Common Errors and/or Crashes Section

[Koshling]

Thanks for the fix,
i can move my units now but suffer under CTD every second turn.
I have attached a minidump, hopefully there's some cure for this symptom.

Save game would be much more useful if it fails reasonably reliably (e.g - put it on auto play and it crashes within a couple of turns say)

Edit - what I **can** tell you from the minidump i that it's a graphics crash of some sort - it's crashing inside Direct3D somewhere in the main game engine, rather than in the DLL. Might be bad unit art or something?

 

[Flinx]

I knew there was something missing.
Put it on autoplay and it crashes within two turns to desktop.

 

[Flinx]

I have attached two sets of a save and an according dump, maybe it will make things easier.
Save 3 went into oblivion without creating a dump file.
Happy hunting.

 

[Koshling]

I have attached two sets of a save and an according dump, maybe it will make things easier.
Save 3 went into oblivion without creating a dump file.
Happy hunting.

I have played auto-play from your first save game for 10 turns without any issue, and since the dumps show you to be having a graphics issue that must mean one of:

• Different assets to the ones I have, and yours contain some sort of bug; or
• Graphics hardware/firmware issue

So:

1. Have you updated all your installtion from the SVN (so current assets throughout) or just the DLL?
2. Are your graphics drivers up to date?
3. Do you have plenty of memory (what OS and RAM do you have)?

I'll auto-play from your second save game as well to make sure I still see nothing, but it looks to me like an issue I can't do much about (since it seems graphic related in some way)

Edit - both mini dumps confirm a graphical crash inside Difrect3D, outside the DLL. All 3 saves I can autoplay 10 turns from without issue.

HOWEVER (@Hydro), one of the techs you can research (and so appears in the tech 'band' at the top of the screen when you finish your current tech, is Steampunk, and it has no icon (pink square appears). This is also true in the Civopedia, and that **MAY** be upsetting the rendering, so it's a possible candidate. You could try commenting it out in Assets\XML\Technologies\CIV4TechInfos.xml to see if that makes any difference for you.

I was surprised to see this appearing at all, since I thought alternate timeline stuff was only enabled by a game option/modular inclusion that was not present by default...?

 

[Flinx]

I have played auto-play from your first save game for 10 turns without any issue, and since the dumps show you to be having a graphics issue that must mean one of:

• Different assets to the ones I have, and yours contain some sort of bug; or
• Graphics hardware/firmware issue

So:

1. Have you updated all your installation from the SVN (so current assets throughout) or just the DLL?
2. Are your graphics drivers up to date?
3. Do you have plenty of memory (what OS and RAM do you have)?

I'll auto-play from your second save game as well to make sure I still see nothing, but it looks to me like an issue I can't do much about (since it seems graphic related in some way)

Edit - both mini dumps confirm a graphical crash inside Difrect3D, outside the DLL. All 3 saves I can autoplay 10 turns from without issue.

First of all thanks for your fast investigation.

1. Current SVN, as always; i even have filecaching / xmlcaching disabled.
2. Graphics drivers are up to date.
3. Win7/64bit/4 GB RAM, i3, Radeon HD 5400

As for different assets: i keep my personal settings and two tweaks for civ/leaders.

But i use the alternative terrain set; i'll try now without and tell you later.

Thanks again.


edit
Just loaded the game without the alternative terrain set - same behavior - one and a half turn and ctd.
Seems i have to live with that - graphics card is a Radeon mobility HD 5400 with 512 MB RAM; that might be the bottleneck.
And if so, it will remain since i use a notebook.

 

[Shiawase]

Hi there guys!
The mod is really awesome, though lately I have some problems with continuing to enjoy it: every 1-4 turns I have CTDs - I'm really desperate pushing through them with save'n'load ;_;
Attaching latest save file.
My config is:
C2D P8400
4GB RAM
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3400 Series (128 MB)
Running Win7 x64
As with the guy before me I have all the drivers updated.

Hope you guys can solve this problem in new patch or build.

