Airlift crash

[Duke of Marlbrough]

New one for me:

I have a unit in a city that has an airport. I hit 'l' for airlift, the game crashes. Here is the error message it gives me.

AppName: civ2.exe AppVer: 0.0.0.0 ModName: ntdll.dll
ModVer: 5.1.2600.1217 Offset: 00025a58

This also happens if I pick it through the drop down menus. The airlift use to work and worked earlier in this game. Prior turn saves still work, just this turns save is now having issues. Other games work fine.

This is my hall of fame game that has been going on for almost three years and been played on multiple computers over that time period.

Any ideas?

 

[Mercator]

Sound like a problem with that DLL file... Have you installed any programs recently?

Try uninstalling programs, updating drivers, checking your system files (sfc /scannow), and/or upgrading to XP SP2.

 

[Duke of Marlbrough]

It seems to be linked to that save file. I can pull up the prior turns save and everything works as norm. I've tried it on multiple computers.

It seems that the save somehow got corrupted with that error.

 

[Mercator]

Hmmm, weird...

 

[Elys]

Do you have Dev tools, SDK etc installed ?

Some debug options when turned on can cause such error.

 

[Duke of Marlbrough]

Not sure what those are, but would those only affect a certain save?

I can pull up an older save and everything works fine. I can then pull up the current save and it crashes.

I've tried it one three different systems with different operating systems; all have the same result.

 

[Ace]

It looks like that one .sav is corrupt. Your best bet is to delete it (and save a copy to floppy disk just in case...) and fall back to your last good .sav.

 

[Boco]

Starting with the "bad" SAV, do you crash going from any to any city, with any ground unit?

 

[Duke of Marlbrough]

The game crashes when I try to use the airlift command with various types of units. I never get the opportunity to select a city. Right when I select it the game crashes.

 

[Mercator]

What Civ2 version are you using?

 

[Duke of Marlbrough]

Multi-Player Gold, fully patched.

 

[ElephantU]

Can you post the bad SAV here so we can give it a try?

 

[Duke of Marlbrough]

I'll send you a PM with a link to the file.

 

[Duke of Marlbrough]

Here's my working theory:

When trying to do an airlift the city listing screen has too many characters/too long of city description and crashes.

I have 255 cities, but that hasn't been an issue before. What I did this turn that was different was I started to add freight destinations to the city names. Lots of characters added over all.

 

[Magic_gorter]

@Duke,

A few GOTM games ago I tried to get big cities with foodfreights. To remember which city has an foodlink with another city I changed all the city names in short names.....A1 - A10, B1 - B10. This way I easily found the link between the two cities and it was an easy way to find the destiny city quickly when pressing the g (goto function). As far as I know the menu for airlifts works the same. Perhaps this way of citynames is a solution for you're problem.

At this moment I'm playing also an HOF-game and have planned to do this cityname style when I'm at the part of citygrowth with foodfreights.

 

[Duke of Marlbrough]

That's what I have been doing for years, just that I had some other info in the 'city name' as well. Since it was more trouble to remove it, I left it as it was. Now, since it caused this problem, I have gone through and removed the extra info and everything works just fine.

Feel free to make a post about your progress in the HOF thread.
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=22774

 

[Boco]

Here's my working theory:

When trying to do an airlift the city listing screen has too many characters/too long of city description and crashes.

I have 255 cities, but that hasn't been an issue before. What I did this turn that was different was I started to add freight destinations to the city names. Lots of characters added over all.

Two questions then:

Does the crash occur when all possible target cities have shorter names?

If you edit @AIRLIFTSELECT in Game.txt to include the line @width=600 (or so), does the crash occur?

 

[Duke of Marlbrough]

Shortening the names makes it where the game does not crash. I haven't tried changing anything in the game files. Just reducing the number of characters in the overall list fixes the problem. It doesn't matter if there are city names that use the full number of characters or not, just that, overall, the number of characters needs to be below a certain number.

 

[Boco]

I was suspecting something slightly different. Civ2 only stores a fixed maximum of characters in a name (15 characters?). The airlift dialog uses Arial font (i.e. not monospaced). Perhaps if a destination city name is too long (e.g.
wwwwwwwwwwwwwww instead of
iiiiiiiiiiiiiii) for the physical dimensions of the dialog as dictated by Game.txt, you might get a crash. It'd be easy to avoid; just change the dialog's width in Game.txt. Then you could use 15 character names freely.

 

[Duke of Marlbrough]

Using a save that was working, I made a city name WWWWWWWWWWWWWWW and no issues with the airlift.

Changing the game.txt file number just made the display box bigger. The default setting for it is easily twice the size of the long city name.

From everything I've looked at it is just related to a certain number of characters in all of the city names combined. I'll try to be motivated and copy/paste all the city names into word and find out the exact number of characters it allows.