Apologies for cross posting this information in a couple of places - I'm just so happy I'm getting somewhere with this and want to share! V. much looking forward to playing the rest of this game...


Did quite a bit of application monitoring and tried a few things at once, and one of them worked... Not sure which one of these did these did the trick, and can't go back and try them one by one to narrow it down just now due to real-world commitments, but these might help you if you are having the memory leak followed by Access Violation error in the combat sections and are desperate to play Battletech like I was. I'll do some further testing tomorrow.

I finally managed to complete 2nd mission - physical memory usage staying at a stable 6.5GB. Page file wasn't getting hit at all - this had a massive boost fixing the lag when switching to the cinematic camera whilst sprinting. (FYI loading times are still loooooooooong though).



1. I updated NVidia drivers to today's release, 397.31. Initially after upgrade, the memory leak and crash remained, so not sure this is what helped. It may be a couple of reboots after installing the drivers did though.

2. Monitoring TCP/IP connections I noticed Battletech.exe was making some TCP/IP connections during play. Some of these are to AWS, but a couple of IPs didn't respond to ping. So completely disabled all network connections/adapters be they wired, Virtual Box adapter and Wi-Fi

3. With all network adapters disabled, I completely shut off Anti-Virus software (Webroot). Sadly, Webroot doesn't have an exclusions whitelist (say whaaaaa) so I hope this isn't what fixed things!

4. Crash in 2nd mission usually happened around time music / sound effects were playing, so disabled my SoundBlaster X-fi, and switched to NVidia audio.

I also had frequent crashes during the mission for the miners right after the tutorial.
Updating Nvidia drivers seemed to help somewhat but did not completely resolve the problem. It also occurs later on certain mission maps only. This leads me to believe that the culprit may be some objects on certain maps that are problematic. Perhaps they have a few objects with a huge number of polygons (far more than necessary) for example. There are probably other sources of instability as well.

For the time being I am mitigating the crashes by saving in every action phase of every turn.

You should check for chipset drivers and bios. I haven't encountered any of those issues on AMD (game using ca. 4-4.5GB of RAM after 3-4 hours of play from 16GB of RAM, not a single crash, so far at least).

I've never experienced a crash (not bragging - just providing another datapoint). I'm using i7-7700K 4.2GHz 32GB ram * GTX 1080.

I was not using the most recent driver for my gpu (and not getting crashes on it). Because there was so much talk about new drivers, I was inspired to update (and promptly uninstall GeForce Experience afterwards). Still no trouble on the new driver.

Are you using Galaxy? I've found that completely uninstalling Galaxy, then installing Battletech afterwards (fresh install) without enabling anything Galaxy-related seems to work.

I think this could be related to OP's point 2: the Galaxy-enabled version tried to connect to Galaxy multiple times (despite not being logged into Galaxy), and the exceptions were likely not handled cleanly. The none-Galaxy installation still appears to try to connect to Galaxy, but since it doesn't exist on the machine at all it seems to fail cleanly and then move on (instead of just hanging).

Actually, I don't even have Galaxy installed. I tried it out when it was new and had problems with it, so I gave up. I use the old GOG downloader client.

I don't think Galaxy is the problem. I'm using Galaxy all the time and didn't have any problems.
First of all you should update all the drivers (including chipset, sound and bios).

Strange - seems like there are as many ways to fix this problem as there are people. All I know is that I tried many things, yet uninstalling Galaxy was the one thing that worked. The same installer (downloaded via the GOG web page) was used for all installation attempts.

Just out of interest, when installing with the client, did you get an option (checkbox) to "keep this game up to date automatically"?

I didn't notice this when first installed - possibly because it detected Galaxy's presence and so did the selection by itself? - but after attempting the install after Galaxy was gone, it had that option (and it was on by default). It may be required to dive into the more detailed options (i.e. where you get to choose installation directory etc) before it will show up.

first time i ran the game it took ridiculously long to boot. my hdds disgustingly full though. i updated the display adapter & switched the game to borderless it seems to be running better.


i have resource monitor shortcut on my desktop, although ive no clue how to interperate the info therein.


video drivers are easily updated /w geforce experience.


however the bios & audio, not as easy.


bios would be asus & sound would be realtek. how do i go about updating these, w/o messing up my pc?


i have a program, asus live update, would that inform me of those updates, is that in itself an app that needs updating?


thanks.

Easiest way to look for driver upgrades is to use Driver Booster.

GOG downloader only launches when I queue up a GOG game for download by using a GOG downloader file link. It's just a very lite download manager client. So it can't keep games up to date. You have to take responsibility for seeking out the patch files (or reinstalling the latest, if you get too far behind on patches and/or get confused).

Oh OK, so in other words you'll get the same installation file(s) as are available via the GOG website. That question relating to "keep this game updated" is still relevant for BT though - I used the installers (not Galaxy) and noticed this option when I dove into the details (i.e. same screen where you can choose installation destination). I suspect keeping it selected may cause BT to attempt Galaxy-related connections.