Civ3 1.29 beta 2

[Brad Oliver]

Originally posted by ejday
Okay, last night, after the first crash, I tried reloading the autosaves to no avail. After quitting, though, and coming back in fresh, it would load fine. Can djou essplain dis to me?

No explanation. If you ever come across a case where you can consistently crash Civ3 by following some fixed steps, then by all means e-mail all that info to me and I'll try and crash it here.

About the monitors: I was trying to get it to run in 1280x1024, which is offered in the monitor selection, top half. When I select it, I get an error: "DrawSprocket can not switch to the requested resolution (1280x1024, 16 bit, 1 something or other)," then it makes a rude comment about my mother and quits. Am I missing some caveat mentioned in an earlier post or is this just a shade of the beta blues?

Does your monitor support that resolution at "thousands" of colors? The resolution box in Civ3 doesn't check what your monitor supports when it presents those choices, so it's possible to pick one that isn't supported and then end up with the error message from DrawSprocket.

Something else a little weird: in the Saves folder, all the save icons come up as the little rosetta stone and tag as "Civ III data." The autosaves look like normal map icons and comes up as a normal "Civ III saved game." In the Auto folder, it also generated a "save.tmp" (as Civ III data), and it weighed in at 0 KB. Never seen that before.

That's all normal behavior.

...Speaking of memory, those unusual saves would load fine, and weighed in much lighter than the autosaves. To wit:
Lincoln, 1850 AD.SAV (data) @ 196 KB
~versus~
Civ3 Autosave 1850 AD.SAV @ 1.5 MB

A while back, they introduced compression for the saved-game format, so some files will be dramatically smaller. I believe there's an option in the game to have the autosaves be compressed, but they might have removed that from 1.29 for performance reasons. I don't remember the sordid history of it now.

 

[Brad Oliver]

Originally posted by Boyd
During GotmXXI, in the MA, I was not longer able to access the tech tree... each time I did so the game had an "unexpected error" and crashed.

I tried going through my advisor, the civilopaedia, through city production choices, etc. and no go.

What might the problem be?

You might have installed the GOTM support files improperly. If one is missing, then the game could crash when it doesn't find it.

 

[ejday]

Originally posted by Brad Oliver

[RE: DrawSprocket 1280x1024 @ thousands of colors]: Does your monitor support that resolution at "thousands" of colors? The resolution box in Civ3 doesn't check what your monitor supports when it presents those choices, so it's possible to pick one that isn't supported and then end up with the error message from DrawSprocket.

Strictly in terms of horsepower, yes. My default screen setting is 1440x900 @ millions. However: I checked the display control panel and, much to my surprise, don't have 1280x1024 as a resolution choice. Hm. The resolution seems to fall between the cracks. For grins, the iMac 17" Resolutions:
640 x 480
640 x 480 Stretched
800 x 500
800 x 600
800 x 600 Stretched
1024 x 640
1024 x 768
1024 x 768 Stretched
1152 x 720
1440 x 900
...So, to be painfully dense, if I don't see 1280 x 1024 on *my* list, then it ain't happening?

 

[ejday]

Just for the sake of the orphans, I checked out the available monitor options in 1.29b2 and compared them against default monitor resolutions in X.2.6 (see above for machine defaults). Civ offered these selections:
1024 x 768
1152 x 870
1280 x 1024
1600 x 1200
1792 x 1344

1152 x 768
1600 x 1024
1920 x 1200

Somehow, of all these selections, there is exactly one (1) match. Tried it. Looks terrible zoomed in or out.

Odd point: I've actually been playing on the 1152 x 870 resolution... though theoretically, I shouldn't be able to. Yet it works. Unlike the one "legal" resolution – which evenly spaces black bars on either side of the screen, at 1152 x 870 the screen is skewed to the left with a large black bar to the right. I'll deal, at least the game looks better.

Odd point two: We had a runner-up: 1152 x 768 also worked (though technically unsupported), and also had the left skew. I still picked the 870 (above) just to fit more information on the screen.

Okay, there is an available resolution that's close to these two (1152 x 720), but I would think either the DrawSprocket matched – and works – or it doesn't. How is it one can get shoehorned to work but the others can't? Any guesses?

 

[Brad Oliver]

Originally posted by ejday

Strictly in terms of horsepower, yes. My default screen setting is 1440x900 @ millions.

snip

...So, to be painfully dense, if I don't see 1280 x 1024 on *my* list, then it ain't happening?

