Fix-It List

My civ4 has crashed alot, and it got worse with the 1.09 patch. But when I switched to old nvidia drivers it all worked out! Thanks alot!

Hello!

First of all, hi.

I bought Civ 4 the other day, installed fine, got the patch and attempted to play it.

When the game loads, I manage to get the commentary part, then my monitor ( HP pavilion F1723 ) goes to sleep. When I turn it on, the screen is completely blank but the music, etc can be heard. This has happened 5 times now, I have managed to have a half hour game before it goes to sleep. Resulting in me closing the game.

Any ideas?

Help much appreciated; I don't wanna take the game back

I just reinstalled after defragging, and I can't run the patch. It doesn't even open. On a 56k modem, downloading that 28meg sucker again isn't too appealing.

Any ideas?

hm..i have this problem:
without patch when i have scroll map the view (this terrain which i have been explored) stay in this same place so i could see that i haven`t explored.
with patch i see everything black and icon of special terrain..so now i can`t play at all...
I have ati 7500 and i have checked drivers 8,11 (realy old maybe from last year) and 5.7 5.8 and 5.11 and i have the same ...also when i changed options in panel varioulsy.it help 9 times on 10 so if someone have the same card i will be glad if he would say me what else i could do.

ross141 said:

...my monitor ( HP pavilion F1723 ) goes to sleep. When I turn it on, the screen is completely blank but the music, etc can be heard.

Click to expand...

ross141,

I am having the same problem, and I have two poor solutions so far. First of all, I have only had this problem post patch, so reinstalling without the patch may fix this for you as well.

Secondly, I've experianced a lower rate of problems, even with the patch, if I go into the windows task manager and close all non-vital processes, as well as disabling the antivirus software. It has served as an option for singleplayer when offline, but obviously not reccomended if you have broadband.

I'm still waiting for a better patch and a better solution myself.

Goodluck.

My probles still are not fixed either with this new patch or all the other ATI ideas posted here. The most gameplay I've gotten out of this game is 2hrs max with the least 5 mins (and it doesn't crash to my desktop but locks up my video so I can't do anything but warm boot...which I hate doing).

This is crap since I have a new gaming machine with an ATI Radeon X600/X550 Series video adapter with 256MB RAM. Sucks to be me.

I know that there are some CDs that have been labeled incorrectly and all that stuff. Last night I was playing perfectly fine, until the game crashed. Well I just said 'whatever' and went to bed. I came to play the game today and everytime I start the game it says 'cannot locate cd, insert correct cd and press OK to restart application'.

Well, I look at the CD to make sure it was the right CD, and it was. I put it back in and the CD drive recognized the cd and brought up the Autorun screen that says 'Play' 'Exit' etc... Well I clicked play and once again after it was loading it said to place the correct cd in the drive.

I have no clue whats going on. Does anyone know of maybe a No-CD fix so i can get this crap fixed or is there any way to fix this. Ive tried rebooting, tried using a diff cd, tried start the game every way possible from different shortcuts to selecting it straight from the folder.

alamo said:

8. Render Error Fix

Indication: Failed to Initialize Renderer - Check DirectX Version and Graphic Settings

First, check your startup resolution in the .ini file. This should be something your card+monitor supports!

This was first associated with ATI video cards, but has affected Nvidia owners as well. There are detailed instructions here.

a.) Uninstall Civ4 and Folder
b.) Delete c:\windows\system32\d3dx9_26.dll
c.) Reboot
d.) Remove Video drivers - ATI has a 'remove all' utility
e.) Download the latest Video drivers - ATI / Nvidia / S3 - do not install yet!
f.) Install Civ4, including DirectX
g.) Install Video drivers

Click to expand...

Excuse me? Uninstall my video drivers and install the game without them, then replace the video drivers?



No, I think I'll just wait until the coders learn how to write software.

I had a stock computer card (nvidia) with its drivers, and a aftermarket ATI pro 9800 card I installed. I updated the drivers and everything, it crashed like everyone elses did. I deleted the NVIDIA drivers for the GRAPHICS CARD ONLY, and kept the ones for the ati card installed. Now I have nearly no crashes on even the huge setting and next to no lag time on movement. It seems with both drivers installed they were conflicting. it worked for me GOOD LUCK!

