Well said Philips

Well I and others have said, when Civ5 comes out, I won't be buying it until I've heard it's stable.

Enough people do that and they don't get the sales... I guess you're always going to get the uninitiated, but if you alienate your "ongoing" fan base it's going to hurt a bit...

I'm going to the same with every other Take2/Firaxis product now too. Sure, they got the quick buck this time, but you can't keep doing the same thing.

Yep, and if you do it enough times, customers wont just wait until it hits the bargain bins, they'll stop buying altogether. As well as telling every friend they know why they shouldn't buy either.

For example, I will never, ever, consider purchasing a Bethesda title. I bought several of the Daggerfall series and they were bug ridden every single time. Even if the next one hits the bargain bins at 25 cents, I swear I wont give them another dime. Ever. And look, here I am evangelising and recommending you should never buy from them, either. ;)

BTW this game is not bad at all, compared to so many other disastrous game releases. Not that I'm in the "it's typical so get over it" camp, just saying at least the game mechanics are down tight. Behind the occasional crashes, there's a great game to play that's worth rebooting for. :goodjob:

Rebooting how many times though? I played for a couple of days before shelving it for a week or so before discovering and trying the changes here at CFC... and how many people just shelved it?

But yes, now I tell my friends, great game, but wait.... don't buy yet. Get another game for Christmas.

Natronomonas http://forums.civfanatics.com/showth...7375&page=3#52

Not the most discursive update, but at least some official comment...

I agree something is better then nothing. This is sort of something. :crazyeye:

I'm not going to read all of your arguing, I just want to say that the game design rocks, but the technical implementation completely sucks.

The developers and publishers both deserve to be criticized and *****ed at for shipping it before it was done. It's crap, just like every other piece of crap from any game company who ships early to meet the quarter/holiday season.

It sure is a fun piece of crap, though.

I totally agree with this. Couldn't stop laughing when I read it though. Especially that last line.

BTW this game is not bad at all, compared to so many other disastrous game releases. Not that I'm in the "it's typical so get over it" camp, just saying at least the game mechanics are down tight. Behind the occasional crashes, there's a great game to play that's worth rebooting for.

See this is what is so frustrating to me. The game is fun when it does work. Especially after Harks hard work. Man being able to play the game now is downright awesome. I still get the occasional slow down. Which if I ignore will crash my system. Lock it tight or just a mem allocation error. If the game slows at all I have to save, back out. reboot and clear the cache. The problem here is unseen. If I let it lock up hard and before Harks work it would. You have to reset your system. Everytime you do this you risk killing your hdd. You at least do some minor damage to it. Not as much as in the old days. But you do some damage. That adds up. There is a reason there is a shut down. Not to mention the risk of totally hosing your OS.
This is what drives me up a wall.

I just hope firaxis can fix this. I hope I am wrong about the expansion pack fix threory. But with there current rate of work and communication who knows. Even if your a hard core believer you don't know they are hard at work. You can assume as much. But we have an old saying in the Army, you can assume but you know what it makes, it makes an blank out of you and me. Censored for my own good. LOL.

Back when we were gaming on dos and 95 machines. We knew it was the os. The limitations of the os made gaming hard. high mem, cd drivers loading the mouse in a bat file. Oh man the bat files you would have to create to get the game to work.
Those old excuses of all the hardware is different. Well they are getting old. Nvidia and ATI have locked up the video cards. Pretty much everyone is running xp. Which is the most stable MS OS to come out. Please lets not make this an MS thing. Cause we could go for years on that. I agree he stole it from xerox. joy joy everyone get happy.
Sure we have differnet mobo manufactuers. ok. chipsets and so on. But is it really the hodge podge everyone is lead to believe. The nightmare. I wonder. I would like to hear from someone who actually codes games on this. Yes this means you can not comment aussie. I mean I can not stop you, but would hope you leave it to someone who actually does this for a living to explain it.
Shoot I would love to hear Harks take on it. Seems he has his hands well in this cookie Jar.
I will admit I am a hardware geek, I work on servers, workstations and laptops. I also do network admin work. My programing skills died out with basic.

