CivAssist II 30-Oct-2016

[JonathanValjean]

Kudos to you, Ainwood, for your hard work!

I am having some problems with the new program, however.

1) It will not run concurrently with Civ III (of any variant). The program will freeze up, and it causes Civ III to run as slowly as molasses.

2) When attempting to run the program while a game is in progress, it also causes my tool bar at the bottom of Windows XP to disappear for the rest of the Windows session.

My current system is 2.6 Ghz, 512MB RAM, Radeon 9000 AIW Pro, Windows XP SP2, and I have the latest version of Net Framework 1.1. Any ideas? Has anyone else had this problem?

Advance thanks for your help.

 

[Ginger_Ale]

I can answer number two. To get the toolbar, just press the windows key (second from the left at the bottom). Or do you mean that even when you exit Civ-Assist and Civ you still don't see it? Then I am not sure, as Civ-Assist is designed to run 'toolbarless'.

 

[vmxa]

Not sure why the problem, but 512MB is very sparse for XP, 768 is much better.

 

[Ginger_Ale]

It works fine for me with only 256MB RAM...

 

[vmxa]

You are running XP on 256? That swapfile must be busy as civ uses about 400MB. Is 256 even met the min requirements?

More power to you, but with 512mb going for less 50 bucks for most brands, that is more pain than I wish to endure. Must be brutal with 5 or more apps running while playing civ.

Anyway I do not know if that is an issue for CivAssist, only that it can't hurt to get up to 768 or 1GB.

 

[Ginger_Ale]

This computer is about 4 years old - 1.8GHz, 256MB RAM, 80 GB HD. System requirements only say I need 32 MB RAM, 500 MHz, 400 MB, so it's ok. Sure civ is slow on huge and world map games, (I do play them occasionally, without animations), but I rarely play them. On Standard, even Large, it's not too bad. Usually I have CA2, Civ, and Firefox open, sometimes notepad for SGs, so it's not that bad. Of course, I would always like to upgrade...

Back on topic now.

 

[JonathanValjean]

Or do you mean that even when you exit Civ-Assist and Civ you still don't see it?

Right. When I exit Civ III (and shut down the crashed Civ Assist II), I have no toolbar.

Thanks for your reply.

 

[ainwood]

Right. When I exit Civ III (and shut down the crashed Civ Assist II), I have no toolbar.

Thanks for your reply.

As a suggestion, try opening the options screen, and turn off "Improve game activation via mouse". That might help a bit.

I realise I'm a bit behind in responding to some of the things posted here - I'll try to get on to it in the next few days.

 

[onomastikon]

Hello, I will try my luck one last time, I am very grateful in advance for any help.
As I tried to indicate in my two previous posts, I cannot run CivAssistII on my machine. (My machine = Win98SE, PIII 1000MhZ, Radeon Mobility 64. Everything else seems to run fine.)

DLed NetFramework, that was also installed without issue. I dont know which version, since I really dont know where it "is" on my machine (it doesnt have a program folder in my start-menü, so I dont know where to find it to "run" it to check the version).

CivAssist freezes up even when it is the only application running. I have to use the task manager to close it down or restart windows. This happens as soon as I try to leave any window, such as the "Options" window.

Can anybody who knows something about computers help me please? Thank you very much.

 

[ainwood]

Hello, I will try my luck one last time, I am very grateful in advance for any help.
As I tried to indicate in my two previous posts, I cannot run CivAssistII on my machine. (My machine = Win98SE, PIII 1000MhZ, Radeon Mobility 64. Everything else seems to run fine.)

DLed NetFramework, that was also installed without issue. I dont know which version, since I really dont know where it "is" on my machine (it doesnt have a program folder in my start-menü, so I dont know where to find it to "run" it to check the version).

CivAssist freezes up even when it is the only application running. I have to use the task manager to close it down or restart windows. This happens as soon as I try to leave any window, such as the "Options" window.

Can anybody who knows something about computers help me please? Thank you very much.

My apologies for not replying to your earlier posts.

I am not really sure what could be causing those problems, as other people have had no problems with using Win98, other than it running slowly on less-powerful computers. The general suggestion is to turn-off the "improve mouse behavior" option in the options screen.

One potential issue if it is locking-up on the options screen is that if you are using a non-standard install directory, or using the install-path-override, is that if it can't find some of the graphics files to draw the world-map, it will display them on a separate tab. I doubt this is the problem but if you could tell us whether you're using a standard install path (or whether you've got a german-language version of Civ too), it might give us a bit more info.