I had a stock computer card (nvidia) with its drivers, and a aftermarket ATI pro 9800 card I installed. I updated the drivers and everything, it crashed like everyone elses did. I deleted the NVIDIA drivers for the GRAPHICS CARD ONLY, and kept the ones for the ati card installed. Now I have nearly no crashes on even the huge setting and next to no lag time on movement. It seems with both drivers installed they were conflicting. it worked for me GOOD LUCK!

Excuse me? Uninstall my video drivers and install the game without them, then replace the video drivers?



No, I think I'll just wait until the coders learn how to write software.

Click to expand...

Why are you so hesitant to do so? Without video drivers, your system still runs in 2d mode just fine. Did you think it runs the game while it insalls? It just uncompresses and copies files, then registers some entries into the Windows Registry. Then once the video drivers are installed after the install you can play just fine.

This will not harm your precious...

loading a saved game takes for ever.

Laramon said:

Why are you so hesitant to do so? Without video drivers, your system still runs in 2d mode just fine. Did you think it runs the game while it insalls? It just uncompresses and copies files, then registers some entries into the Windows Registry. Then once the video drivers are installed after the install you can play just fine.

This will not harm your precious...

Click to expand...

That's not the point, I shouldn't have to uninstall my video drivers to install a freaking game, regardless of how well or not my system would run without them. Since my last post I have even upgraded my drivers, and guess what? Everything else on my system works fine, but CivIV behaves even *worse*.

This is called subpar programming, and is a big problem in the gaming industry in general, but Sid and his associates have always been one of the biggest offenders. If I produced this degree of bugginess in my software, I'd be fired. In fact I was, once. That's when I learned that testing and bug-stomping are at least as important as design and coding, something the makers of CivIV still need to learn.

P.S.: What is this B.S. about loading a special version of DirectX9c to be able to play CivIV? I had the latest version of it, already downloaded and installed from Microsoft, and still the CivIV installer wants me to install DX9c? Sorry, this does not in any way pass muster, Mister Meier.

HELP!!!! My game freezes. Completely. Usually game starts fine and runs to about 1500 AD, then freezes. Have to reboot machine. I have the patch. Running a Gateway 710 S with P4 3200, 1 gig RAM, 9600 PRO and I've tried all types of fixes. Guaranteed freeze if I try and access World Editor. I'm about to committ mayhem on something. Any suggestion to solve this problem. Freezes are Random, and saving and restarting don't prevent freezes of which 1 in 4 is during startup. One of you techs out there help an old guy out?

Here you go.

On a P4 3.0 w/2gigs of memory (matched) on an ASUS P4P800 Deluxe motherboard, with an ATI RADEON 9600XT video card with Catalyst version 5-11_xp-2k_dd_ccc_wdm_enu_27345 drivers and all the latest firmware updates for my motherboard, audio, etc. This is my Rendering Computer for 3D Studio Max Projects.

I formatted the 200 gig 7200 rpm Western Digital hard drive, Reinstalled Windows XP Pro with all the updated drivers, and installed Civ4 and the patch and set up a 4 gig swap file. Over clocked CPU over clocked Video (was working fine with MAX.) Played the game on custom huge map with 6 continents game ran ok but was not a speed demon, until I got the world map took 20 min. for the next turn after spending 20 min. during my turn. Game lasted about another 20 turns although the computers turns went from 1.5 min. to about 3 min. Then it crashed out. Shut down completely and restarted. Tried to load the last saved game and after 30 min. it locks up with a black screen. If I moved the mouse it makes rainbow lines appear randomly. When I Ctrl+Alt+Del I get an ATI driver error and drops down to 8 colors. So all in all I am not happy. If I set the Video elements of the game to low the game will not even start. So now I am really not happy. This is even after deleting everything in the cache. So this is the last game I plan on getting ever and this is from some one who still has his old Commodore 64 and 128 pack up in the bottom of the closet along with an 8088, 286, 386, 486, PI, PII, PIII, and the 4000 plus games that go with them. So if you want any more information you have until Friday after 5:00 PM EST to ask me for it. As of then I reformat the drive and reattach my 3D Studio Max Drive so I can go back making money.

Thanks so much for finally putting me off computer games. I think I will just go back to the PNP table games.

