Consistent, Reproducable crashing bug in 1.16f

[WhittyMike]

I finally received a message from Firaxis "tech support", but it wasn't very helpful -- just suggested four possible conflicts with other software, none of which could be the problem because either (1) I don't have that other software and/or (2) I never have this problem except in huge map games in the late industrial era, making it highly unlikely that it's a conflict with anything else in or on my PC.

I thanked him for the message but politely asked him to try harder next time, rather than just the usual "tech support" knee-jerk reaction that I hear so often, that "it must a problem with your {hardware | other software | zodiac sign}, because it simply can't be a problem with our product."

 

[Despiser]

I encouraged Firaxis to visit this thread to get a better fix on the bug two days ago. I don't believe size of the world matters. I can always get to the late industrial era on different world sizes before the inevitable crash. I have two separate games saved before the crash that I have a chance of winning if they ever produce a working patch.

 

[BradC]

There is some indication that three or four different problems have coalesced under the "civilization3.e.exe" banner, and so there may be three or four different solutions. I have tried one that was proposed and it seems to have worked, although all I have done so far is start a new game that got much more complex in terms of warfare and such than the ones that were crashing on me. No crashes so far. Tonight I will test one or more of the "crashing" games if I have time. If anyone else wants to try (but remember that DirectX 8.1 cannot be uninstalled!), follow this link to the relevant thread:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=13298

Good luck (and wish me luck, too)!

 

[BradC]

False alarm. My old save game still crashed, and a new one crashed last night. See my post in "What's up with the civilization3.e.exe..." thread.

 

[Hiro]

In the "What's up with..." thread we figured out that crashes are related to cities falling into disorder. Well I should say "ONE confirmed point for crases..."
(Dumpster figured it out and my sure-to-crash-savegame survived the turn . Please check your critical savesgames and report.)

This might explain quite a lot of effects reported in this thread:

• crashes do not happen at the beginning of a game -> population to low for unrests
  
• crashes happen far more frequent during middle ages -> population bigger -> "better" chanches for unrests
  
• crashes happen almost certain during industrial ages when somebody declares a war. Civs are likely to have republic or democracy then. Hence war is a major source of unhappiness -> disorder.
  
• AI declares war to another one -> have you negotiated military alliances with any of the participating civs? Perhaps these are activated driving you into war? (I never had such alliances before, so it is a guess only. This might as well be a completely different bug.)

Do I still have to say: Watch your population happiness closely, especially while replaying formerly crashed turns.

 

[Brocky]

My crash occured not during the AI's turn but in the middle of my turn. I was cruising in my game as the Chinese and I wiped out the Americans except for a single Galley that was left and hovering around my coast. I build a Frigate and sent it over to kill it. When it destroyed the galley I got a message from my Military Advisor saying that I had wiped out the Americans and then this appeared:

CIVILIZATION3 caused an invalid page fault in
module CIVILIZATION3.EXE at 017f:0052c290.
Registers:
EAX=00000000 CS=017f EIP=0052c290 EFLGS=00010246
EBX=00000000 SS=0187 ESP=00abdd04 EBP=0a84f1e0
ECX=00680dc8 DS=0187 ESI=00000000 FS=4d47
EDX=01323dac ES=0187 EDI=00000000 GS=0000
Bytes at CS:EIP:
8b 56 10 8b 46 1c 8b 4e 14 89 54 24 14 99 2b c2
Stack dump:
06fb5900 00000000 00000e00 00629c48 00000000 00000013 0a84f3a4 00000000 004026e9 00000003 00000013 00000000 00629c40 00629c40 00629c48 00493898

This seems to be the same as everyone else is getting. Anyway, I tried and tried again but I eventually gave up, thinking that I might get the victory where you have 66% of the total territory, but I kept an eye on the Galley.
I wiped out the French and the Galley was still there. I offered peace with the Americans and in the negotiations I gave them one of my costal towns close to the Galley (I moved my units out of the town first). Sure enough the Americans accepted and moved the Galley into the town and I hit them with my Cavalry. RIP America: Game, Set, Match, China.

 

[wotan321]

My games are crashing EVERY game in the industrial era too. I experimented with the game and this is what I found.

No matter what I do "in game" prior to the crash, it still crashes at the same point.

I uninstalled, reinstalled, and applied the new 1.16f patch. I reloaded my customized .bic file. Same crash. If I load the original .bic file though, the game plays fine. I went ahead and played a few more turns, saved the game, and reapplied the custom .bic file. The game immediately crashed.

I have not tried updating the directx, but I will.

Has changing the .bic file made a difference for anyone else?

 

[wotan321]

I installed directx 8.1. Still crashes.

I turned off AutoSave. Still crashes.

Lets hope that second patch comes out soon..... any word from Firaxis?

 

[xamevou]

Yes. I have not one, but TWO savegames that can be used to recreate this problem. One is from 1778 AD (playing the GOTM#1), the other is at 1986 AD.

When my turn ends, the foreign advisor window appears ("The Xs have declared war to the Ys") and it crashes after my attempt to close that window.

I was able to completely finish a game some days ago (at chieftain level, just to learn the mechanics of civ3), but this bug has spoiled two of my games so far. If this bug is not fixed I do not feel very motivated to start another game. I emailed the savegames to the tech support here in Spain.

Could it be possible to use some cheats to avoid that two civs go to war? At least I could finish my games.