If you are getting this on every window (which it appears that you are), then I'm really at a loss to explain it - it sounds like it might be something to do with the .Net framework, but it does sound strange!

In the next week or so we'll be releasing a new version that has a couple of tweaks that should allow it to run slightly better on lower-powered PCs.

 

[onomastikon]

THank you very much for your reply!
I am afraid that I dont know much about computers, so I dont know how to check if my install directory is non-standard. Could you please tell me how I can check that? I cannot successfully turn off the mouse options that you mentioned, since the program freezes up when I try to leave the options tab.

I am playing the English version of Civ3 Vanilla 1.29f -- I don't know if this is important, but it is the version I purchased via TryMedia (no CDs, your credit card is billed 34$ and you can DL the program, which is handy for me overseas, but maybe this is a shoddy version?).

I CAN say this, however, in the meantime: I installed the NetFramework for your program (I didnt have it before; I actually don't know what it does). But for ten days or so now, Windows tells me there are "important updates" for my windows (this is the standard thing it does to tell me of service packs and security patches, I think), and when I say "Install Now", it takes me to its page as usual, and I see it is something for NetFramework, I think it is Service Pack 1.1 -- the only problem is that I have not been able to successfully install it yet, it is really odd, it takes forever to DL (it is a 10.4 MB package, normally I can DL that in about 1 minute) and then it sort of stops after about 10 minutes with the message "No Updates Were Installed". So maybe it is a NetFramework problem? I don't know, and I am not sure if I can get what I need from a source other than these official Microsoft Windows Updates pages. Anyhow, maybe that means nothing, but I thought I would say it.

Thank you very much for your time and patience.

 

[onomastikon]

OK, I did a manual update and got this NetFrameWork 1.1 Update installed, and the same issue occurs: Civassist freezes as soon as I click anything; in this case, it was the "OK" button on the "About" Tab in the Options section. I have to reboot.
Is there anything, and information, I can post here so that you can see maybe what the problem may be? I know too little about computers to know what to look for.
Thank you very much, and sorry for the problem!


EDIT ok I tried a few more times, attaching a screenshot here, maybe this is possible to tell something from it? The last few times I tried, I had CivAssistII as the only application up, this time one other application (Outlook Express) is up.
I THINK the problem comes whenever I try to leave and then come back to the CivAssistII main window. It lets me, for example, OPEN the options screen, but not close it. I can move around the various tabs on the main screen (General, Diplomacy, etc.), whcih I did by loading old saves, and your program looks GREAT (FINALLY a way to view existing deals), but as soon as I try to leave the application (alt-tabbed a few times, once tried to run Civ3), it freezes up.
Thank you!!!!

 

[ainwood]

It does sound strange - it might be a problem with the .Net framework. I'll see if I can find any info.

 

[Luthor_Saxburg]

When trying to load CivAssist II, it gave an error message: "Index was outside the bounds of the array." Please see attachment for the details.

After that, the CivAssist stopped working. I closed the CivAssist and the Taskbar went missing (just like with JonathanValjean) and the PC went much much slower.

I rebooted and everything was fine.

 

[ainwood]

When trying to load CivAssist II, it gave an error message: "Index was outside the bounds of the array." Please see attachment for the details.

After that, the Windows Taskbar went missing, the CivAssist would always show the same error message when I tried to do something and the PC went much much slower.

I rebooted and everything was fine.

Did civassist ask if you wanted to e-mail the save file? If not, then you probably have an old version - make sure you have the latest, as we fixed a lot of bugs related to these sorts of things.

 

[Luthor_Saxburg]

I don't think it did ask to email... I download the newest version.

Is it better to un-install the old one and install the new or can I should install and overwrite the old one?

 

[ainwood]

Best to uninstall and reinstall (In fact, the installer will (currently) make you do that).

 

[MSTK]

Ainwood, is there any way for you to add a Combat Calculator into this? Or any other quick utilities?

 

[onomastikon]

It does sound strange - it might be a problem with the .Net framework. I'll see if I can find any info.

Thanks very much!!

 

[Michelangelo]

Ainwood, is there any way for you to add a Combat Calculator into this? Or any other quick utilities?

There's actually already a combat calculater in CAII. Go to the map utility and make the units visible under the right mouse click. Then you can select a visible unit and you can do the combat calculator, again on the right click context menu. Normally it's there, but with units invisible it's greyed out.

HTH.