10 ? "I love beer"
20 goto 10

LOL. I still have the old trek game I played on the atari 800 that I totally rewrote and almost got suspended for.

So open question to the game coders out there. Is the state of todays Hardware really the hodge podge that everyone is lead to believe. Please only answer this if you are a game programmer. Otherwise it is just an opinion, and they are just like.... well you get the idea. I am looking for honest feedback. Help me, us to understand a little better. :crazyeye:

So open question to the game coders out there. Is the state of todays Hardware really the hodge podge that everyone is lead to believe. Please only answer this if you are a game programmer.

Hell yeah, it's a hodge podge.

But, if you're coding with DirectX, the whole point is that you don't have to worry about it. You're supposed to be able to just write good DirectX code and let the hardware manufacturers make it work.

Realistically, a small game company is going to test on only a small set of hardware configurations. The main focus should be on testing the actually game play, not the hardware compatability. Most developers won't have the resources to insure is works on everything. Theoretically, if the hardware drivers all work properly with the current version of DirectX (<--BIG "if" there), then if it works on one it works on them all.

But, then there's the other tools...BINK, MILES Sound System, PYTHON (WTF?!? on that one), etc. etc...The more of these you rely on, the greater your chances are of having bugs in your game that you will never, ever find. If you heavily rely on somebody elses code, you're just asking for trouble. But, you can't fault developers for using them. Your budget may not allow for any other choice.

Back in the "old" days (DOS) you had to write code for every piece of hardware out there. But, how many hardware companies were there? Take sound cards, for example. You could count them on one hand. Heck, if you're talking King's Quest, I think there was only one!

So is it the different Hardware, or is it the tools you use. It almost sounds like its the tools from what you just said.


total side note. I believe I read somewhere that python was use to encourage moding.

There's always a problem with both. :mad:

Cool thank you for your input.

blue3c
What actually do you mean by "hodge podge"? If you mean a big diversity - then yes and no.

It's actually YES when it comes to testing... No matter how clean the code is, expect bugs.

I am constantly looking for new creations at demoscene (scene.org). And you know what?... In days of GeForce2 domination, a lot of demo-coders wrote demos which used nVidia OpenGL exetnsions... rendering them unusable for my current ATi.

I praise ATi not for becoming a legend again, out from nothing when nVidia had the market... I praise them for solving all those compatibility issues which they inevitably had with so much software being tested onyl with nVidia just because nVidia was dominating when it was written.

This also comes to bugs legitimization. My favourite story about that is not about D3D, it's about HTML. &nbsp; is the correct spelling. &nbsp is not. But IE (MS explorer) treats just &nbsp as a space as well. Inevitably there is a backlog of documents on the web which have &nbsp (no semicolon at the end). No matter this contradicts with HTML specs, all new browsers have to follow, that is '&nbsp' is a space, not &nbsp as Opera6 for example shows it.

I believe ATi had A LOT OF "&nbsp"'s in games written for nVidia, and sometimes these legitimized bugs are to be caught later, by developers of our days. I think my insane_mode (which is actually a "bug") works because it worked before with 'nVidia' for some famouse title, so ATi and even Intel had to follow... heck, it works for everyone in that thread with very few exceptions (probably debug version of d3d runtime).

There is a "robustness" principle (frequently noted in RFCs) which I just don't accept. It states "be democratic with what you get, be strict with you give". It's about the code, protocols and interfaces.

Whenever I write something, I prefer using "be pain in the a** with whatever you get". Otherwise a lot of bugs become legal, and a lot of ambiguities appear.