Some data:

CivIII v1.16f
Directx 8.1
Laptop Compaq Presario 12XL519
Windows ME

 

[bloodysmurf]

I reduced the Romans down to a single Galley... and I suspected something was wrong because after a few turns this Galley just stopped moving. I brought in an ironclad to finish it off, and as soon as I wipe out the Romans the game crashes:

CIVILIZATION3 caused an invalid page fault in
module CIVILIZATION3.EXE at 0167:0052c290.
Registers:
EAX=00000000 CS=0167 EIP=0052c290 EFLGS=00010246
EBX=00000040 SS=016f ESP=00abdd04 EBP=0b5ded00
ECX=00680dc8 DS=016f ESI=00000000 FS=0fe7
EDX=087ea9a0 ES=016f EDI=00000040 GS=0000
Bytes at CS:EIP:
8b 56 10 8b 46 1c 8b 4e 14 89 54 24 14 99 2b c2
Stack dump:
0b60444c 00000040 00000d80 00629c4c 00000000 00000013 0b5deec4 00000000 004026e9 00000006 00000013 00000000 00629c40 00000d80 00629c4c 00493898

If anyone in Firaxis is interested in checking out the savegame, just reply to this thread...

-ollie-

 

[BradC]

It is not civil disorder in my case. I cranked up the luxuries and no one was going into civil disorder, anyway. And there were some turns earlier when a city or two went into civil disorder, and no crash.

It could be the .bic file I'm using, I guess. Is everyone experiencing this problem only with custom .bic files?

I don't really want to play with the standard empires...

Sigh.

Brad

 

[wotan321]

Yeah BradC, its so far only been custom .bic files that crash. I hope other folks comment on this too.

What are you altering in you .bic files? My changes included:
>unit attributes
>civ colors
>civ attributes
>city names
>my civ's name and leader

Perhaps if we could find a common thread.... that would help us prevent this.

HEY FIRAXIS!!!! I assume you guys are aware of the actual cause of this crash and are speedily developing a fix. Could you clue us in on to the etiology of this ailment?

 

[WildDonkey]

Hey all,

I am using Civ III stock out of the box with 1.16f applied. I am playing standard size, 8 civs. Absolutely nothing custom, and I have never even seen the editor.

I am around 1680 AD and experiencing the crash at the beginning of my turn when the cities are being "examined/calculated" I guess. I did make it past this point once by turning up the entertainment slider, but it crashed on the next turn after I turned it back down. For me it seems to have something to do with the city going into or out of social disorder??

I have tried emailing support but they have been useless thus far. They don't acknowledge that they have a bug(s). Just update my drivers and such (which I have). Again I don't have custom .bic files or anything else. I am playing it exactly as they intended. So they have NO valid excuses for me.

Anyway here's my PC's specs:

Win2k
P4 1.7GHz
512Ram
SB Live
Linksys Ethernet Card


BTW In the general discussion area I have a poll for the crash. Please go there and vote so maybe somebody will acknowledge this problem exists and FIX IT! The poll is titled "Have you experienced the "CIVILIZATION.EXE has caused...."" Or something to that effect

 

[Vynd]

I've had trouble with this crash bug as well, and I've never modified anything about the game. So far as I can see from my own experiences and from what people have posted here, the problems are clearly related to the v1.16f patch. I couldn't get through a single game with the patch applied. I uninstalled Civ and started over again without the patch, and since then I've never had any games crash on me. So my advice is, play without the v1.16f patch, and hope that they eventually release a new patch (V1.16g??) that actually works.

 

[Despiser]

Then why is it called a "patch"?!?!

 

[Apollo]

A lot of the things people have said here sound similar to crash in the "What's up with Civilization3.e.exe..." thread, but this was started before the patch was released, and I have been getting the Civilization3.e.exe crash in every game around 300AD no matter what I do since my pre-order came from Amazon.com back in mid-November. Are these two bugs different or the same?

 

[Dan Magaha FIRAXIS]

Originally posted by WhittyMike
I finally received a message from Firaxis "tech support",

Just to be clear, there is no "Firaxis tech support". If you heard from anyone at Firaxis, it was probably me, and I'm not a tech support guy in any sense of the word, I'm simply doing the best I can to answer what questions I can and help where I can be of help.

Infogrames are the tech support guys, it's their product, and they are the ones responsible for supporting it.


Dan

 

[cht2000]

Well do you know anything about the bugs or are you just trying to pass the buck? I guess you're not responsible for the release date or the tech support, but it was firaxis who wrote the code.

 

[Dan Magaha FIRAXIS]

If I knew specifically what was causing the bug, I would have posted the solution, as I have done here on many occasions (for example, the monitor refresh rate problem or nVidia Detonator driver issue)

We did write the code and we are definitely interested in finding and squashing bugs, especially if they're major crash-inducing bugs. However, a lot of times hardware configuration, compatibility problems, and other weird feng-shui computer phenomena are what's causing the problems, not simple coding errors. This is where technical support comes in, and it's their job to walk through their checklists and make sure that what we're talking about is a definite bug, and how to reproduce it. This helps us to locate and kill these bugs.

An example is that some people had problems where the lines don't show up between the civs on the foreign advisor, and a lot of people thought it was a bug in the code. The actual problem was that their video drivers didn't have open GL support, which is the API that was used to code some of the graphical effects in the game, including those lines in the foreign advisor.

The point to all of this is that there is a process, and it's set up that way for a reason.


Dan

 

[Jeffy Barbarian]

So has anyone found the soulution. I as well have the same problem. Crashes in the industrial age.

Gives me practically the same error message.CIVILIZATION3 caused an invalid page fault in
module CIVILIZATION3.EXE 17. somethiing, something....

I have renewed my drivers, turn off programs, edited my startup... used the patched, not used the patched.

What a load of Calvary Horse-hockey!



I have never had so many problems with a game, and I have told everyone that I know to tell everyone they know, that this game's really, really buggy, and incomplete, and to view all these calls for help on this message board before they buy this piece crap.

Another thing, I can't believe some the higher held esteemed gamer mags gave this bug-a-thon a high rating