[BtS] Amra's Modpack v3 for Beyond the Sword

moopoo said:

well yeah. Carthage wasn't the only civ in the history of the world to have ancient cavalry.

The whole horse archer thing makes absolutely no sense to me. The only time i can think of where the horse archer was a prevalent, important part of an army (with my limited knowledge of history) is when the mongol Hordes charged down into europe. In the middle ages. An ancient cavalry is much more important and widespread, from what i know.

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Indeed. The Mongol invasion did not come from out of nowhere. The Parthians (ca. 200 BC - 200 AD) were famed both for the "Parthian shot" and Parthian tactics, i.e. horse archer tactics. (Mongol cavalry tactics are very similar.) In fact, most nomadic light cavalry were horse archers from ancient times on, the earliest European examples being the Cimmerians (bringing down the Hittites), Scythians (stopping Persian expansion north of the Black Sea) and Huns - all appearing in the present day Southern Russia/Ukraine region, the latter after the demise of the Xiongnu through military actions of Han China around 200 AD, if I'm not mistaken.

Hello everyone & sorry I haven't posted in a couple days but I've been busy handling some unexpected & important real world issues. I'm also going to be out of town for the next 3 days.

I'm always open to suggestions but you may want to hold off on them for a bit until I can get the MAF (Memory Allocation Fault) problem under control with my basic modpack.

I might as well let everybody know now that I'm putting the Full Version on hold until I can figure out the MAF error. I've run 3 test games the last couple evenings and each one has given me a MAF in the late Modern Era so I know there is definitely a problem. The last test game I ran last night gave me a MAF with just the stock unit art (No Unit ArtStyles) so I will concentrate on testing different aspects of the BUG Mod next week.

Basically, I'm saying that I don't know if I want to spend a large amount of time adding more to the Basic modpack if it has an error that the Full version will just inherit. I realize that other large modpacks have had the MAF error also and maybe it's just something to do with CIV4 not liking large modpacks, I don't know.

Also, please note that I want to play the Full version of my modpack just as much as a lot of you all do too. There were a lot of things in my Warlords Modpack that I liked such as the extra religions & resources so I will do my best to figure out this error.

Thanks to everyone for their patience.

Good luck with that! Many other big mods have suffered + punted on this problem. My guess is that it's a bug/limit somewhere in the .exe save game code (based on the variety of mods effected), as opposed to some mod comp. Personally I've only seen MAFs on Warlords (eg ViSa modpack), and in BtS I get some sort of video memory problem (256MB isn't enough apparently.. even with reduced graphics, no animations, single unit...).

Try turning off auto-save (set AutoSaveInterval = 0 in civilizationIV.ini, the default is 5), and see if 10 turns can be played from a MAFing(!) savegame. In my experience it will always save 1 time, but any more and there could be a MAF.

what's a MAF?

Re Jeelen: That's a very good point I guess I'm looking focussing on western europe (don't we all?) in my lack of horse-archer appreciation (if this is coming across as sarcastic, it's not, i'm just not being very articulate). I still think there's a good case for adding in an ancient horse unit that isn't a horse archer.

memory allocation failure !

oh. cheers snipper. or is it rabbit?

anyway. so that's when one's computer gives up trying to load a s**tload of stuff, yeah?

That's right ! you can shorten my user name to snipper because I think rabbit is exclusive of White, Rabbit even if he is not here anymore.

Just to report that 1000 BC for Amra now has 200+ downloads!

Also, Amra 18 civs BTS map now has 300 downloads!

Re Jeelen: Cool

Re Snipper: isn't White Rabbit here anymore I liked his avatar

Amra said:

Hello everyone & sorry I haven't posted in a couple days but I've been busy handling some unexpected & important real world issues. I'm also going to be out of town for the next 3 days.

I'm always open to suggestions but you may want to hold off on them for a bit until I can get the MAF (Memory Allocation Fault) problem under control with my basic modpack.

I might as well let everybody know now that I'm putting the Full Version on hold until I can figure out the MAF error. I've run 3 test games the last couple evenings and each one has given me a MAF in the late Modern Era so I know there is definitely a problem. The last test game I ran last night gave me a MAF with just the stock unit art (No Unit ArtStyles) so I will concentrate on testing different aspects of the BUG Mod next week.

Basically, I'm saying that I don't know if I want to spend a large amount of time adding more to the Basic modpack if it has an error that the Full version will just inherit. I realize that other large modpacks have had the MAF error also and maybe it's just something to do with CIV4 not liking large modpacks, I don't know.

Also, please note that I want to play the Full version of my modpack just as much as a lot of you all do too. There were a lot of things in my Warlords Modpack that I liked such as the extra religions & resources so I will do my best to figure out this error.

Thanks to everyone for their patience.

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Amra, my own testing shows that I always get a MAF when I try to load a save after I've been playing a game in the mod. (as apposed to exiting the game, then restarting the game, and then loading the save). I also have a fairly good shot at getting the MAF (about 50%) when playing into the medieval ages, then going into the world builder screen (either on loading it or switching back).

In vanilla BTS, I can go back and forth into world builder constantly.

