Game keeps crashing!

Hello. I used to be able to play BTS just fine. Then for some reason (possibly because of downloading the latest patch?) it started having graphical problems and crashing. I did a system restore and for about a week it worked just fine again. Now it has resumed crashing. At first it gave me an error message saying that it could not acquire enough video memory and recommended I lower my graphics settings. I did so but it still crashes just without the error message. Does anyone know whats going on? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Just some more info. I've already tried downloading the latest graphic card drivers and version of DirectX

OK, sorry to keep adding to my own thread. Guess I should of read the "how to get help here" thread before I posted . Anyway here is my DxDiag file.

It may be unrelated to Civ, it's possible your computer has gotten sick. Try using Smitfraudfix it's a free program that I've found works better then pretty much every other virus scanner and what not out there. Anyway it wol't hurt anything to run Smitfraudfix once (just google it, or look it up on wikipedia).

My computer isn't sick, and I'm having horrible problems with crashes on Civ IV. I have 512MB of video ram, I play games that are far more demanding in terms of video, and I don't have any of these problems. In my opinion the 3D engine for Civ IV just flat out sucks.

Having said that, if anyone has any suggestions to improve the situation. I did lower my graphics settings to low, and it seemed to help. But there is no way I should have to do that, my video card is far beyond even the recommended specifications.

My video card isn't high end, but Civ IV isn't a new game anymore and just about any video card manufactured in the past couple of years should have no problems with it. If I sound frustrated. I am...

Anyway, I've attached my dxdiag.txt.

the 3D engine the game uses sucks indeed - but that is no excuse for it not working

try a newer driver: http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx?p=xp/radeonx-xp

At this point that is the most recent driver I can use. I play old 2D Dx-7 games and there is a problem with them with any drivers that are newer than the one I have installed. It's behaving marginally well right now on livable graphics settings.

what kind of crashes are these? to Desktop, reboot, freezing?

Various. Sometimes it's a fatal exception (I think), sometimes it's not enough video ram (which is ridiculous). It always crashes to desktop, I've never had the os lock up, or had to reboot.

I expect part of the problem is related to the fact that I am running a game of Fall Further on a huge map, at marathon speed, with all 45 leaders in the game... I know, I failed to mention that part. But damnit, if you are able to do it, it should work!

the vram part is probably caused by the mod - unfortunately the game does render the whole map including hidden stuff - which is not the most economical way of doing things. There are some things one could do to minimize that a bit - is this on low graphics settings?

the fatal error: do you have the exact wording?

The crash I am getting now is a "memory allocation" error. I also have 4GB of ram and it isn't even near to being maxed out, or even touching the paging file.

Can you believe that Mythic bought a license for this 3D engine to use in an updated client for Ultima Online? Someone deserves a salesman of the year award. I should also mention the client based on this engine failed spectacularly...

And another one is a Visual C++ "runtime error". That might well be mod related.

And another, "Failed to allocate video memory."

Just to add some more information on the crashing. It happens most often when a new window pops up in the game. It can be for anything, saving the game, dialog with other leaders, civilopedia, whatever. It also can happen when I am scrolling over the game board, although this is less often.

It is happening almost every other turn now. I'm trying various things with 3D settings.

-R6025 pure virtual function call

That's what I'm getting in the VC++ errors.

It's basically crashing every turn now. I get through one turn, then when it auto saves on the next turn it crashes, and I get a corrupted game save. It's not so bad right now because I'm not in a battle, or micromanaging cities. But at this point when I am doing that, I have to save after every action, or risk losing an entire turn.

I've done everything I can think of:

- tried it with overclocking off and on, both for the video and the system (I'm not an extreme overclocker anyway, it was pretty conservative)
- tinkered with every 3D setting I could find

I think basically I just have to accept it is going to crash a lot, or try to play a game with far less leaders in the game, and reduce the world size. The thing is with Fall from Heaven and Fall Further it is just so much fun to play with all the leaders on a huge map. Hopefully the next version of Civ will be made with a more robust game engine.

a memory allocation error will occur any time the game uses more than 2GB of memory - since that is the limit set by Windows XP for any one program to use - you can increase that to 3GB by setting the /3GB switch in the windows boot files (ask if you don't know how).

the c++ errors might indeed be mod related - and you should post them in the bug thread for that mod.

in previous ffh (and modmodmodmodmods of that ) versions one common cause for vram errors was the smoke animation - does your game have a lot of smoking tiles? that or burning sand tiles?

