble. I've usually got my PCs under a fair bit of strain, and all that happens when flash crashes is a message pops up to tell me it has crashed - no HDD thrashing at all. So, I would recommend you run a diagnostic on yours just to be safe. The last thing you need is your hard drive dying on you in the middle of something important.

You are right about refreshing the page, but from my personal perspective I don't see the point. When running this program, flash crashes about once every 30-40 hours or so, and I leave the PCs running 24/7. All I have to do is manually restart flash. At worst, reboot the PC, and a reboot once a week probably does it good after all

It seems to affect everybody differently. My friend's didnt even crash for the first few months while mine was. If I let it crash on my main pc, it seems to want to write some kind of dump file to disk for the whole 1.5 or 2gigs of memory it was using, while simultaneously removing it from the pagefile on disk at the same time - thereby causing the thrashing. I suspect some setting in the flash plugin is the culprit. Nothing wrong with my pc at all. Been playing diablo 3 and other games fine. Only this flash plugin gives me grief actually. My disk is the bottleneck in the system though (like many a pc) so when it wants to write this file thats why it causes so much problem.

Sadly I cannot go anywhere near 30 hours before a crash. More like 2 hours. But I do have alot of cities and scroll through alot of screens playing it. Which seems to be what increases the memory usage. it seems to load all the graphics or something in, but when you move to the next page it doesnt remove any or reuse them in future, just leaves them hanging around. As you say, badly coded in some way.

I am fairly confident no English speakers were used in the production of the game. Probably software (like bing translator or something installed on a person's pc). Anybody who had learn any English would not use many of the common errors we see in the translation. They would do well to throw a few quid to some of the now experienced English players to help them on the translations TBH.

I dunno about affluent thing. I guess they found people in Russia pay big money, so they just ported it here as is with prices inflated, thinking the English are so rich they will pay it! But who knows.

kingkano wrote: I suspect some setting in the flash plugin is the culprit.

I would have to agree. I've been playing about with the settings of mine tonight, and have been unable to replicate the symptoms you describe - although I have managed to successfully crash flash twice.

kingkano wrote:Been playing diablo 3 and other games fine. Only this flash plugin gives me grief actually.

*glares with eyes so envious they flash emerald green* I would love to have that kind of free time, you lucky thing you. Been eyeing Skyrim with desire, but I know full well I simply don't have the time to play something like that.

Flash will give grief because it's a weird compiler. It's a run-time compiler. Meaning it actually compiles the code for whatever program you are running, when you load the plugin up, rather than it being ready to go before you load it. Hence the long loading times. The fun part about that is, your version of the game is compiled to take advantage of your specific computer - nobody else's version compiles the exact same way as yours. So, if your computer has an eccentric architecture, you get an eccentric program.

With this in mind, flash has to be tightly coded, or any errors or ambiguities in the code are going to cause different effects when they compile on different computer configurations. This is the same reason as to why sometimes a specific flash program won't load at all, ever, on one computer, whilst it loads just fine on three others. A little sloppiness, usually in memory allocation, causes it to crash out on that specific architecture.

kingkano wrote:But I do have alot of cities and scroll through alot of screens playing it. Which seems to be what increases the memory usage. it seems to load all the graphics or something in, but when you move to the next page it doesnt remove any or reuse them in future, just leaves them hanging around. As you say, badly coded in some way.

Yes, barbababa benchmarked it. It's adding approximately 500 b - 10k to memory every time you change screen. It adds a k to memory every time you check your mail. There are a few other 'leaks'. It's allocating memory, but forgetting to deallocate random amounts of it when the program is done with it - so it just leaves that memory allocated forever (or until the program crashes or is aborted by the browser). A stand-alone version of MyLands would be a system killer. Oddly, the black screen at startup occurs when there is not enough unallocated memory to run the second program, so whoever coded it is aware of how to memory manage properly, they just don't.

I don't believe it's laziness either. My money is on spaghetti code. It's a random mess of jumping code inside would be my bet, added ad-hoc. So, sometimes the proper closing methods are called, and sometimes they are skipped entirely.

kingkano wrote:I am fairly confident no English speakers were used in the production of the game. Probably software (like bing translator or something installed on a person's pc). Anybody who had learn any English would not use many of the common errors we see in the translation. They would do well to throw a few quid to some of the now experienced English players to help them on the translations TBH.

I honestly never even considered the possibility of automatic translation programs KingKano. You would be right. These things are nowhere near ready for professional usage, and won't be for a number of years - probably decades - hence, as we're still trying to understand the basic psychology of language, and how it actually changes the wiring of the brain and the way those people view the world. So those who grew up speaking different languages literally do see the world in different ways. That has to be factored in for translator algorithms to be truly effective. The formal name for this being the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis for those of you who wish to look it up.

Linguistics truly is not my field of expertise, so I only have a layperson's understanding of the complexities involved, and it doesn't go much deeper than what I have explained in the paragraph above. But in a nutshell, it would be utterly insane to use one for a professional project. But you are right, KingKano, they are using procedurally generated words. Now that you have said it, I can see it *shudder*.

kingkano wrote:I dunno about affluent thing. I guess they found people in Russia pay big money, so they just ported it here as is with prices inflated, thinking the English are so rich they will pay it! But who knows.

One would hope that no professional with an eye on international affairs is that silly. One would really, really hope so. London is one of the main banking capitals of the world. But London is not the whole country, and the wealth of the banks, does not reflect the wealth of the people. Especially not in a global depression. At times like these, it is business 101 to lower prices to scoop larger numbers in.

What I meant by their not coming from an affluent background, is that those who come from a poor upbringing, tend to be nervous about money. They fear it's all going to go away again, and they're back to the poorhouse. Every time they think this, they raise their prices, or find another way to squeeze more money out of their customer base, even when it is detrimental to their product as a whole to do so. No matter how much money they amass, this fear never really leaves them.

It is quite similar at least from what I can see to what is going on with MyLands, at least on the English language server, so I do wonder if the same processes might not be driving these developers. Fear drives their prices up, not business savvy.

Was going to post about this, but just spotted this post. It's stupid. At first I thought it wasn't freeing up the memory so it could load faster, but changing back and forth to the same city keeps stacking up the memory usage.

Needs fixing!

you guys seem to have some real problem there while myn can get up to a GB or so in usage after a couple of days ( occasional crash usually to do with online vids ) with 4GB 1333Mhz total ram its not that much of a problem, it isnt anything to do with the speed of the ram or amount perhaps ? or is this one of those things that gets worse the less ram you have ?