Quote Originally Posted by Stelawrat View Post
I posted because I was worried that I might damage this comp if I continued to play, pushing the system this way.
Theoretically it should be fine. Practically speaking, though, many laptop designs can overheat because they're not ventilated well enough for the GPU to run at max power for prolonged lengths of time. It really depends on the quality of the laptop build, but my generic suggestions here are:

- Figure out where the ventilation is on your laptop and make sure that it's not covered. (For some of our test laptops, that's easy because the vent is always exposed. For others, they need to be propped up on something because the vents are on the bottom.)
- If your laptop becomes physically too hot to touch, you're definitely in danger of damaging the laptop. (Not to mention your lap!)

Oh, and to clarify, running at 100% memory usage is nothing to worry about. The thing that's a little scary is if the CPU column on the Task Manager is permanently running at 100% -- that's when things can get overheated.

That & also I wondered, was really curious about, how it was that I can play at 1:0 on the island, in all of the environments, without any problems. Play there isn't affected by number of mobs, players, actual time of day. It's just beautiful.
That's a complicated question to answer, but the short version is: Serbule is huge. It's surprisingly huge, actually -- 36 newbie islands could fit into the same landmass that Serbule uses. And it's more graphically complex: it has fancier sky and terrain systems, and more points of interest (such as buildings, giant hands, weird statuary, etc.).

Right now, because the area isn't very optimized, your computer needs to render a lot more of Serbule than is actually visible on your screen. But even when we finish optimizing it, it'll still need a lot more resources. There's large open fields where you can see for a lot farther than you can on the island.

In contrast, we've worked hard to keep the newbie island graphically simple because that's where we teleport people to if there are problems. It will get more complex eventually when we add the fancier sky/weather system, but it'll always be less intense than the huge outdoor areas like Serbule.

Re: the chip set, if it's a built in limitation, then I guess the RAM can't be reallocated?
No, it can't be reallocated, but the Unity graphics engine works around the limitation by using more of your regular memory. Basically it swaps textures from regular memory into and out of your video memory continuously. This slows down your framerate because copying that stuff around isn't instantaneous. It also uses a lot more memory overall because it basically has "spare copies" of lots of textures loaded in regular memory, ready to shove into your video memory whenever they're needed.

All that said, it should theoretically be doable -- 8gb is a lot of memory, even when it has to swap stuff in and out like that. But the game is far from optimized, and Serbule is where most players hang out, which means you need to have lots of different armors loaded at once. So it's definitely possible that you're using all available RAM and still need more. Hopefully as we optimize things, it'll be less of a problem.

Are you saying that if you play in windowed mode that if you maximize the window the resolution setting doesn't apply, it only makes a difference in full screen? Or am I just misintupritating you saying that making your window smaller is easier?
I should make that clearer in the Settings window, I think. Yes, the list of resolutions in the game is only used in full-screen mode. In windowed mode, the game's resolution is... however big the window is! So if you maximize the window, the game is effectively running at your desktop resolution. (Minus some pixels for the window borders and start menu and whatever else you have on.)

So if you're running in windowed mode and you want to reduce memory usage, you can either make the window smaller, or change your desktop resolution.

To change your desktop resolution: In Windows 10 if you right-click the desktop itself and choose "Display Settings", you'll see a very similar drop-down list of resolutions. Changing the resolution there will change your whole desktop, which will in turn change the game's resolution when running in windowed mode.