'nuff said - what info can I give you?

Nvidia Gforce 2 Mx/Mx400

Same here. I'm set to lowest graphics, no music, no unit animations, and right when it tries to zoom in to the city (or when the wonder movie screen appears), the game crashes. Sometimes. Not every time. (Which implies a bug.) I'm using Radeon 7500, if it matters.

I'd just like to point out how incredibly stupid it is that we can't disable wonder movies. :mad:

Or has someone already figured out a way to monkey with the XML to stop them from firing?

Same problem here. I remember how we could disable wonder movies in Civ2... my how we've advanced.

Same problem here... using a 64MB GeForce 4 Ti 4200. I too tried in vain to disable wonder movies - apparently they aren't included in the "minimize popups" option. Grrr....

Works like a charm: Go to the civ4config file and change the "no in game movies" thing to 1 instead of 0

Same thing is happening on my end--sometimes the wonder movies are fine, but most of the time it kicks me to the desktop. Once it restarted my computer. Worst part is those Wonder movies are pretty uninspired--they're all pretty much the same thing. Somewhat disappointing. And frustrating that there's no way to turn them off.

Love the music, though. And so far the game is everything I expected it to be,

Same problem. I have a cruddy GEForce 4 MX. I'll try that config solution later on.

Thanks MDM -- I'll try it tonight.

And I agree, the music and the atmosphere of this game are great. Too bad I can't fully enjoy it. :(

I solved this problem by installing the latest drivers for my graphics card. nVidia just put out a new set for the GeForce based cards a week ago.

Hope this works for some other people too!


FYI: There is a parallel discussion (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=133312)going on in the Bug Reports forum...

I have an MX 400 as well, anyone else try the edit in the config file?

I have installed the latest drivers available tonight (Thursday 10/27/05) from www.nvidia.com.

I have not tested wonder movies yet, but I still get an error pop-up box on the main menu screen and again when I first start a game.

The error window title is "TXT_KEY_INVALID_PLAYBACK_TITLE" with a body of "Invalid Device".

I hate to have to disable wonder movies in order to play the game since that and voice-chat multiplayer were the two features I was most looking forward to seeing.

Nvidia GeForce 4 Ti4200 64MB 8xAGP

Go to C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\My Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4

Open CivilizationIV.ini

Find ; Set to 1 for no in-game movies
NoMovies = 0

And set NoMovies = 1

Did anyone experiencing this problem with NVidia/GeForce card remedy this situation with new drivers? I just installed the newest drivers, but I'm afraid to test this and lose a game as a result :P

Thanks for that fix, I hopped on to find out exactly this. I'm running below the required, but aside from the wonder movies things were actually doing fine. And I had The Pyramids work ok (Just jerky), but after a couple bugged me out I figured I'd seek a fix.

Also managed to change the username and alias. Spiffy, shouldn't need to keep changing it every time I play now. =D

My wonder movies don't crash, but they play for 1 sec, stop very shortly, play another sec, stop, etc. including the sound stopping, too. I had this problem before with other games that use the "Bink" video software.
Anyone know a solution?

ATI Radeon 9600 Pro (5.7 or 5.8 I believe but don't think this ever changed b/c of driver version)
Win XP SP2
Direct X 9.0c (of course from Civ4 DVD)
Lots of codecs installed

Notre Dame wonder has crashed twice now.
First time to reboot - unistalled & reinstalled.
Second time to desktop.
Asus P4C800E, 2.6 MHz, 1 G memory, FX5900 GT w driver ver 5.3.0.3, WinXP SP1
Don't accept driver as issue since game plays fine up to that point.

FIX for Wonder Movies crashing:

Game would play fine until certain wonder movies played, then got a CTD.

Solution:
Uninstall game. Reboot.
Install latest driver from Nvidia.com. Reboot.
Reinstall game. Reboot.
Play game.


This worked for me. When I built a wonder (Stonehenge) the movie window would pop-up, then the game would lock-up. Any attempt to do anything else, like hit ESC, would immediately result in a CTD (crash to desktop, game gone).

Be aware that after install the new drivers, I STILL had to uninstall the game and reinstall it in order for it to work correctly.

Really guys, if the wonder movies are giving you problems, PLEASE, uninstall the game, reboot, update your video driver, reboot, then re-install the game, reboot.

This technique has helped me. I really hope it helps you.

Nope that ain't it.
Replayed again until Stonehenge reboot crash. Replay & crash to desktop.
Run Task Manager & Motherboard Monitor in background to watch temps & crazy thing plays Stonehenge. Really interesting artifacts. CPU useage is high but temps are fine. Somethings wrong here - it's not hardware. When I first got into games & they didn't work I always assumed it was my fault. I don't jump through that hoop anymore.

Perhaps the routine or program (I'm not computer savvy so I don't know the lingo) is too inefficient, taking up lots of CPU, which causes the game to crash on relatively older PC's?

Report from the trenches

I changed the settings in the Civconfig file. No movies. (That includes the animations for unit battles.) but otherwise complete stability.

I am hoping that they fix the movies at some point. Kinda makes getting wonders fun during the end game.

Won 2nd easiest setting with space race about 80 turns before mandetory. Next up Noble setting.

System is

P4
3.0 GHz
2 gigs of Ram
Eforce 5200

Considering upgrading the video card sometime this week. I will let you know if that helps.

(Note that I have NOT updated drivers to most recent. When I did that I experienced problems with EQ2 and, for now, I would like to keep playing that game).