 

[Flinx]

Just did a cross check on the desktop computer.
Win7 / 4 GB RAM / NVidia GTX550 Ti, 1 GB VRAM / i5 @ 3,00 GHz

Just about the same behavior as on my notebook, sadly.

 

[Koshling]

Just did a cross check on the desktop computer.
Win7 / 4 GB RAM / NVidia GTX550 Ti, 1 GB VRAM / i5 @ 3,00 GHz

Just about the same behavior as on my notebook, sadly.

Probably memory. 4G doesn't leave as much as you need for large maps really once the OS has taken its cut. I assume you are using the SVN? (its slightly less memory hungry than v20, though only a little so)

Edit - are you using the new static leaderheads? That might help save some more memory. Take a look in task manager also and see what your memory usage actually is once the game is up and runnign your save. If your graphics card is buffering stuff in system memory also ()which it may be, then it'll be using some too). Win 7 performance monitor migth tell you something - at the very least it'll tell you if you actually have any totally free memory left (which I doubt)

 

[Shiawase]

Probably memory. 4G doesn't leave as much as you need for large maps really once the OS has taken its cut. I assume you are using the SVN? (its slightly less memory hungry than v20, though only a little so)

Edit - are you using the new static leaderheads? That might help save some more memory. Take a look in task manager also and see what your memory usage actually is once the game is up and runnign your save. If your graphics card is buffering stuff in system memory also ()which it may be, then it'll be using some too). Win 7 performance monitor migth tell you something - at the very least it'll tell you if you actually have any totally free memory left (which I doubt)

All of that sounds strange to me, because:
1) By default all programs are limited for use of only 2GB of RAM
2) Even if there's not enough RAM, there's a swap-file.

 

[Koshling]

All of that sounds strange to me, because:
1) By default all programs are limited for use of only 2GB of RAM
2) Even if there's not enough RAM, there's a swap-file.

Under a 64-bit OS even 32 bit programs (at least those built for the /3G switch [see below]) get up to 4G of logical address space (it's the logical address space that matters, so swap file can only give you up to the max amount a process can have, which for a 32bit process is 4G, and even then only if you have defined a large enough swap file). Under a 32 bit OS the deafult is 2G process logical addres space, but from Win XP onward you can enable the /3G boot-time switch on the OS, which repartitions the logical address space as 1G for OS use, 3G for app process use - this requires the apps to be built to support it (Civ4 IS).

So:

1) If you are running a 32 bit OS make sure your /3G switch is enabled (google XP /3G switch)
2) If you are running a 64 bit OS this functionality is enabled already, but make sure your swap file settings are such that it allows more memory to be committed than your physical memory size (i.e. - max swap file size must be > physical mem size)

 

[Flinx]

As given in the first answer of mine i use the current SVN build which includes static leaderheads.

As for the CtDs, i had my game running several hours straight without any issues, bigger lags or crashes, except for wild clicking on the mini map.
Since two days i ran into Ctds. As i haven't changed anything in my side the reason for the Ctd would likely has it roots in the recent changes, be it graphics, dll-changes or xml-updates.

Saving three to four times a turn with restarting the game every turn or second turn isn't the way i like to spend my time on this mod.

Hopefully there's a solution soon, but as you mod-guys had the black terrain problem solved some versions ago i'm confident that you'll find a solution for this problem.

 

[Koshling]

As given in the first answer of mine i use the current SVN build which includes static leaderheads.

As for the CtDs, i had my game running several hours straight without any issues, bigger lags or crashes, except for wild clicking on the mini map.
Since two days i ran into Ctds. As i haven't changed anything in my side the reason for the Ctd would likely has it roots in the recent changes, be it graphics, dll-changes or xml-updates.

Saving three to four times a turn with restarting the game every turn or second turn isn't the way i like to spend my time on this mod.

Hopefully there's a solution soon, but as you mod-guys had the black terrain problem solved some versions ago i'm confident that you'll find a solution for this problem.

