Well, the trouble continues:

Since yesterday I have not been able to play test my game. The first launch already took a while if I'm not mistaken, then I got an "Error E1241: Can't open DirectX device" (three D3D_Init Window: 640x352 failed messages before that in the acklog).
Since then my game has taken twice as long to compile as it did before. Old values: 15.Xs for the first compile, then 12.Xs for subsequent compiles. Now it takes 29.Xs, until the game starts with an OUT OF MEMORY DirectX error.

Just once it worked correctly with the old compiling time after a reboot, otherwise always the same result.
I've tried several old builds from my external hard drive, including one from over a year ago, surprisingly the same result.
Reinstalled everything, no Windows update since May, thought it could be the DirectX loader that's making trouble but no change.
(1) Do you have any idea what could be causing this behavior?


When I put

at the end of my main file (finally found this helpful define in the manual) I can see that the "..." progress almost comes to a halt after it's done compiling my code. Most dots now take about 3-5times as long, the first dot after my last PRAGMA_PRINT/ last line in my code takes about 10 times as long as the previous average.
I'm not sure what the compiler is doing right after it's done with my source code as it takes a while until it reaches the first global dummy TEXT or PANEL object (where I put in invalid code).
(2) Can you please share some insight on this process?



Publishing and compiling the exe there takes as long as it does now too, however, the published version seems to work fine. This is not quite feasible for development though.
VMMap returns a Heap size of 380MB for my game running in the published version and a level loaded and running.
When I put invalid code after my last PRAGMA_PRINT and stop the compile process that way, VMMap returns a Heap size of about 1245MB (EDIT: 961MB on my laptop?). After that it crawls up to about 1550MB, starting the game and then resulting in that OUT OF MEMORY error on level_load (which seems reasonable because of the 2GB/ ~1.6GB heap limit - the previous 380MB seem to coincide as well).
(3) I am aware that the development build is different to the published build but does it seem reasonable that the compiling of less than 3MB in code result in that huge heap size in the development version?


Thanks for your time.

EDIT2: Although it probably does not matter in this case, the exact error is "DirectX driver failure: D3DERR_OUTOFVIDEOMEMORY".