Civ4 CTD in screen after creating custom game

[rgon84]

I've been running Civ4 so far with no problems. But two days ago, the game started to CTD on the loading screen right before the game actually starts (the one that says (setup players, loading graphics, etc.). I've no idea what could cause this. I have the latest patch installed, and my video drivers updated.

Is there any way to fix this? It would help if Civ4 made an error log file after every CTD, but I've yet to see one.

 

[Akhenaton]

Is there any way to fix this? It would help if Civ4 made an error log file after every CTD, but I've yet to see one.

By default CivIV makes an Application Log entry on CTD. In addition to that you can enable logging in CivIV per instructions from 2K Games. One of the logs (not necessarily init.log if it happens later) will at least show the last thing CivIV tried before crashing. You can also setup your Windows to provide logs with Dr. Watson. You may also setup writing of crash dumps, the preferred method is probably using CivIV itself over Dr. Watson. Get a dump (take size "Normal") from CivIV by setting "GenerateCrashDumps = 1" in C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\My Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4\CivilizationIV.ini. These dumps are found in the "temp" folder (by default C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Local Settings\Temp\CivilizationIV.exe.dmp), which you can zip up with the latest save before the crash (even if the crash doesn't happen consistently with the same save, it might theoretically offer easier to access clues to the devs about what it did prior to the memory state in the dump).

In any case, nobody in the forum will be reasonably able to make sense of these logs or dumps without debug builds and source code of CivIV, which only Firaxis has. So you would have to send the information to them via 2K Games support.