Application Error

[CaptainPatch]

Forgive me if this has been addressed elsewhere, but I'm in something of a panic.

Yesterday I upgraded my video card from a NVidia Geforce 9500 GT to a GTX460. (MUCH faster screen refresh, btw.) So last night I was tooling along, going from about Turn 200 to @ Turn 271 with no crashes. (Had no need to Load a previously Saved game, so no CTDs.) But today when I try to Load any of last night's Saves, I get....

CivilizationV.exe - Application Error

The instruction at "0x00642cc2" referenced memory at "0x00145000." The memory could not be "written".

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Anybody know what ^^THAT^^ is all about, and how to fix whatever the problem is? I'd hate to think that the only way to play the game is by playing all the way through from beginning to end at one go because Saved games won't Load.

 

[The_J]

Could you please first check, if you can create new games and reload a freshly saved game?

Because it might "just" be, that the savegame got corrupted due to a bug.

 

[CaptainPatch]

Well, this just keeps getting more distressing.

ALL existing Saves (including Saves from before the change in graphics card) CTD with the stated Application Error. Trying to start a new game simply does a CTD with no explanation why it's crashing; just the notification to M$ about the crash.

Am I going to have to uninstall and reinstall the whole game?

 

[The_J]

Before you do that, you should try what steams in built function to check the file integrity does.
Then you should delete everything in the Civ5 cache (My Documents\My Games\Civ5\cache).
Afterwards a reinstall should be the next step, right.

 

[CaptainPatch]

UPDATE: I tried to uninstall/reinstall and discovered that Civ 5 is NOT on the Add/Remove Software list. That is, the PC doesn't "see" it, even though there's a wad of folders in My Documents. So I "Delete from local drive" at Steam. That apparently only makes it unavailable at Steam until you "reinstall". (Like erasing a file on your hard drive still leaves it on the hard drive until it gets overwritten. It's actually just removed from the directory.) So I reinstalled at Steam, tried to start a new game and crashed just before going to Turn 0.

So next I deleted from local drives at Steam AND deleted the Civ 5 folder from My Documents. Reinstalled via the disk (which routes to Steam automatically anyway). Tried to Play Civ 5 at Steam and once again crashed just before Turn 0.

BUT THEN I actually looked at my Start options and saw "Play Civ 5 (9.0c)" and clicked that. <<THAT^^ worked.

You would think that Steam/Take2/Firaxis would be sophisticated enough to recognize which OS (XP, Vista, Win 7) your PC is using and utilize the correct DirectX version. After all, the program can autodetect your hardware and start with optimal graphic settings. I can see allowing a option to "step down" the DirectX for whatever crazy reason, but if a user has XP, the DirectX 10 and 11 shouldn't even be options.

Whatever happened to "user friendly" and "intuitive interface"?