No at this point in the game there isn't a lot of smoke. I'm going to try the /3GB switch and see if that helps. I also discovered that at some point I had reset the following line in the CivIV ini file:

DisablePAKMemoryMapping = 1

I had fewer problems with PAK memory mapping disabled, but at some point I must have re-enabled it and forgotten I had done that.

ori said:

a memory allocation error will occur any time the game uses more than 2GB of memory - since that is the limit set by Windows XP for any one program to use - you can increase that to 3GB by setting the /3GB switch in the windows boot files (ask if you don't know how).

Click to expand...

I tried that. It just made my system unstable. I also did some reading up on that, and it only is useful if the program itself also initializes with the appropriate switch, something which I very much doubt is the case with Civ IV. Beyond that, when I check memory usage it isn't using anywhere near 2GB of ram (around 800MB).

Well it appears that I have fixed the crashing problem. I did two things, the first one was uninstall the Ad-Aware service. I'm not sure if that was causing any problems, but I became somewhat annoyed when I went to upgrade to the latest version and I discovered I couldn't uninstall the old one. I ended up having to kill the service process, delete the service manually, and delete all the files manually.

But what seems to have really done the trick is a bit of a long story. I am also an avid Darkfall Online player, and I was having a lot of problems with lag in that game. So at one point I ran Process Mon, and discovered that at one of the specific times I consistently lagged, the Darkfall executable was making calls to the msimtf.dll. At the time I didn't really find out much other than that was a dll used by keyloggers. I didn't think I had a problem with that but I squirrelled away that information in the recesses of my mind...

Fast forward to today. Fall Further was crashing every turn. I loved the game I was playing, but it was intensely frustrating, not to mention a huge waste of my time. I decided to run Process Mon and see if I could figure out what was happening just before the crashes. Well it turned out, much to my surpise, that the Civ IV executable was making calls to the msimtf.dll as well, just before it crashed.

At that point I decided something was up and did a full anti-virus scan, as well as a scan for root kits, and as I suspected, I found nothing (although I am going to run another scan tonight just to be sure). I also did some more research on the msimtf.dll and found this. I followed the instructions in that article, rebooted my computer, and lo and behold, I am not crashing anymore.

The whole Ad-Aware thing happened because I wanted to run a scan with the latest version. Anyway, the problem appears to be fixed, and I am a much happier camper. Now back to the important task of leading my Jontar to world domination...

edit: *&*&%#! Just crashed again! Well, at least the problem is better than it was...

Llewen said:

I tried that. It just made my system unstable. I also did some reading up on that, and it only is useful if the program itself also initializes with the appropriate switch, something which I very much doubt is the case with Civ IV. Beyond that, when I check memory usage it isn't using anywhere near 2GB of ram (around 800MB).

Click to expand...

Beyond the sword is largeaddressaware - and civ4 and warlords can easily be made to be - so they can work with more than 2GB - in my case the 3GB switch alone made the system unstable and I had to use a slightly different upper limit using the userva option and set that to 2800 and it worked - it sometimes needs playing around a bit.

what are the settings (map size/difficulty/number of players) when the MAF error occurs in your case?

ori said:

Beyond the sword is largeaddressaware - and civ4 and warlords can easily be made to be - so they can work with more than 2GB - in my case the 3GB switch alone made the system unstable and I had to use a slightly different upper limit using the userva option and set that to 2800 and it worked - it sometimes needs playing around a bit.

what are the settings (map size/difficulty/number of players) when the MAF error occurs in your case?

Click to expand...

Huge map, noble, 45...

edit: Gotta hit the hay. So far, so good, but I'll know for sure if it helped tomorrow. Thanks for the help and suggestions.