Civilization III Fixes (PLEASE READ)

Sisyphus:

Like I said in another post, WWIIO blows away any software release in history for BUGS. Worst release ever! So this is nothing. I merely said to try another monitor, becaus eyou can't seem to get one for the IBM you have.

World is full of tis in the business end as well. Have you ever looked into some of the M$ solutions on technet knowledge base? Worst advice I can imagine. They even contradict themselves. You ca neasily trade this game to someone else if you don't wish to play it anymore.
 
Originally posted by Sisyphus
Let's see - I pay $50.00 for a game program.
It doesn't work out of the box, so I should
rearrange my hardware to make *their*,
apparently buggy efforts work properly.
I think not!!!

I suggest you go complain in another forum. I started this thread to explain the bugs and fixes Me and the rest of Infogrames has figured out. I am trying my best to help people, not just on the phone, but even people on these boards out of my own free time.

Again, read the whole thread before you go and attack Firaxis or Infogrames, we are working on the issues. If you would like you can call Infogrames technical support and I will be happy to help you directly over the phone.

Thank you all again for the help! :D
 
sk0tie:

I think your efforts here are WONDERFUL.

It took my son writing -See "Black Hole Of Death" thread - to write a generic driver that overcame my problems. Why isn't something included with the game to get the resolution problem under control??

I have no idea where else to place such posts. I sent an e-mail through the support page of Infogrames and still do not have a response.

I am sorry if I have consumed space and time which potentially could have been put to better used, but I was simply looking for help wherever I could find it.

Have a Happy Day !
 
Hi! I was hoping you could help me out. First, my basic system specs:

- 350 AMD Processor
- 126mb of Memory
- Windows 98
- 32mb AGP video card

Okay, here's the problem. I'm sure it has o do with the fact my ol' motherboard is about to give out... Anyhow, I'll be playing just fine and dandy for awhile when the drum-like conformation sound begins to repeat endlessly, usually while on the diplomatic screen. After this, the game usually locks-up within a few seconds or so.
Also, a related tidbit. If you start the game in a resolution below 1024x768, the game will reset the resolution like it should, but the task bar ends up floating around in the middle of the screen... Quite weird, anyhow.
Thanks in advance if someone help me out. :)
 
pwarnk has got the way to fix this, his homeade inf file worked like a charm on my w2k box (monitor was 6yrs old...)
asus doolie p3-800
512ram,nvidia geforce2 mx 32MB
 
Hey sk0tie. First of all, thank you for showing up at the message board to lend a hand. The game works just fine for me, and I have really had no problems getting it to work. (P3 1.0 GHz, 256 megs PC100 RAM, GeForce2 GTS 64MB DDR video card.) It is nice seeing the company that made the game providing support. I also post on the High Heat Baseball message board, and after going through the crap on that board, it's nice to see a helping hand. (I.E. HH2002 was FILLED with bugs, yet 3DO refused to fix any of them. It's nice knowing that Firaxis/Infogrames cares about their customers. Keep up the good work!
 
First of all, I would like to sincerily thank you, sk0tie for your excellent work here. You have really helped to restore my faith in Firaxis/Infogrames!:goodjob:

But unfortunatly I have a problem... I have found that after entering the Industrial Age I cannot load saved games. The transition to Industrial Age works fine, but if I try to load any games saved during the Industrial Age I get the following error:

DataIO operation system error: CITY

I am still able to load games saved prior to the transition. My specs are: 500 mHz Celeron, 128 mb ram, 1 gb free disk space, Voodoo3 video card, SBLive! Value soundcard, Win98.

I know that someone else earlier had a similar problem but it was never addressed... hopefully you or someone else will be able to solve my problem! Thanks a million!

-Kolath
 
CoolLizy : You are not alone.

My problem is most likely the same that is plaguing you. Thankfully I can start the game up with no problem and actually play for a while.. But now it is crashing every 15 minutes without fail. I played a game on chieftan with a small map and was fairly isolated with my opponents. In fact, I didn't even make contact with other civilizations until the 1700's. Before that, the game only crashed once or twice (and about 6-7 hours of playing). From what I remember, one of the times was when I double clicked a unit, another time was when I was in a city screen and was trying to fortify one of my units. Then I came in contact with the Aztecs (who crushed me by the way), and crashing seemed to be much more frequent. Sometimes while in diplomacy screens the hard drive would start chewing endlessly and the music and sound kept repeating and getting badly distorted.

