I have found that Wasteland 2 DC somehow takes a long time to close on my computer, and I mean looooooong. Now, granted my poor Sharrow is getting on, but I have played all manner of other games without a problem (Shadow of Morder, Witcher 3, Sleeping Dogs, Thief (new one), Victor Vran, etc.).

However, after playing WL 2 DC for a while, when I go do close it down it takes literal minutes to give me control back. My HDD just sits there grinding like it's a robot sculpter, and I cannot click on anything. Nothing else I have takes this long to shut down.

Any ideas? I fully accept I need an upgrade, but that can't happen right now. Just wondering if this is something to do with Unity or if it is my system. Have tried forcing DX 9, but didn't notice anything different there. If there are other command line options would love to try them out.

Running:
i7-930 2.8 GHz
Corsair Something-Or-Other 6 GB RAM
Sapphire Radeon 7850 2 GB
WD Black 2 TB HDD (1TB free)

Should, in theory, not have a problem. Any help much appreciated.

It sounds like your system is thrashing. There are a few ways to try and deal with this:

1. Add more RAM.
2. Get a Solid State Drive and move your OS to it (and maybe the swapfile as well?)
3. Try to reduce the amount of RAM used by your system. This means closing programs when you aren't using them, for example.

Edit: or 4, if there is indeed a memory leak, wait for inXile to patch it and for the fix to make it to gog.com. Also, try playing the game in shorter sessions and see if that helps.

I have not tried DC yet, but I've been reading a lot of posts about it. There is talk about a memory leak. If so, by the time you exit you might have very little memory left.

An experiment: fire it up, start playing for just a few seconds, then close it. Does it still take a long time to exit?

Thanks guys, should have mentioned. Yes, if I start up and play for a short time (in this case around half an hour) then it will close normally. So that's what a memory leak looks like then? Huh. Never knew.

That's how it looks from a user perspective on an OS with virtual memory (basically, any modern OS that you would likely interact with).

On an embedded system without virtual memory, what would happen is that the device would malfunction at some point, as it tries to access memory that doesn't exist. Alternatively, the program could be written to detect that situation and shut down if that happens. (Prediction: If you disabled the page file on your system, Wasteland 2 would crash after a while, possibly taking other parts of the system with it.)

From a programmer perspective, a memory leak looks something like this (code is in C):
{
x = malloc(sz);
/* code that uses x */
/* no call to free(x), or the call never gets executed because of a bug */
}

In other words, the programmer forgot to free the memory that was allocated, so the system thinks the program is still using the memory and can't reuse it for anything else. Then, of course, the program allocates more memory, and then the system eventually runs out of memory and has to swap something to disk. Once data has been swapped to disk, if it is later accessed, the system has to swap it back into memory, and that's the disk access you have been seeing.

Memory issues are actually one of the trickier thing to debug in C programs, to the point that tools have been developed to try to deal with it. (One recent language, Rust, has strict rules (that can trip up programmers not used to them) that are aimed to prevent memory related bugs.) Memory leaks, in particular, can remain undetected because they don't cause the program to crash or behave oddly; they just cause the program to eat memory if allowed to run long enough. (Other errors, like memory corruption, will crash the program if you are lucky, and can lead to remote code execution vulnerabilities if you are not.)

Incidentally, my suggestion of adding more RAM would only delay the inevitable; you would be able to play for longer without the system having to swap, but it would still happen eventually.

I expect they will have a patch to solve this pretty soon.

No hope.
The problem's been around for more than a year, still no fix.
It's something about Unity idiosyncrasies, so hard or impossible to patch.

The original release was already a clunker on my 2008 era computer and the DC takes several minutes to boot up the splash screen even. Haven't played long enough to tell if it is also slow to shut down.

Can't think of a Unity engine title that ever felt "right" to me, and I'm someone who has put up with the various Source engine iterations over the years so it's not like I have particularly high standards.

You`ve got to be kidding me! We pay money for this and we shouldn`t have to live with something not working right because `It`s too difficult!. That`s not the customer`s\gamer`s problem.

So I guess it`s not been so bad for me because I have 16 gig? Truth to tell, i did notice this bug after my long sessions and wondered what it was.

Not having a go at you, just saying.

There was something similar wrong with the original version, where turns would take forever on my machine. That was fixed in a patch, and it ran beautifully after that. I'm guessing somehow the same thing cropped up when shifting to Unity 5 and they weren't aware, or it is something that doesn't occur on all systems. Hearing that others have had the same issue leads me to think it is the game and not my machine, so I would recommend people go to their site and place a support ticket. If enough do this then it will get a high priority flag (I would hope!).

http://www.inxile-entertainment.com/support

It sounds to me (again, I have not experienced this myself yet) that this is a new leak and one with greater effect than any old leaks that we've been living with in W2. If so, then it is probably not a Unity problem. Also if so, then there is indeed hope that they will fix it. I'm just making a guess based on how loud the buzz is.

I saw on their forum that sear or somebody else official said it was related to shadows, and you could work around it for the time being by turning off shadows.

Support got back to me and said they thought my hard drive was failing. So I ran a five and a half hour CHKDSK scan for them to show it was just fine. Now need the time to recreate the leak and post logs.

Note: if anyone here does notice a leak, long load times, long exit times, etc. then make sure to grab a copy of the log file before firing the game up again.
Log can be located under:
<your game install path>\Wasteland 2 Director's Cut\Build\WL2_Data

Name: output_log.txt

This contains, among other things, load times.

Here's something you can try on a Linux system:

Create a script that periodically checks the memory usage. The script (which we'll call memuse.sh) might look something like this:

#!/bin/sh
free
sleep 300
exec ./memuse.sh

This script will output the memory usage stats every 5 minutes. Now just redirect the output to a text file.

Then, with the script running, play Wasteland 2 for a while. If there is a memory leak, it will show up.

(The reason for using exec here is so that the script will not use increasing amounts of memory.)

I have an R9 380 4GB card, and playing the DC I found that playing in D3d11 mode--which is native for the game--the game crashes regularly for me about every 40 minutes except when I'm underground (like in the AG Center basement), and then the crashes come every 20 minutes, or so. I've tested this many times and it is consistent behavior for the game's native D3d mode. This could be the memory leak bug or it could be something else.

However, I have found a workaround which works 99% for me--100% in-game. That is, in the last 17 hours of continuous play I haven't crashed a single time, in game. The workaround is to add the following to the target line in the game's shortcut: -force-d3d12

Ostensibly, this is for people who own a D3d12 card...like me. With the 7850, the workaround for you might well be: -force-d3d9 (I tried that briefly before using the d3d12 switch, and did not crash, either. YMMV.)

I am running the Catalysts 15.10b drivers. I said 99% above, however, because even though the game is no longer crashing while playing using the d3d12 switch, it still crashes on exit. Every time. But that is the only time it's crashing. Good news is that the crash is instantaneous--it's immediate. No lengthy shut-down crash at all when exiting. It's a CTD that leaves Win10 running.

Hope this helps!

I'm running Windows 10x64, build 10565, 8 GBs 2133MHz ram, FX-8320E.

Attached is a .png illustrating where to put the switch if you're not sure where it goes...