Damn, even HTTP has legitimate bug with chunked output. It should end with \n\n, but it ends with just \n (probably vice versa). Read RFC and check google output with telnet (or any other web site). And FireFox has stepped on this stone with their first version... I even saw request for fixing at RentACoder :)

i have to say, i agree with blue3c. if u buy something, you expect it to work. FULL STOP. not, it will work when we get the 4th patch out in a years time. work the first time round, then you would not have arguments like these. its the same with all things in life. If you bought a car and the brakes didnt work, would you still think, "hey man, dont worry, its the holidays, the rest of the car is fine". Or if you bought a pair of scissors that didnt cut anything, you wouldnt say "its ok, its the holidays" no if something doesnt work, its up to the manufacturer to fix it.

personally dude, i think if ur that upset with the game, just return it, and buy AOEIII or something.

As much as I hate to bang on about it I agree also. Would it be acceptable for a playstation/XBOX game to be released in this state? I know they don't have compatibility issues, but I think the real gripe is that SO MANY systems & cards were not Beta tested. I agree that 99% is an acceptable success rate and that some systems will always have issues, but I personally don't believe Firaxis came anywhere near this figure (on systems THEY said should work).
They deserve credit for getting the problem fixed so quickly (For those unaware Rome total war suffered CTD in the same way and to his date, STILL no patch). However, there is still no excuse for not getting it right first time.

Not sure how it works in the US, but in the UK you can basically take any game back if it doesn't work (even unpatched). In the US, either they should accept returns no questions asked, or they should ensure proper testing. They can't have it both ways.

This issue has slowly been getting worse over the last 6 or 7 years and it is time some kind of legislation was implemented in the major gaming countries, to force publishers to hit certain targets in relation to compatibility on release and also revised targets after a given time period, to allow for patching. The difficult bit is coming up with a sensible & reasonable solution which doesn't hold back games producers. HOWEVER, THERE MUST BE A WAY!:)

Created this account just to let Hark know that his work made it possible to play this game...it would CTD for me after a while, but not any more...and there is no reason a game like this should cause my rig to CTD...thanks man!

Created this account just to let Hark know that his work made it possible to play this game...it would CTD for me after a while, but not any more...and there is no reason a game like this should cause my rig to CTD...thanks man!

I also haven't had a CTD since applying his patch. I can actually play huge maps with 18 civs, which was previously a very bad idea.

I am downloading v1.52 now, so let's hope that this is the one we have been waiting for.

sorry, wrong thread

I think we need to close this thread :).

With a PS2 or an X-Box there is just one configuration for the developers to test the game on, with the PC there is almost an unlimited amount of different combinations, so there is no way in which they can get the game to work fine for all possible pc combinations. When people find a bug for their system, they can report it and they fix it.

Or, when they find many bugs, they can report all of them and they can all be fixed.... which is what is finally happening : )
: )

Did I mention I'm happy after the 1.52 patch : )

sure sure sure sure sure

Let me start out by saying that although I am not totally clueless when it comes to computing I am no genious either. While I do understand half of the technical advice that is given here the other half might be over my head. Having said this I recently purchased Civ 4 and was really looking foward to dominating the game but have encountered countless problems just tryng to get it to work. Currently after much effort and sweat (and cursing and contemplating just sticking to plaing Civ 3) I am now to the point where the game plays (although a bit slowly, specially late in the game, during wonder movies {heavy stuttering and static}, and in the diplomacy leader clip {really slows down when attempting to initiate the leader screen between turns). However I am now in the latter stages of a game and the problems seem to be getting worse. Recently upon completion of the Space Elevator wonder the computer froze and I had alot of difficulty even getting Task Manager to come up. I shut Civ 4 down and restarted the system which overcame this problem (I was still not able to view the movie but the computer did not freeze this time). Yet when I completed the Space Race and earned a Space Race Victory the computer crashed again. In summarry I need help in four particular areas:

1. Improving game speed between turns (specially when a diplomacy window is going to appear).
2. Improving or eliminating wonder movie performance.
3.Improving game speed in general (regardless of what graphics quality sacrifices I must make).
4. Improving Intro and Victory movie performance (or getting it to play at all) or eliminating them.