Now today I started another game as chieftan and I came in contact with other cultures fairly immediately. Diplomacy screens have been popping up often, and all of the crashes (about 4 or 5 in a few hours of playing) have either occured during the diplomacy screen or later on in that same turn after a diplomacy action was completed.

On the technical side of things, I have noticed something unusual. I use a 250mb partition of my hard drive dedicated solely to the Windows swap file and in the past 2 years have never gotten a message saying that partition was out of space. While playing Civ 3, this occured. Windows should not do this as it manages the virtual memory and doesn't allow it to grow endlessly. I have even specified to make the maximum virtual memory space as 200mb on that drive and it still crashes. From this it seems like Civ 3 is wildly wasting system resources or generates an excessive amount of information in the swap file. I don't know if this is because of an incompatibility problem with the K6-2 processor or something else. But looking at both of our system configs, the thing both CoolLizy and I have in common is a K6-2 350 processor.

My system config:

AMD K6-2 350mhz
64 mb memory
DirectX 8.0
Windows 98 SE

Diamond Monster Fusion (Voodoo Banshee) 16MB AGP
using 3dfx Voodoo Banshee drivers, v. 4.11.01.1222

Creative SB-Live Value
v.4.06.00.0711

Thanks sk0tie for your support and I hope you might have some insight into our problem.
 
It's probebly Windows fault. Oh well, I put the game on the system I'm on now (I had it install on my own computer which I don't use for the 'net), and it works much better. It's a 450Mhz.
Try turning off the music, it works better that way. Too bad, though, the music's pretty good, even if the ol' Civ them isn't around still.
 
SKotie,

You are doing an awesome job!

Thank God I was able to have no major problems with the game. The only ones I had were just little nuicanse things that come up once in a while.

One thing is that in a city display, if you try tp update a unit by right clicking, then click another unit too fast, it locks up and you have to turn off your computer. WIthout auto save on, you lose your game. I did this about 3 times before realizing to just click in the diplay more slowly and then it never happens.

The weirdest thing happened yesterday: I was playing Civ3, and then got up from my computer to do something else without saving or quitting out of the game. After 20-30 minutes my monitor shuts off to save power. When I came back and moved my mouse or pushed a key to get it back on again, all the little lights on my monitor flashed and the diplay would not come up. I had to reboot my computer and then it was fine. Not a big deal; I'll just remember to save and quit.

Skotie, here's just a simple question not related to really technical stuff.... and anyone is free to answer who can help
It's about autosave...my question is if you have autosave on, will it create a new file every turn when it saves, or will it overwrite the same file, only one file for each actual game you have going? I don't really have a space issue on my 30gig hard drive, but I could see how people may get concerned since these save game files are massive. Also, if it creates a new file for eath turn, there could be hundreds in your directory when the game ends...is there a cap on how many files there will be before overwriting the older ones? Someone answer my stupid question please...I might want to turn on my autosave to help me with some of these unexpected lockups.
 
I tried posting this question in a different thread the day that the game came out but the proposed solution didn't work so now I'm trying here:

The game plays fine but when I quit, you can hear the hard drive working and then the computer just locks up. Usually the CivIII map screen remains as the image but I can't do anything to get out. In addition, I can't click on anything. Control-Alt-Delete will not get me out of the program and as a result I have to just turn off the computer. Then everytime I boot up with my computer I have to deal with the warning that I didn't shut down windows properly. I can't imaging that having to do this everytime is good for the long term health of my computer. Any suggestions?

By the way I have set screen resolution to 1024 x 768 (although that wasn't the typical setting I was using before I purchased Civ III). I have a Gateway 2000 Pentium II, 450 MHZ. An EV700 monitor. 3dfx VoodooII 3d graphics accelerator, and 128MB RAM.
 
