So recently I started playing Civ again installed and started playing.

I started noticing once there was a lot of stuff on the map, the HUD?(not sure what appropriate name would be, the palce where you see the minimap, the tech being researched etc.. all the blue area) would sometimes dissapear for a couple seconds and the game would be frozen up. It would usually happen a couple times several minutes apart before finally crashing.

The crash could be triggered by several actions. Saving, clicking on the minimap, selecting a unit, moving a unit, and more all caused the crash. When crashing, the music would keep playing but the screen would flash to black, then flash to a darker black, then back to black and repeat for a minute or two before crashing to the desktop and giving me the "civ 4 has encountered an error and needs to close (send/don't send report)" error. The desktop would also appear on 800 resolution and 8 bit colors with no way of resetting it except by restarting the computer.


Here is the error log taken from the Event Viewer.

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Application Error
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1000
Date: 10/12/2008
Time: 10:27:47 AM
User: N/A
Computer: JASON-BDFEAA5DD
Description:
Faulting application civ4beyondsword.exe, version 3.1.3.1, faulting module civ4beyondsword.exe, version 3.1.3.1, fault address 0x005c5da7.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Data:
0000: 41 70 70 6c 69 63 61 74 Applicat
0008: 69 6f 6e 20 46 61 69 6c ion Fail
0010: 75 72 65 20 20 63 69 76 ure civ
0018: 34 62 65 79 6f 6e 64 73 4beyonds
0020: 77 6f 72 64 2e 65 78 65 word.exe
0028: 20 33 2e 31 2e 33 2e 31 3.1.3.1
0030: 20 69 6e 20 63 69 76 34 in civ4
0038: 62 65 79 6f 6e 64 73 77 beyondsw
0040: 6f 72 64 2e 65 78 65 20 ord.exe
0048: 33 2e 31 2e 33 2e 31 20 3.1.3.1
0050: 61 74 20 6f 66 66 73 65 at offse
0058: 74 20 30 30 35 63 35 64 t 005c5d
0060: 61 37 0d 0a a7..


THe error logs each seem to be a bit different, I won't post them all here unless requested, I'm not going to have a 50 page long post.

My C: drive was "dirty" for the past week or so and chkdsk could not fix it. I finally managed to get it to "NOT dirty" this morning. I will try playing a game now, I am hoping that it had something to do with my Civ crashing. I will update if I am able to play without a crash or if I crash.

Ok it didn't fix, kind of.

I did notice that I lasted much longer in the late game where lots of stuff was going on.

I am starting to belive it is due to a memory leak or something, but I have no idea exactly how to identify and fix this. Reason being is that I was noticing the game going from smooth and progressively I was losing FPS. I started getting a "dissapearing HUD" about every five minutes or so, which progressively came at faster intervals. Now just about five minutes ago the game was lagging terribly and I knew something was about to go down because the HUD dissapeared about five times within one minute then I got to the black/blacker screen flash where I just restarted without bothering to sit through it and restarting anyway.

Any suggestions?

No one has any ideas? :confused:

First: Have you updated to BTS 3.17?

Next: Your system meets the official required specs for the game, but to be honest with you the GeForce FX 5500 is a very substandard card for playing CIV. People were having issues with Vanilla Civ using that card back in 2005 when the game originally came out.

It is very likely that Civ has a memory leak (lots of programs do) but there is nothing you can do about it directly. This is not something the end-user can change. You can get more RAM than 1GB that you have - if you want.

Things you can do:

You can change the resolution of the game to a lower setting (such as 1024-768). That will reduce the pressure on your GPU. You can change some of the graphics settings on the options menu in the game, such as turning off unit animations, and reducing graphics settings to low. You can go into the BTS.ini file and change some of the advanced settings such as turning on the MEMsaver option, and some of the graphics related things.

First: Have you updated to BTS 3.17?
That I have done, I haven't got the "unofficial patch" though, should I give it a try?
Next: Your system meets the official required specs for the game, but to be honest with you the GeForce FX 5500 is a very substandard card for playing CIV. People were having issues with Vanilla Civ using that card back in 2005 when the game originally came out.
Yeah this computerw as built on a budget at a time when I had no computer so getting one quickly was more important than waiting to have enough money to spend on a better one
It is very likely that Civ has a memory leak (lots of programs do) but there is nothing you can do about it directly. This is not something the end-user can change. You can get more RAM than 1GB that you have - if you want.

Things you can do:

You can change the resolution of the game to a lower setting (such as 1024-768). That will reduce the pressure on your GPU. You can change some of the graphics settings on the options menu in the game, such as turning off unit animations, and reducing graphics settings to low. You can go into the BTS.ini file and change some of the advanced settings such as turning on the MEMsaver option, and some of the graphics related things.
I have all the in game settings on lowest, I'm not sure what my resolution is but I will try lowering it if possible.
I hate to say this because I sound like a complete idiot, but I can't find the BTS.ini file :blush:

Thanks for the help I'll report back if it helped.

No worries: The BTS config file can be found in:

Documents/My Games/Beyond the Sword/

I think the file is actually called civilizationiv.ini, but make sure it is the one found in the Beyond the Sword folder!

I don't know that much about the unofficial patch. Maybe someone else can chime in on that issue

To change the game resolution, you can go to the options menu once you load up BTS and go to the graphics tab. The first option should be to adjust the resolution.

Thanks I found it.

Is there a post or article that shows which options should be enabled and disabled for best performance? I was able to look through and see some that seemed obvious, but there's a lot that I'm unsure of what they mean exactly and I'd rather not mess everything up by changing them.


It also turns out my resolution is already on the lowest setting possible.

I have had a number of problems with ffh, for the longest time after hitting continue on game start, i would get the age of magic has ended movie screen, but it would apear blank and cause a crash to desktop, i tried to play on another computer and had the exact same result. i found this post and as steve2000 suggested for this guy i messed with the setting in the configuration file. I found that alot of differnt options could be turned off, with most video sequences turned off i am now able to play ffh without issue.
Both computers use a shared memory on board video geforce 6150 chipset, and I am somewhat sure this is the cause to my former problem, ram alone would not clear it up i used 3Gigs with no success.
I would also like to point out that most of these settings use a 1 and 0
where as 0= flase/no
and 1= true/yes
and TY steve2000 for your mighty wise suggestion :-)