Not quite. As it happens, you've got an LCD with a maximum resolution of 1440x900. You can't support a resolution greater than that, but you can use any that are less, even if they're the wrong aspect ratio. In other words, the vertical resolution of 1024 is greater than 900, so you need to pick one that fits in both directions. I'll add all those iMac flatscreen resolutions back into the app for the next build so this won't be a problem in the future.

 

[Naboo]

I usually play with music off, so I don't know if this is a recent issue or not. Recently I started leaving it on and noticed "odd" music playing. For example I'll be negotiating diplomacy with Greece, but I hear Indian or Chinese music in the background. Sometimes I even hear 2 different melodies at the same time. Also the preferences don't seem to "stick". If I uncheck the music, I still get music and so usually I push the slider all the way left so I can get my way I've deleted the CivIII preferences file several times.

Also, during diplomacy with music playing there are sometimes breaks and pops. Diplomacy seems to have the most audio problems. Since I've also noticed ocassional crashes during diplomacy I was wondering if the audio prefs and music weirdness might be tied together with that. Os 9.2.2, G4/533 256MB RAM.

 

[AdrianE]

Originally posted by Brad Oliver


You might have installed the GOTM support files improperly. If one is missing, then the game could crash when it doesn't find it.

Absolutely. Its a GOTM file install problem that happened to me as well. Check out http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?threadid=55694 for the answer.

Adrian

 

[Nicci]

i just finished a complete game with hardly any problems.
only once my roads weren't shown proparly. but that could have been my computer.

 

[MinutiaeMan]

Brad, I've encountered what I think is a but not mentioned here before...

I'm playing a game with the 1.29b2 patch, with OS X 10.2. I haven't had any major problems, and the game did NOT crash... but I had a rather major lack of information that caused a large boo-boo!

In the Foreign Advisor window, some of the players were replaced with solid-colored circles, with no indication that there were supposed to be countries there (e.g. no lines indicating relationship status). This became a problem when I declared war against the English -- and I rather suddenly discovered that they'd had a MPP with the Iroquois, and I was fighting a war on two fronts! (I went on to give them both the smackdown, but that's beside the point. )

But also, after the English and the Iroquois were wiped out, there were still colored circles left in the window. No players were obscured at that point, but the bug seemed to remain.

Finally, these two screenshots were taken during two separate game sessions -- Civ3 was quit and later restarted (with a reboot in between even, IIRC).

I've uploaded some files that will hopefully help solve this problem:

http://www.st-minutiae.com/temp/Civ3_Shot1.jpg
http://www.st-minutiae.com/temp/Civ3_Shot2.jpg
http://www.st-minutiae.com/temp/Civ3_Saves.sit

Again, I really appreciate all the work you've done for us! Thank you very much!

 

[AlanH]

I have had a similar experience, but was able to fill the circles with other civs I knew by control-shift-clicking a vacant circle, bringing up a list of know but undisplayed civs and selecting one of them. I've tried downloading your .sav file to see if it matches my experience, but I just get a rude comment about trying to steal your hosting service's bandwidth. I suggest you upload the files to this site if you want others to be able to view them.

 

[kf97mopa]

Originally posted by Nicci
i just finished a complete game with hardly any problems.
only once my roads weren't shown proparly. but that could have been my computer.

I've seen that too, the roads looked like they were shining. I wondered if the Shining Path was attacking me - I believe I did kill some Aztecs that game - but that thing disappeared after restarting Civ, so I guess not.

Anyway (now watch me seamlessly stear this back on topic), this was before I had 1.29, so it's not a new bug anyway. I took a screenshot back then, but never bothered to report it becase I never saw it again.

 

[MinutiaeMan]

Originally posted by AlanH
I've tried downloading your .sav file to see if it matches my experience, but I just get a rude comment about trying to steal your hosting service's bandwidth. I suggest you upload the files to this site if you want others to be able to view them.

Well, fudge! I made a slight omission when I wrote my site's .htaccess script. I wanted to protect the large files on the rest of my site, but I generally use the /temp/ folder for message board posts like this. I forgot to write an exemption for the /temp/ folder.

The block has been fixed. Go ahead and try to get it again.

 

[AlanH]

Minutiaeman:

The 1240AD .sav file, as you say, has a plain circle where England should be in F4. This is the effect I've seen before, and if you shift-control-click the circle (shift-rightclick on a multi-button mouse) you get a popup menu with England as the only item in the list. Click on "England" and dear old Liz appears with all her connections.

