Fix-It List

Airlik said:
I was able to get it to work for extended periods (meaning a couple of hours between crashes) by using a couple of the things suggested here. What worked for me (not sure which of the following did it, but it's working now and I have not the patience to crash my machine multiple times to figure out if any one was a silver bullet):

- I'm using the latest/greatest nVidia drivers (Nov. 14th)
- changed the card to use shader 1.1
- lowered graphics detail level to medium in-game

In three hours of playing last night, it crashed once after about two hours. Since it was crashing left and right with the first of the above done, it was either the shader or the graphics detail that fixed it... I'm guessing the graphics detail. Other people are using more advanced versions of the shader and it works. I'd guess that means it's some feature they are using at high graphics quality they are not using at medium. The crash after two hours, though, makes me think memory leak...

It is pretty much a random crash now, and does seem related to events in game. The most common one after which it goes "boom" is when I see the message about border expanding near a town, when the town is on the screen... the border expands visually and the machine locks up. If anyone from 2k games is following this, I hope they check that fixed (would that be the shader?) in the hopefully-soon-to-be patch.
 
The game loads initially fine, but after I select a scenario to play, it appears to load fine and says "done". However, the green loading bar does not disappear and the screen is black. I can hear music. Any advice?

My system is a P4, 2.53 GHZ, 384MB RAM, 256 NVIDIA card.
 
Dear all,

after reading most of this chapter (and understand not half of it to be honest because I´m really no specialist in gaming /computer...) I hope someone can help me (a computer "simple mind") with the following:

I´ve bought the german version of Civ4 (I´m from Hamburg/Germany) two days before and since then I tried to start it - without success (...ok, in meantime I had to work a little...)

I´ve read and understood everything about "minimum configuration" and can say that I´m sure to have more of what´s required (maybe instead of the grafic carte because I can´t remember which kind I´ve selected when I´ve bought my system. Maybe it´s a hint, when I can confirm that CIV3/Conquest run without problems...?!

I installed the game without any error messages, confirmed everything mentioned during the installation process but when I try to start (doesn´t matter whether from CD or harddrive it seems the program trys to start, I see some messages like " init "this or that", than it seems to be through and the last thing I see is that my mousepointer changed to a kind of digger (?) and a message said "DONE"....and then everything stops! I can´t shoot down this message or do anything else but have to start the computer again.

Could you please give me information what else I sould try / can do to play the game?! Or is it better to give it back to the dealer and wait until bugs like this are gone? I really can´t change things like mentioned above (...changing .ini files or things like that. If you say that maybe the only solution I´ll try to get my money back and wait for other versions.

Is there maybe a "producer contact / mail" I can write to additional?

Thank you in advance for your messages/information.

Helsinki
 
I have a home server running MS Small Business Server and I redirect users' My Documents folders onto a shared drive of the server. Civ4 will autosave correctly to the redirected My Documents folder; however, when I do a manual save or load (ctrl-s or ctrl-l) I am unable to navigate to the server's My Documents folder. If I want to restore an autosaved game, I have to exit the game, then open windows explorer and double click the autosaved game.

Any suggestions?
 
Hello Evey1 so i ve got some king of problem
1) i had that problem with DirecX and Graphic [i almost fix it ]
the problem ive got now its i havent got that error when i lunch the game i see black screen for 30sek and it exit from the game :(

Overall
i havent got error it just kik my out of the game

P.S>if i wrote it in wrong topic plz dont delete it just move it PLZ
And plz for help :] thx
 
Hi Everybody

My problem is, that the mouse (USB) is freezing after several turns, sometimes it's possible to play 30 minutes and sometimes it's only possible 2 turns or none. Sometimes it's possible to save the game using the keyboard and restart the computer regularly and sometimes I have to reboot. I have tried many things to find a solution for this problem (drivers, graphic settings, etc), but without success. Should i wait for the patch or has anyone a solution?

thanks
Matthias73, Switzerland

My system
AMD Athlon 1800+
MSI RX800SE
512 MB RAM
Yamaha SW1000XG Soundcard
 
I have a 64 meg geforce mx clone and was experiencing the intermittent game crash problem (usually when finishing a wonder.) After trying some of the changes suggested here I was still not having any luck. However, I went to the graphics setting for my card and reduced the hardware acceleration slider down one notch from the max and haven't experienced a crash since. I even played a full game winning the space race. :)

p4 2.4/400, 512 ram, herc 5.1, mx64, 60/7200 hd
 
I'm running W2K and just loaded CIV the other day. Surprisingly the game plays fine even with a Radeon video card (I updated the video driver before installing CIV), but now I'm having trouble with Internet Explorer and Media Player.