If you have good evidence of a recent change (and it sounds lik you do), then could you try a few experiments for me please (since I cannot reproduce it):

1) Run current assets with V20 DLL - if that doesn't crash (dont bother recalculating bonuses for the purposes of the experiment) it would support the idea that an asset change has caused the issue (save format changed slightly a day or two ago, but if you use your first posted save game it should have been saved prior to that change and I think v20 will load it)

2) Alternatively, try v20 assets with current DLL. Again don't worry about recalculating bonuses. Again no crash suggests a recent assets problem

If **both** of those still CTD for you then that would point towards a DLL issue. Once we know which it is we can start to hone in on it by backing out various changes and potentially making private test builds for you to test CTD on etc.

 

[little_cyclone]

Ever since I upgraded to vanilla V20 I've been getting a nonrecurring CTD evy 10-15 minutes after hitting Renaissance age.. And its not the usual CTD I've had previously wherein the game locks up & I have to manually end process & restart. Instead it unceremoniously just dumps me to desktop with no warning, as if I'd hit Alt+F4, which was most assuredly not the case. Afterwards I load most recent save & play for another 10-15 minutes before it CTD's again I'll try & upload a minidump & save in a few hours..
Also, I see people talking about nonanimated, stationary leaderheads. Mine are still the regular animated ones. Is that just SVN atm, or is there an option I'm missing somewhere?

 

[Flinx]

I'm just downloading V20 and will test your suggestions.
Results won't be available before tomorrow.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

Ever since I upgraded to vanilla V20 I've been getting a nonrecurring CTD evy 10-15 minutes after hitting Renaissance age.. And its not the usual CTD I've had previously wherein the game locks up & I have to manually end process & restart. Instead it unceremoniously just dumps me to desktop with no warning, as if I'd hit Alt+F4, which was most assuredly not the case. Afterwards I load most recent save & play for another 10-15 minutes before it CTD's again I'll try & upload a minidump & save in a few hours..
Also, I see people talking about nonanimated, stationary leaderheads. Mine are still the regular animated ones. Is that just SVN atm, or is there an option I'm missing somewhere?

I am also getting these CTD's which dump me out of the game and I am in the Renaissance age.

Static leader heads are only in the SVN.

 

[strategyonly]

I am also getting these CTD's which dump me out of the game and I am in the Renaissance age.

Static leader heads are only in the SVN.

Is that with current dll?

 

[Koshling]

Is that with current dll?

If it's the same as the one Flinx has it's definately graphical, so I would say almost certainly due to an asset change, not a DLL change. As I sugested to Flinx - check whether it happens with the v20 DLL and latest assets and/or visa versa (v20 DLL won't load a latest version save game, so you'll need to compare a save from a few days back or earlier to be able to do both tests)

 

[strategyonly]

If it's the same as the one Flinx has it's definately graphical, so I would say almost certainly due to an asset change, not a DLL change. As I sugested to Flinx - check whether it happens with the v20 DLL and latest assets and/or visa versa (v20 DLL won't load a latest version save game, so you'll need to compare a save from a few days back or earlier to be able to do both tests)

Works perfect for me But i haven't been able to get to the Renaissance Era since you changed alot in the current dll, nice btw

 

[Madd_Mugsy]

I'm in renaissance now with no crashes so far fwiw

But I did have something strange happen. All of a sudden, I can no longer build paved roads anywhere.

And I also had a great farmer finish building a sheep, only to have no sheep and a great farmer that didn't want to build anything else.

 

[Koshling]

I'm in renaissance now with no crashes so far fwiw

But I did have something strange happen. All of a sudden, I can no longer build paved roads anywhere.

And I also had a great farmer finish building a sheep, only to have no sheep and a great farmer that didn't want to build anything else.

Paved roads I'm unsure about. On the Great farmer however - did you lsoe access to sheep before he finsihed his build? (e.g. - through loss of trading relationship or something) - that would cause the build to stop (though the progress towards it will be retained if you are able to restart it later) and the farmer to be unable to try it again (until you get access to sheep back)