AMD64 3000+
PC3200 512meg x2 (dual channel)
6600GT 128meg - latest non-beta nVidia drivers
Audigy2 ZX sound
Turned off virus scanner and non-needed services
WinXP Pro SP2

huge map, 8 civs (including myself), noble level

The good after the patch:
- wonder movies now play much smoother, not choppy*
- dont crash to desktop in the start/middle of the game**
- several of the gameplay bugs resolved as noted in the patch read me

*except gets choppy near the latter stages of the game, see below
**Again, near the latter part of the game crashes are worse then pre-patch

The bad after the patch
- stablilty quickly decreases near the latter part of the game. By the time I hit the year 1900 or so (and the map fully reveiled) things started to take much longer. Not only the AI turns but during my turn scrolling across the map became a nightmare. At times takes 30+sec for the main screen to refresh and draw the units/terrain. At times the scrooling is smooth, othertimes tiakes quite some time. Animations/sound became choppy as well at this stage in the game. Seems like a memory leak when the units/civ size gets beyond a certain point.
- The crashes become quite common when you get to this stage of the game. early/mid 1900s. When the game crashes about 50% of the time its to the desktop, the other 50% of the time causes a blue screen of death with a reference to a nvidia driver .dll At this point I can only play 5-6 turns at a time before one of these crashes happen. In essence my game is unplayable.

I am very disappointed in this game and lack of quality. I realize and accept some amount of bugs. The world is not perfect nor is the s/w industry. But to release this with game stopping bugs is unacceptable. There was no way these bugs could not have been noticed before ship unless their QA dept is compleatly inept.

I shall think twice about buying another game from Sid or his company.

Hello all

I see alot of ppl r having trouble with this game,... so Am I.
Managed too get the game working for a little time but the game has reached a point where it keeps restarting my puter. Tryed to create a log file to see where the error is comming from, but this is pointless as the machine dose not get time to put an entery into the file. All my other games run fine with my current setting, I've even tryed customizing my Graphic card setting to this game but that cause problems with other games on my computer. I think the problems ar graphic based,...... has any1 solved this error or is there a new patch comming out to fix the error's encountered?

Penfolde

Drastik said:

I know that there are some CDs that have been labeled incorrectly and all that stuff. Last night I was playing perfectly fine, until the game crashed. Well I just said 'whatever' and went to bed. I came to play the game today and everytime I start the game it says 'cannot locate cd, insert correct cd and press OK to restart application'.

Well, I look at the CD to make sure it was the right CD, and it was. I put it back in and the CD drive recognized the cd and brought up the Autorun screen that says 'Play' 'Exit' etc... Well I clicked play and once again after it was loading it said to place the correct cd in the drive.

I have no clue whats going on. Does anyone know of maybe a No-CD fix so i can get this crap fixed or is there any way to fix this. Ive tried rebooting, tried using a diff cd, tried start the game every way possible from different shortcuts to selecting it straight from the folder.

Click to expand...

This happened to me once after I installed the patch. Clicking the desktop shortcut instead of using the autorun worked for me, but YMMV. I am wondering if my DVD drive is flaking out on me, though. I tried installing Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow last night, and installation failed due to a failed cyclic redundancy check when Setup tried to install the manual. When I try to install Heroes of Might & Magic IV, I encounter a similar problem.

Then again, it could just be Windows XP . . . .

Firaxis sucks. Some VPs let this out unfinished for their christmas bonus because some programmers didn't wear their pants a told them not to... Whatever, I got the random crash bug up to last night until I read alamo's fixing list.
My AMD3000+, my SATA disk, my ASUS board, 1gb memory and my ATI x700 were fine.
I'm running CIV IV on win 2k and it was randomly crashing every 2 to 60 minutes, no matter what I did (or did not do, it crashes when I leave it to get a beer!).
Whaterver, I think i got rid of the "bug" by setting my windows cache file size to 2048-4096mb (you'll find it under control panel/system/advanced/perfomance...)
****, ****, tabarnak de calisse de siboire de trou du cul d'ostie de criss de pas bons. (Quebecois swering!)
Couldn't just they write it in the manual??? NO, GUESS WHY? They never tested it or what?
I really enjoy that game but there is so much issues and the support is just running so far behind that it almost made me quit it.
I was peacefully playing Civ III PTW up to CIV IV came out so I could have waited for 1-2 month to buy a playable game!

Fezz

On a lighter note, since the patch I now get a 'Your machine is below minimum specifications. Civ4 will not run on this hardware setup' message when I start up. You just keep telling yourself that there, Sid. I have played many a good, lagless game despite it. What is the point of this message? They should have a 1 time counter so that you only need to see it the first time- it serves zero purpose otherwise.