I don't know if this has been addressed before, or even if it's already been fixed in a build I don't have access to, but it's become something of an annoyance.

The most recent public build of VERGE (11 Dec 05) doesn't appear to free memory correctly, or at least as well as older versions do. At it's most basic, this is the code that's causing the trouble:

int i;
while(1) {
i=LoadImage("testpic.png");
FreeImage(i);
}

In the 11 Dec 05 build, watching my page file usage in the Task Manager shows that, while VERGE thinks the image is gone, it's still loaded in memory somewhere. If left to run long enough, that code snippet will eventually lead to Windows Virtual Memory error messages. I stopped at that point, but I guess it would eventually crash.

Now, note that VERGE does think the image is gone. If I try to Blit() the image after it's been freed, VERGE breaks. It thinks it's gone, but my computer thinks differently.

However, if I use Serinor's version of VERGE (28 Sep 04), the memory issue vanishes. The page file usage never moves no matter how long the program runs.

Again I don't know if this is useful or important or just me being overly picky, but the graphics-intensive compo game I'm working on gets REALLY slow if I start playing too long.

(Incidentally, while I'm thinking about it, the 11 Dec 05 version blows chunks when I drop it into Serinor's directory to try and use an updated engine for my major project. I haven't had time to test it as thoroughly, but since I know the newer version absolutely despises Serinor's save files, it may have something to do with FileReadQuad()/FileWriteQuad() incompatibilities between the two versions of the engine.)

Thank you! A lot!

It's too late to use it with my compo entry (one of the pitfalls of having to use a public terminal to access the Internet as opposed to my own computer and the fact that we're moving to another state today) but I appreciate it all the same. Hopefully, with some effort, Serinor will get a new engine version too, and that's what really excites me.

Good luck on getting a new public build out. I know there must be others who'll appreciate it.