hammer, completely unstable

Hammer has to be the most unstable program I have EVER worked with. If it was only an operating system it could surpass WinME as the crappiest code ever. Ive got 512mb ram, plenty of free harddrive space (50 or so gigs), winXP (home), geforce3...

Im shutting off ALL other programs before opening Hammer and that doesnt seem to help at all. Ive tried RAMdefraggers but that doesnt seem to help either because Hammer doesnt just crash when it runs out of RAM, just whenever it feels like it.

Has anyone figured out how to stabilize this POS at all?

Valve maybe?

Post your system specs, and what problems are you experencing?

Now for my rant about Hammer: Hammer takes up a lot of RAM, and
honestly if you have used the UNREAL ed then you would know that that
editor takes up a lot more of system resources than hammer does (same
goes for the Doom 3 editor). 512 is a lot, but that barely enough to
run the game at decent settings, add some more RAM and not only will
Hammer run better, so will your computer. Also what is your processor?
There is a significant difference between 800MHz and a 2.4 GHz
processor.

You might also have adware on your computer, along with spyware, run a
tool that gets rid of it and maybe your system will stabilize.

Also, reduce the number of undo's. That helps a lot. Try to close as many steam windows as you can while hammer is open.

I think its because hammer loads all the textures into ram or something (the GCF system doesn't allow hammer to just load them).

3 ghz pentuim 4

512mb ram

radeon 9800 (128 mb) - opps thought I had a geforce3 :razz: was my last system

winXP

50gigs harddrive space left.

I run ad-aware & spybot religously. Ive got norton 2004 (up to date). I dont have ad-aware & spybot loading when the machine boots becuase there's not much point. I boot up in a selective mode where it doesn't load norton when I want to use Hammer, because norton has enough problems of it's own.

The funny thing is that I can have a ram defragger up that's reporting how much ram I had free and Hammer crashes consistantly when Ive got over 100megs of ram left. Running out of ram doesnt seem to be the only instigator.

Hell, when I shut down the SDK window that I have to open to get into Hammer (who thought of terrible idea?) I'll regain 100+ megs of ram sometimes (but doesnt help with the Hammer stability issue).

Normally when Hammer crashes it doesn't want to let me save my map but then I close down the SDK window and for some reason it lets me save then. It chews my system up so badly that when I click the winXP start menu button NONE of my programs are listed anywhere in there.

I've got another stick of 512megs ram but it went bad and have to replace it. Maybe when Im back up to 1gig or ram it will behave better, but as it is it has to be THE WORST development tool I've EVER used... and I was programming in BASIC on my 8088 ... back in the day when PC's only ran at 4.77 mgz, 640k was 'more then you'll ever need' (thanks bill gates hehe) and my duel floppy drives where the bomb (because we didnt have hard drives yet!)

/sigh

I didn't see any explicit mention of it, but make certain you close the
"Source SDK" window right after you launch Hammer. The "Source
SDK" menu window just sits there consuming non-paged memory until your
system starts to die.

And as already mentioned, reduce the number of 'undo's :

<div style="margin-left: 40px;">Menu Tools --> Options... --> General tab --> Undo Levels

</div>
Mine is set to 50... no problems.

Valve has already responded to this problem here:

http://www.chatbear.com/board.plm?a=viewthread&t=102,1103748632,4247&id=760736&b=4989&v=flatold

[size=13]It appears on some user's systems, the SDK
installation runs out of resources after working in the SDK/Hammer for
a certain amount of time.

We are currently investigating this issue.

Until the exact solution is found, some users have reported that closing the SDK Launcher and the Steam Play Games menu after launching Hammer prevents the problem from occurring. If you're having this issue, you may want to see if that solves the issue for you.

This is not a permanent solution, but may be a useable workaround
until we find the exact source of the problem and provide a solution or
SDK update.

Really, Hammer is one of the most stable level editors ever made.
Since level editors have no use in the actual game, most are very
unstable (anyone remember the early versions of UnrealEd?)

[/size]

True

ok this is hilarious BUT... If I run WinAmp while using Hammer then Hammer never crashes... no idea why but it works. I had been shutting winamp off before using hammer because i wanted all the ram I could get but... I guess hammer likes listening to my mp3s... /shrug

prolly because winamp uses a memoryblock that causes hammer to crash. when it's being taken up by winamp (gag) hammer is not encountering it and therefore not crashing. When it's off hammer uses that memoryblock and gets retarded.(in here)

Assuming that's true, how can a memory block that causes Hammer to crash not cause Winamp to crash?

because it's being used in a different way by each program. or maybe winamp uses it for something like the little window that pops up when you click "About" in the help menu. That is something almost no one goes to, so we woldnt KNOW if it makes it crash or not.