For example, let's go back to our walled-off path scenario: so, the game knows to ignore those chunks of terrain when looking for a path, until the terrain changes right? Well, "terrain change" doesn't just mean mining it includes building within those chunks or placing certain furniture (ladders, anything hearthlings can walk on) or chopping a tree or anything which could open up a path. Now, where things get even more complicated is that most of this work is invisible, and the player has no way to see how their own actions or orders affect the amount of work to be done in order to "solve" the simulation of whatever situations they just created. And that's just one of the many many things that the game is doing in any given moment - finding paths for enemies to travel is nothing compared to finding paths for all the hearthlings to go about their jobs, for example. However, the trade-off is that now the computer has to store notes on all these chunks as "don't bother trying to find a path through here" which eats up a small amount of memory (it has to be in RAM so that it's easily accessible when entities are looking for a path otherwise it would slow the whole simulation down while the computer reads it from HDD/SSD), and if you keep adding those small bits of memory over a long enough game then eventually they add up to a significant chunk of memory. The game tries to path some enemies through that gap, and discovers that it's blocked - it will remember that those chunks couldn't be passed through, and make a note to not even bother trying to path any enemies (those ones, or new ones) through those chunks unless it receives a new note saying that something in those chunks has changed the terrain (which might mean that a path has opened up again!) So, this is a good design decision - it saves the computer trying and failing again to find that path.
![stonehearth steam disc stonehearth steam disc](https://cdn.myfreesteamkeys.com/big-breezy-boat-free-steam-key.jpg)
However, for each clever little thing it remembers to save itself work in the future, that's one little section of memory no longer available for processing each task.įor example, let's say you have a path into your town between two hills, which you choose to block off.
![stonehearth steam disc stonehearth steam disc](https://www.allkeyshop.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/buy-stonehearth-alpha-cd-key-pc-download-img1.jpg)
Stonehearth does an amazing job of crunching complex data down into bite-sized pieces, and trimming the "possibility space" of its decisions pre-emptively to save on future processing costs.
![stonehearth steam disc stonehearth steam disc](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/vRAkPNeGI7o/mqdefault.jpg)
It's not a "memory leak" so much as "the game writes a practically infinite number of little details into memory, and your computer's memory is finite"Īnd I'm not talking about details that should be cleared and aren't (that would be a true memory leak), I'm talking about details that are supposed to be remembered.