Memory Usage

Hi, trying to find the amount of main memory a running program is using.

I only see commands to find Vid Mem.

What i'm doing is hitting the 'windows' key and having a look at the 'blitzcc.exe' process in the task manager.

Is this a reliable way to find main memory usage?

I'm running on a 512Mb machine and was wondering what size of program I could run on a 256Mb machine.
(under Windows Xp)

Thanks
Marg

Theoretically, as much as the virtual RAM allows.

I've just used the Windows Task Manager to tell me the memory usage. Seemed to be accurate enough.

I don't know what your project is, how large it is so it is difficult to comment on whether 256MB is enough.

However, an easy way to calculate the amount of memory your game or app will take up, as an estimate (disregarding video memory usage for now,) would be to have a look at the way you are storing data.

As an example - in one of my games "Blood And Plunder" (Gauntlet clone/remake) most of the system memory is used by music and sound effects (filesize of wav files and uncompressed ogg files will tell you this), and only a small amount of it by gameplay data. No more than about 5-6MB were used by my pathfinding method (pre calculated) and this was probably the single most largest amount of memory used for any component other than sound and graphics. All the other Types and arrays in use would probably account in total for another 4 or 5 MB of system memory.