BTS causes bluescreens of death on mouse click

Hello civFanatics forum,

I'm having problems with BTS. It is causing blue screens of death (BSoD) randomly when I click with my mouse. I can play a long time before BSoD happens (more than 3 hours).

Example :

- During a diplomacy event with a foreign leader. I click on one of the possibilities of reply and then BSoD.
- I have a missionary that is waiting for orders then I click on the mini-map, I can the screen change to the other location for 0.5 second and the BSoD.

I have the game for 3 days now and all the games I have played ended with a BSoD. I have patched up the game before I played for the 1st time with the latest version ( v : 3.13, 121MB). I have also updated my graphic drivers after the 1st BSoD without any effect. I have not had any problems when playing Civ4 Vanilla for the prior 2 years.

My hardware is :

- Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2
- Intel Core(TM)2 CPU 6420 @ 2.13 Ghz.
- ATI Radeon X1950 Pro (latest drivers)
- Asus P5B Deluxe
- Quantum FireBall 30 gig (Dont laugh...I have windows on it for nearly 7 years now and it has outlasted 3 other 'storage' disks combined )
- SeaGate 330 Gig 7200 rpm (Civ4 is installed on it).
- Creative X-Live 5.1
- Antec 500 Watt powersupply.

My resolution is 1280*1024 with all the details, textures in the options screen set to maximum (the game is smooth).

I must point out that when I was playing Civ4 vanilla I didnt get to see the missionaries or great people's little light show animations when they are doing they function in a city. Now with BTS I do (maybe the problem is related to that but I don't know what to do with it).

The only thing I have played in BTS is the 18Civ Scenario for the vanilla version.

Thank you for your time

LoneTraveller

welcome to cfc

does the blue screen contain any error message you remember? does the event log show anything?

I found out looking through the CivilizationIV.ini file that the event logger wasnt turned on. So I just turned it on and activated the dump file generator. I'll give it a try and see what happens.

I got another bluescreen just now. It says it has a problem with the file 'ati2cqag.dll'

I get its my graphic card that is the problem.

you might want to try a different (newer?) driver for your graphics card...

I can't. I installed the 'latest' meaning right off the ati.com website 2 days ago. I got another blue screen and noticed a line saying :

PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA

at the end of a turn.

Should I report this to 2k.com or will they never answer me ?

you can always try and hope for an answer - but they'll tell you it is not their fault since it is likely a hardware issue:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms793437.aspx Microsoft Developer Network said:

Bug Check 0x50: PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA

The PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA bug check has a value of 0x00000050. This indicates that invalid system memory has been referenced.
Parameters

The following parameters are displayed on the blue screen.
Parameter Description
1 Memory address referenced
2 0: Read operation

1: Write operation

3 Address that referenced memory (if known)
4 Reserved

If the driver responsible for the error can be identified, its name is printed on the blue screen and stored in memory at the location (PUNICODE_STRING) KiBugCheckDriver.
Cause

Bug check 0x50 usually occurs after the installation of faulty hardware or in the event of failure of installed hardware (usually related to defective RAM, be it main memory, L2 RAM cache, or video RAM).

Click to expand...

I have a vague idea. Don't be shy to call it 'not related to the issue' but when I launched the task manager of winxp and looked at the amount of RAM used by the civ4 process, the amount shown was near 1.4 gig. Now I have 2 gigs of ram and I assume that winxp takes like a few hundreds to run the programs in backround.

When I do the math a part of me says that all the RAM must be close to used up.

Could it be that the map I am running is too big for my hardware capabilities ?

I mean when I'm looking at the map and there are no selected units that have focus and then I select the diplomacy or military menus well I think that the program launches another thread and there is just no more memory to borrow.

