There seem to be some systems where the game starts up fine but may fail in-game due to insufficient system resources, such as insufficient video RAM.

There have been some bug reports (I'm happy to look those up if requested, here's one but there have been more) indicating that MegaGlest requires 512 MB video RAM to be available, 256 MB are often not enough but can work if the least resource consuming configuration is applied.

While there will be a stack trace and an error message on standard output/error to report what happened, this is not a great experience if it happens while you are in-game, and not a great experience for GUI addicts in general. I think it would be better to check for possibly insufficient system resources at start-up (allowing to override this check with an INI setting) and to display a warning if it turns out that the system does not provide for the minimum requirements. This waning could contain a hint to check http://faq.megaglest.org for hints on a low resource configuration.