Here is what I have done so far:

1. All updates for Windows are installed.
2. Latest version of DirectX installed.
2 1/2. Direct X ran and tested (passed all tests).
3. Latest Sound and Video Drivers installed.
4. Requirements checked and passed.
5. Page File on Virtual Memory set to Min=Max
6. Sound Acceleration turned off.
7. Direct3D enabled.
8. Direct3D acceleration disabled.
9. Messed with many memory saving settings in the _Civ4Cofig file.
10. Downloaded and installed latest Civ 4 patch.
11. Messed with many memory saving settings in the _Civ4Config file (again).
12. Turned all the Video settings to Low within the options Menu in the game.

Here is what I have not done so far:

1. I have not changed the AGP memory size on my BIOS settings (becouse I do not know how or where to).
2. I have not disabled Antialiasing (becouse I cannot find where to do so {have looked everywhere in DirectX and in the Display and System Utilities in the Control Panel}).
3. Have not been able to clear Game Cache (can't find file, tried to follow both paths listed on this forum but so far have been unable to get there)

Here is what I suspect might be wrong:

1. When I downloaded the patch I did not do it through the game rather I logged on to the Official Web Site and got it through there while the game was off. As a result it did not save the patch within the Sid Mier's Civ 4 Folder but instead under My Documents in a folder I created myself. When I installed it I saw the Civ screen come up so I assumed everything went ok, could this be the problem?

2. I have made several changes within the _Civ4Config file but I have noticed that almost none of them have taken effect. List:
1. HideMovieBackground = 1 (yet it stills shows the background)
2. MemSaver = 1 (alt-tab function still works)
3. Bink16Bit = 1 (cant really tell whether this change took effect but there was no improvement in game play. It was suppossed to switch from true color to hi-color movies)
4. BinkInterlace = 1 (can't really tell if this took effect or made a difference).
5. Disabled background music (this actually did take effect!).
6. NoMovies = 1 (nothing happenned still get all the in-game movies)
7. AutoSaveInterval = 0 (one of the few changes that did work, no more auto-saves).
WHAT IS GOING ON HERE? WHY ARE SOME CHANGES FUNCTIONING AND OTHER NOT?

3. The first time I ran Civ 4 after installing the patch the game said that some of the system requirements were barely met the settings had therefore been altered and that this might effect game play. Are my problems just a matter of computing power and I either have to live with what I have or is there anything else I can do?

I apologize for the length of this letter and I do appreciate any help offerred and your time in reading this long list of complaints. I have been plaing Civ for about 13 years now and I have always loved the game so this is pretty disappointing since I have never had such a problem running a game before. Once again thanks for any help I can get and good gaming to every one.

1.09 did very little to address these issues. Try the latest patch, 1.61 which you can find here (http://civfanatics.com/civ4/patch/).

talk about necromancing...

Was that response intended for me or someone else? If it was for me I have downloaded the latest patch v1.61 already but my problems continue. I am especially perplexed by the fact that some of the changes I made in the config file have taken effect while others have not. Anyways thanks for the help if you were replying to my post, if not thanks anyways.

That wan intended for you, it was the first one after you posted. It's to you definetly.

Was that response intended for me or someone else? If it was for me I have downloaded the latest patch v1.61 already but my problems continue.Of course it was intended for you. This thread is about about 1.09 and nowhere did you explain that you had downloaded any other patch. ;) I am especially perplexed by the fact that some of the changes I made in the config file have taken effect while others have not. Anyways thanks for the help if you were replying to my post, if not thanks anyways.Sorry. That was the only suggestion I had. The only other thing I can think of is your computer may not be up to scratch. You need a recent video card and at least 512Meg of RAM. Preferably a Gig. But you probably knew that already.

I'm using patch 1.5something. Works for me and I'm not going to risk a patch that will screw it all up for me. Maybe you can try that one