What exactly causes this game to crash?

[Motokid600]

I wasn't sure where to put this. This isn't a complaint really just a general question as to what causes this game to CTD. It happens a few times a session for me at anytime. In the VAB. ascents, descents, Kerbin surface. But mostly it happens when launching a flight. The game CTD's when trying to load the craft onto the pad. Yes I use mods and what not and they make it worse, but that's not what im here to talk about. I want to understand the anatomy of the crash. If I can figure how why its happening I think I can better avoid it.

I do know this is a 32bit .exe. And that it can only manage about 3gigs(?) of ram. Once the game goes over that via mods ( or any large craft it seems ).. crash. That makes sense, but what doesn't is why is it random? If this was the case wouldn't the game crash each time like clockwork? I reload the game and all is well until the next random instance. So whats going on here? The crashes are tolerable for me because I rape the quicksave button, but its a nuisance when performing a landing.

Could it maybe be a graphical issue? Nvidia drivers are up to date, but I am using Nvidia overrides in the control panel. FXAA, 16xAF, 16xQAA, 8xmultisample, triple buffering and no vsync. ...bit of a mouthful id say, but Id wager such settings introduce more variables.

Edited August 5, 2013 by Motokid600

[swiftgates24]

It crashes because it's in Alpha.

[lammatt]

crash because something went wrong

plain and simple.

[SDIR]

The load on your RAM varies with where you are and what's happening in the game. It's happened to me before I upgraded my computer. A good way to try and avoid it is to run the game in compatibility mode and to open task/resource monitor to see if you can reduce the load on RAM. If that doesn't work, try tuning down your resolution from full to half or even one quarter, that tends to reduce RAM usage by a good 100-300 MB Hope this helps!

[FITorion]

Mods generally...

Besides that could be any number of things. There's going to be unoptimized code and conflicts and all sort of issues until they get serious about cleaning it all up... which generally happens right before release. Not release of an update... release of the 1.0 version of the game.

[Tiron]

It can use up to 4 GB of RAM if you're on a 64 bit OS.

The '3 GB' thing is a limitation from 32 bit versions of windows caused by Microsoft mostly disabling PAE (except for the parts they HAD to use for Data Execution Prevention). Basically, on 32 bit windows, the total amount of RAM you're allowed to use is limited to 4GB minus your Video RAM, because your Video RAM is included in the 4GB limit, which is why people that would configure their system to go past 3GB (the default limit on 32 bit XP was 2gb, but it was possible to go higher with the right flags set) would vary. Some people could get 3.75 GB, some 3.5... Some only 3. Because their Vidcards had 256MB, 512MB, and 1024MB(1GB) respectively of onboard RAM. There ARE other types of memory that can pulled out of the limit as well, but rarer and usually much smaller than the vidram, at least on consumer machines.

On '64 bit' this isn't a problem, because Microsoft allows '64 bit' OSes to use memory addresses larger than 32 bit.

KSP is still a 32 bit program, however (the 64 bit builds apparently come out very unstable due to some problem with Unity). But if you're on a 64 bit version of windows with more than 4GB of RAM, WoW64 (Windows on Windows 64, the Windows component that runs 32 bit programs on 64 bit systems) gives it access to the full 4GB, but only if the program has the 'Large Address Aware' flag set. Otherwise it only gets 2GB.

KSP has the LAA flag set, so it gets up to 4GB.

Crashes can be caused by all sorts of things, but one thing I notice in particular is that KSP really, really doesn't handle being minimized while running fullscreen very well at all. It causes all SORTS of problems.

[Sethnizzle]

If you want to know, a crash dump folder is created within the main game directory every time it crashes, I believe. That might tell you the exact reason for that particular crash.

[Tiron]

If you want to know, a crash dump folder is created within the main game directory every time it crashes, I believe. That might tell you the exact reason for that particular crash.

Errr, well if you know how to read it, yeah...

I'd start with checking the 'crash signature' listing in the error window Windows Pops up. It'll have the crash type (usually APPCRASH but BEX isn't uncommon), and a hex code that identifies it more specifically. It'll also list the specific file that caused the crash. This can help in determining what exactly happened. Sometimes, anyway.