When IE tries to open a second window it crashes and Media Player 9 won't even completely load. I've uninstalled and reinstalled both programs and have even reinstalled DirectX 9.0c from the Windows site directly but the problems still continues.

Anyone else having any problems like this or have any suggestions?

Thanks

Edit: I was previously running DirectX8.
 
cougz said:
I can't even get a log of my games failure to start, I can't find a civilization4.ini file anywhere.

I have installed the game 4 times, all were a complete success as far as the installation process was concerned. Have installed to different areas, default as well as a another partition. Installed from Admin account (using win2k pro SP 4) Have created new user accounts.

No matter what I do I don't get the folder in "My Games".

It's no surprise the game doesn't start when it can't even find an ini file.

Same deal for me :/

The links in C:\Program Files\Firaxis Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4 point to

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\My Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4

Except it doesnt exist. I've installed it to other drives, same error. As soon as you try and run the game you just get the standard "Civilization4.exe has caused errors in windows and must close, an error log is being created" bla bla bla.

Irritating. Unfortunately I dont have another laptop handy for me to try what cougz did. Administrator has (as far as I can see) all the permissions set to do anything I could possibly do.

Any ideas?
 
fjorner said:
Mouse Icon Freezes But Can Still Move in Background - Symptom: the mouse icon freezes randomly. System is otherwise ok. Can move the cursor around 'invisibly' and can click around as normal but the icon doesn't follow movements. Even happens in Windows when exiting the game. Only solved by a complete cold reboot of sys. Temporary Workaround: In control panel > mouse, enable Mouse Trails with the shortest possible length. Will only ensure that the mouse icon will be VISIBLE, if not spotty. Obviously not a solution.
It also occurred to me.. simply mouse freezes.
It happens while playing and also with a new brand PC
regards
 
Oceanrower said:
I can not see the menu in the beginning (overlooking planet earth). Has it got something to do with what my graphic card can and can not do? It is a 128MB ATI Fire GL T2-card.

Anyone who has seen this problem?

Well, I got exactly the same problem as u. N my comp is only a year old, never had problems w anything before. Got a laptop, a comopq nc 6000 w ATI MOBILITY RADEON 9600 (128mb) videocard n 1500mb RAM. And I cant see the videos when the game starts, and when I get to the menu, it simply isn't there. :mad: If u guys know this problem, or if it is part of a bigger problem, plz tell us what to do.
 
King David I said:
Okay, my problem is that the Map isn't being revealed as units move across it or the Map is revealed, however, it only is revealed partially on the screen which is very frustrating. I saw on this post that someone had figured out how to mod the xml to reveal the map completely. If someone could tell me how to do this or tell me how else to fix this problem, thanks!

btw, running the game on an Inspiron 1150 Laptop, so I know my graphics card isn't the best....the Leaders heads only show up as eye balls and teeth.

I am having some video issue similar to what King David is describing. When zoomed in to the detail level, all I see is blackness with the exception of towns, units and resources. Anything that overlays the base tile is displayed, but the base tiles are all black. If I zoom out, to the level where the clouds are visible, the base tiles become visible, but the units, etc. are no longer visible at that level ov view. Also, the leader views only show disembodied teeth and eye - somewhat cool but rather disconcerting to see teeth hovering in mid air. I tried updating every driver I could think of, I reloaded directX, I applied the art pack patch, nothing. I am using a 1 year old Dell computer that has basic on-board intel video. It has 96 mb memory and has been up to the task of everything else I had thrown at it until this game came along. Any ideas (other than going out and buying a $300 video card to run a $50 game) would be appreciated.