The 1440AD map has a cosmetic defect, with colored circles that cannot contain leaders because all the leaders are already displayed. It's my guess that this would show up the same in the Windows version, as most of the code is, I think, just the Windows code running in a Mac OS envelope.

 

[Boyd]

The 1.29 beta has been working like a charm... one or two sluggish spots but otherwise grand!

One query though, I have gone back to give gotmXVII a try and I cannot make it through the second turn because it SOOOOOOO SLOOOOWWWW...

I have tinkered with the preferences but to no avail. In addition, the whale tail isn't appearing (at the start) so I am wondering if there is something else that is wrong.

GotmXV and XVI are fine though...

 

[Sid]

Re: the whale tale -- have you moved the 'resources\resources shadow.pcx' files around? remember we had that little folder to shuffle them into\out of?

Re: slowness. Even with larger maps it doesn't normally slow for me until a bit later than turn 2. Are you on OS 9? The latest version of 10.2.6 + 1.29 seems to run faster, even with Quartz on.

Unless someone more techie than me has a suggestion, have you tried turning off auto-save (yeah, i know, it takes courage) and seeing if it moves faster between turns?

good luck,

 

[AlanH]

Originally posted by Boyd
One query though, I have gone back to give gotmXVII a try and I cannot make it through the second turn because it SOOOOOOO SLOOOOWWWW...

I have tinkered with the preferences but to no avail. In addition, the whale tail isn't appearing (at the start) so I am wondering if there is something else that is wrong.

GotmXV and XVI are fine though...

I seem to recall that GOTM17 was the first appearance of Fog, and that resulted in a lot of comments about slowness at the start of the game which disappeared as the game went on.

 

[Boyd]

@Sid & @AlanH,

Re whale tail: Used the correct resources, but I'll go through it again as that must be the problem.

Re sloooowww: Tried turning off autosave and all of the animation, et cetera. This isn't about being slow, it is about moving the settler, which is slow, waiting about 60 seconds for second turn, building Carthago and then waiting for up to 8 minutes... and it is about that long thereafter.

I am running OS X.1.5, 640 MB, G3 processor, no quartz...

It did this to me before when I tried to enter gotmXVII but in the beginning turns it only took about 3 - 4 minutes.

I have reinstalled Civ III, the 1.29b2, all the required gotm files... gotmXV and XVI run fine, as do XVIII up (with the exception of my playing abilities).

anyway, if you think of anything I would appreciate it. thanks.

 

[Txurce]

Boyd, I have Jaguar and an 800MHz G3, and the game plays smoothly and quickly. Brad indicated that processor speed is meaningful, but it's hard to imagine that the disparity between our processors would make all the difference.

 

[AlanH]

@Boyd: I did try a dry run on 17 some time ago and don't recall having those kind of delays. Although I have a G4, it's only 350 MHz. What's your processor speed?

I'm having trouble finding time to get to some kind of result in GOTM22 right now, but I'll try to load up 17 again as soon as I can and check the turn delays.

I do find that if I finish moving all my units and the "Next turn" message is flashing it can sometimes get very sluggish to do anything other than hit next turn. When this happens, if I'm trying to do end-of-turn micromanagement or diplomacy rounds I either activate a fortified unit which wakes the game up again, or I save/quit/reload to clear whatever the blockage is.

[Edit] As a general principle I would recommend upgrading your OS, as Jaguar is way better than 10.1 in every department including speed. Though right now it might be best to hold on for Panther, due in the next couple of months, to save on a double hit. Panther is reputedly even faster than Jaguar, and not just on high end CPUs.

 

[n8mac]

I am not sure if this is a game error or a 1.29 error. This is the first time I have encountered this. This is a vanilla 1.29b2 game with the GOTM parts installed.

I am trying to start a build on a wonder of the world - Newtons University in my capitol, Babylon. This wonder of the world has no city requirements yet it and other wonders appear in only half of my cities build ques. I have 8 cities and can only build any wonders in 4 of them. I am not building any wonders at all currently. When I enter the cities that cannot build them they are shown grayed out as if they are being built in another city. I cannot even build the Forbidden Palace in 4 cities.

Babylon is a screen shot of a city I cannot build a wonder in. Ninevah is a shot I can build all the wonders in. I have also included the game save.

PS - I tried restarting and nothing changed.

Babylon shot.jpg
Ninevah shot.jpg
Hammurabi save file.sav

[Edit: This is user error as I have dispanded pikeman in 4 of my cities, please disregard post]