Would another 2 gigs of DDR2 800 mhz help out or not ?

well - 2 GB of RAM are plenty to run the game, though it might slow down if it needs lots of it itself - since windows starts using hard drive memory once the RAM memory fills up, which is slower but will not cause crashes. more RAM will help making the game faster (though by default XP does not allow any application to use more than 2 GB of memory and will crash it with a different error if that limit is reached regardless of available memory).

In your case the error points to some defect in hard memory either on the graphics side or the RAM part - the problem there is that it is likely just one address on that memory chip and it is quite possible that only Civ tries to access that - additional RAM *might* cure this by changing the mapped addresses when they are redistributed on then 4 GB of memory so that the faulty "bytes" are now on a different address and the crash could migrate to a different application. You should try to see if memory test finds any fault: download and run
memtest86 - do that when you have time to let it run for a few hours. If it does not find any problem after a few hours or overnight run you can be confident (though not certain) that at least your RAM is not damaged. This does not tell you anything about the graphics memory though

Summary: Buying the additional memory will enhance game play by speeding up the game. It *might* mask the crash you experience but won't solve it. You *might* still experience this crash regardless

I haved the same problem like you "PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA". In the begining I was getting BSOD only when exit game, later I haved problem when starting game with BSOD and then it start with every game and I knew that my graphic card is death!!! Then I by new

I'd try a full uninstall of the ATI catalyst. Reboot. Reinstall DX9 (The SDK release that includes the updated dlls). And reinstall an older ATI driver.

I have the same problem. My issue (PAGE_FAULT_IN_NON_PAGED_AREA) bsod is actually occurring not just while in the game but at random times when using other applications too. I first noticed the issue within 24 hours after installing bts (retail box) day before yesterday. I was checking out System Restore to see what all had changed and I see that DirectX 9 was installed/updated. I've reseated RAM, run memtest, chkdsks etc. nothing happening. I'm letting my machine "sit" in BIOS today until I get home from work to make sure at least BIOS is stable. I checked out windows updates and didn't get anything for DirectX so it's not like I can update that. My next step, quite unfortunately will be to uninstall BtS and run System Restore to a point before installing BtS. *sigh* and it looked so cool too...

PS-- Intel E8400 C2D, 4gig ballistix ram, geforce8600gtx, and a plextor burner

Try taking out 2 gigs of ram, and see if the issue persists. If it doesn't - then one of the registry or boot.ini settings got muffed - which tells windows what to do w/ more than 2g's oh ram.

Removing a gig of ram seemed to make it "stable enough" to be able to System Restore to the point in time before I installed BtS. Rebooting after System Restore everything seemed to be OK (with Civ IV, no BtS) so .. and I was able to add the ram back and still everything appears to be OK. Never in 20 years have I installed a program that caused bsods. Anyway, just glad to have my machine back, guess I might try to run BtS in a vm or smt, definintely not reinstalling it on my current hardware. (Unless someone knows of a way I can install it W/O installing the DirectX on the disc, it never really gives me the option to install it, it just does it on it's own)

Well I installed another 2 gig of ram identical to the one I had previously. But now I get program crashes related to the fact that my graphic options are too high. I put them all down to "Low" and reduces my resolution but it still crashes

Too bad. This expansion seemed interesting.

I used to run CIV & Warlords w/ 1Gig of System ram, and a Radeo 9800Pro. - The Radeon crapped out quite some time ago. When I replaced it w/ a Nvidia 7600GT (AGP), I got another Gig of system ram.

1) WinXP (32bit) can't use more than 3Gigs of ram. You have to disable the system from accessing the 4th Gig by modifying One of the files from msconfig.exe (I forget which), along with a Registry Change. It's been discussed here on CFC, try a forums search for "memory problems 4 gig" or such.

2) I run BTS maxed out @ 1680x1050 resolution, with the 7600GT - which I'm pretty sure is weaker than yer Radeon 1950.
I do periodically have graphical glitches which resolve themselves when I Just toggle between 0x and 2x AntiAliasing. I don't use AntiStropic (don't believe my card supports it).