SKotie:

Thanks for all your efforts so far. I've never gotten a reply through Infogrames "official" channels about the game not working with my laptop CD-ROM drive.

You seem to be saying in previous posts that you realize the copy protection prevents the game from running on many laptops, even those from mainstream manufacturers like Dell. Is this the "official" response? Is there any intention to provide a fix?

I'm a little disappointed that the suggestion seems to be to get a new CD-ROM drive, when the one I'm using is less than six months old.

Frankly, this seems to be a major cop-out on Infogrames part.

Let me know if there's anything else I can try besides hacking the copy protection like others have been forced to do.

Thanks ...
 
One more thing ...

I would suggest adding "Not for Use on Laptops" to the minimum system requirements listed on the box.
 
Skotie, thank you for your time and Mind.
I would like to tax them both once more(you helped me once before)
Civ.3 was working well for me for a while(one week). Then one day it stopped working. The first screen would come up in the middle of my desktop but it would just go away and nothing would happen. Them it stopped even coming up, and when the CD runs the play button doesn't work., but all of the other buttons do work. I can't figure out what has happened.
Please help me.:confused: I don't know that much about computers
 
PLEASE HELP!!!!

I got a realy bad problem! It happens every time I play and it can be annoying. It comes when I try to quit playing. I move my hand towards the ESC button but then every time the phrase "Just one more turn..." pops into my mind and my hand moves to the ENTER button insted and I have to play one more turn.

Any idea how to get rid of this bug???????


My computer have the following thing in it:

Processor: Intel Pentium II, MMX, ~300MHz
Memory: 64MB RAM
DirectX Version: DirectX 8.0 (4.08.00.0400)

Video Card name: RAGE PRO TURBO AGP 2X (English)
Manufacturer: ATI Tech. - Enhanced
Display Memory: 4.0 MB

Ecept this bug I have mention everything is working fine.
 
Any word on when us unworthy ones can expect a patch? At least give us a small one to fix the <expletive deleted> annoying broken air superiority?
 
Air superiority is "broken?"

That sucks. I didn't get there yet. It's the 1700's in my game now, and this is the farthest I got in a civ3 game. I hope I don't get that industrial age bug that others got.
 
I posted it under another thread bu had no answer. Some help here ?

I cannot play very long, ( around five to six minutes, like 50 turns)because my system freezes, and I have to restart the computer. Maybe the computer tries ti access the CD ROM because I hear a sound for some time (i waited an hour). Some others have the same problem, but i did'nt read about any fix. Could it be a copy protection problem?

I have a Windows XP system with NTFS, 768 Meg Ram, 61,4 Gig Hdd, Ati Radeon 64 ViVO with the most recent drivers, SoundBlaster Live X Gamer with new drivers, Optical Intellimouse ABit motherboard, Intel Pentium III 866eb, Pioneer DVD drive, no CD writer.

I tried the tricks suggested on the Civ3 site for Windows XP, i.e. I tried to run it in Windows 2000, 98, et 95 compatibility modes unsuccessfully. Also in 256 colors and 640 resolution

Il looks like it stops when it tries to autosave, but I am not sure, because it is then frozen.

Did bomebody have the same problem? Does somebody have a fix? HELP!!!

:mad:
 
Originally posted by Kolath
First of all, I would like to sincerily thank you, sk0tie for your excellent work here. You have really helped to restore my faith in Firaxis/Infogrames!:goodjob:

But unfortunatly I have a problem... I have found that after entering the Industrial Age I cannot load saved games. The transition to Industrial Age works fine, but if I try to load any games saved during the Industrial Age I get the following error:

DataIO operation system error: CITY

I am still able to load games saved prior to the transition. My specs are: 500 mHz Celeron, 128 mb ram, 1 gb free disk space, Voodoo3 video card, SBLive! Value soundcard, Win98.

I know that someone else earlier had a similar problem but it was never addressed... hopefully you or someone else will be able to solve my problem! Thanks a million!

-Kolath


Kolath,

This bug has been fixed in the patch which should be available soon. Keep your affected savegames, as they should work again once the patch has been released.


Dan
 
Top Bottom