Here's my theory (and it's just that since I have yet to conceive of a way to test it): There are allot of logging functions in the BUG mod. You should look at their .ini (actually they have 2 and both are huge!) So, all of this loggin information accummulates as you essentially record all of the game history. Keep in mind that all of those messages you see pop up during the game are getting recorded. (see CTRL+TAB) Now, in addition to the growing data pile that the game holds in virtual memory while you're playing, you also have a game engine in Civ 4 that also keeps all of the unit positions and graphics information in virtual memory. Now, your graphics are freakin' awesome! But, unless every civ is using the same art files, etc...i.e. not ethinically diverse, then Civ 4 also ends up juggling several different versions of files too.

Some of this juggling occurs in an active status (presented to the player when in los (line of site) or when in world builder (no fog of war)). So, in the later stages of the game, due to espionage, satellites, and your larger empire, you can see ever increasing chunks of the map.

Now, active information (again stuff which results in viewable information to the player) takes up more virtual resources than passive information (stuff which the AI sees as just 0's and 1's and uses to calculate its turns, etc...but obviously no graphics information), and passive information isn't nearly the hit on virtual resources that active information is, but passive carry-over still causes problems on larger maps and leads to earlier MAFs during game play.

Let's assume that the above is true. Ok, now what if BUG also causes logging information to be stored for the AI? Or, what if said logging info has always been stored for the AI by CIV 4, even without a mod? So, you have that mounting drag on virtual resources, compounded by the ammount of combat, number of promotions, negotiations, city foundings, city raizings, technologies being researched, and number of civs, and indirectly, the size of the map, and your game speed.

Now, compound that last paragraph with the fact that we have so many beautiful art files with your awesome mod!

Unfortunately, I think it comes down to finding a way to re-direct the game history logging information. I don't think there is a way to change how civ 4 manages the virtual information for fog of war and all of the city locations, unit infos, etc...for the AI and the player. I don't know what happened between warlords and BTS to make this memory management so untennable.

Perhaps if the game didn't have to store all of the game history logging info in its virtual memory, but instead created a separate file that it kept updated like a separate xml or html file that was totally independent of the game? You'd have to play in window mode though, but if a programming genius (such as yourself) could make that happen, it would probably aleviate much of the issue.

In terms of my own testing, standard continents maps seem much more stable (using default number of AI) than large Terra maps with 10 total civs. So, it's definitely a virtual memory store issue. The larger your map and the more civs you have, the faster you reach the MAF issue. I also beleive that you hit the MAF issue faster (tech period wise, e.g. Medieval vs. Modern) when in epic speed mode vs. normal. This last aspect points to the number of units being a factor, but also the ammount of information being logged by BUG.

Best of luck to you, I hope the above helps. I only wish I could code half as well as I seem to be able to find problems

@Amra

MAFs 'Memory Allocation Failure' means that BTS exe asks windows to give it more memory. Windows can't find more memory to spare and denies the request, BTS can't proceed and exits. (Technically it is not a CTD).

There is no modding error that may cause MAFs. Mods add more stuff. It requires more memory to handle this stuff. BTS runs out of memory. The problem is actually in BTS itself as it has a serious memory leak problem. Memory leak means that BTS requests memory and windows give it that memory. BTS no longer needs the memory and is supposed to return it back to windows. However BTS doesn't return the memory to windows and no longer use it. This is lost memory. After playing for some time lost memory is getting larger and at some point windows has no memory to grant it to BTS.

BUG, is not particularly a memory hog. In fact ethnic flavored units use-up much more memory. Simply put, if you have a single model for all swordsmen in the game only the memory needed for this model is used along with a reference to each instance of swordsmen on the map (such a reference is quite small). With flavored units you would need memory for maybe 10 models for the swordsmen alone. Actually considering the way BTS works I suspect that all units models are loaded whether they are in the current game or not. Just go figure!!

Bottom line, don't waste your time seeking a solution that you simply got no tool to get. i. e. none of us can actually change the exe file and solve its problems. The best a modder can do is to work around the problem (Visa mod guys did so for warlords and succeeded to some extent). Otherwise it is a matter of cooperation between you the modder and the players. If a player wants more stuff he should accept not to push the envelop too much i.e. no huge maps. Players also should accept that some annoying CTDs will be dealt with in the modern era. Disable autosave, save manually and reload each time. People have done this with several mods because they deserved the hassle. (Which I am sure you can create one good mod to join this list).

Interesting...then we should strive to find a "stable" way to play. For example, is it a Standard map with 7 civs as the max?

...or introduce plague that kills off units and some sort of fall of civs....oh, wait a minute....I have seen that somewhere before

We can always hope that in a year or two main stream PCs will have much more horse power so we will all enjoy Larger maps and more of everything. We also can hope that the Firaxis guys can do a better job with Civ V. until then we have to live within the limits of our PCs and the limits of the BTS engine.

You guys keep referring to the BTS engine - is the problem with BTS, or with Civ 4 in general? coz if it is just bts, that implies something was changed with bts (and thus can be changed back)

It is a problem with Civ4 that wasn't solved with any of the two expansions. We refer to BTS as it is the exe file this mod works with.

oh ok. i thought so.

I have a BtS game of FFH taking up almost 1.5G wo/ any problems, whereas ViSa (for Warlords) and Amra's (BtS) run into memory errors near 1.2G. For me the ones with memory problems can only be saved 1 time before the errors start up.

Kalimakhus said:

Visa mod guys did so for warlords and succeeded to some extent

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What did they do, if I may make a quick in-thread tangent?