As an aside, I am not certain I like the new interface. Having been an avid civ fan (including the spectacular Alpha Centauri) since nearly the beginning, I am having a hard time swallowing the new interface. It appears to be very cluttered and pop-ups come at me from every direction wheter I am interested in what an icon does if it just happens to be between where my cursor and and where I want it to go. And while much of the graphics are quite stunning and detailed, others are quite cartoonish and out of place. And the civilopedia looks like a childs picture matching game, its quite visually assaulting. Call me old school, but I much prefer the older games to this one, but if I can get around the video display issues, I will perservere and give this game a chance to see if it grows on me.
 
I have since installed the 1.09 patch. The Single Player works fine.

After receiving latest save file for my PBEM, it comes to part where I have to input my password and after I do, then click ok, nothing happens. I can keep clicking ok and ditto..nothing changes. If I click cancel, password screen goes away and then
initialization completes, screen goes black a sec and I am back to Main
Menu!

How do I resolve this? Thanks
 
Hi all!

The game works (almost) perfectly on my laptop (p4 2.8G, 512,GeForceFX,...)
The only problem is, when I try to save my game, I get a message saying something like "memory allocation failure, exiting program" and without saving the whole game crashes. Hapily autosave works pretty good, so most of times I can just play along. Just this one time the game always crashed at the same point of the campaign (the same date every time) showing every time this same error message... Does anyone know what memory is failed to be allocated? And even more important, anyone have a clue on solving this problem?

Thanks a bunch!
T
 
I tried the "Art Pack Patch" above. The unpack does not appear to do anything (no new files that I can see and no errors reported by the PakBuild prog). Moving the Art0.FPK file causes Civiv to crash (no art pack file available with the movement of the Art0.FPK and no other files are available).

I also tried to open the pack file (even though it's not an "FPK_layout" file) and got a "could not open" error (probably a valid error as it's the wrong file type?). I thought possibly I could get around the mysterious unpack "failure" or get some additional info
 
1. After about an hour in the game, the audio starts cutting in and out on all the cutscenes. It's not a physical problem with the disc, as a wonder will in some game sound correctly but in others if I build it later will sound choppy. Highly annoying. Is there a way to copy the audio tracks to the hard drive as you could in the older versions of Civ?

2. MAJOR multiplayer problems for tons of people. Quite simply, people are very often unable to connect to games. If the host is firewalled, I have NEVER been able to join their game, it says "Connecting to Host" forever. This is also the case for a lot of other people, although many say they can. In other cases, for unfirewalled hosts, it just says "Connecting to Peer" forever. This I've found can sometimes be resolved by a restart, but is annoying as hell.

3. Not so major, but a major annoyance... whenever I enter the multiplayer lobby, it is sorted by name... which is useless to me. I'm only interested in joining new games that haven't started yet, and have to manually resort and scroll up every time I get back to the lobby. Scrolling up is even buggy. I'll move the scroll bar all the way up, and it'll keep jumping back down.

I'm running ZoneAlarm firewall-- don't even think about telling me to kill it, because I'm not taking down my firewall protection for a damned game. I have high-speed cable Internet. I'm on the latest v1.09 patch, and never played unpatched.

Does Firaxis see this thread??

Joe.
 
ok so about the art package, i understood everything untill this cut and pasting crap. where exactly is this "level"? where am i pasting this thing????? :(?
 
fjorner said:
Mouse Icon Freezes But Can Still Move in Background - Symptom: the mouse icon freezes randomly. System is otherwise ok. Can move the cursor around 'invisibly' and can click around as normal but the icon doesn't follow movements. Even happens in Windows when exiting the game. Only solved by a complete cold reboot of sys. Temporary Workaround: In control panel > mouse, enable Mouse Trails with the shortest possible length. Will only ensure that the mouse icon will be VISIBLE, if not spotty. Obviously not a solution.

The Civilization 4 Disappearing (Invisible) Cursor Error:

I have installed 1.09 and this is still happening to me as well. Does anyone have any idea what could be causing it? Or at least a way to regain a mouse cursor after quitting to Windows? Restarting the PC is really annoying.
 
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