Crashing to Desktop...

Gah it is getting much worse from my previous post.

I am at about 1900 AD and it crashes every couple turns. Very frustrating. When I started the game it crashed after an hour or so, each time the crashes got closer together. Now I cannot even get 10 minutes out of it. Also, I was getting a crash to desktop. Then I got a blue screen, and the last crash was this garbled colored screen. So not only is the game failing it is now taking my system down with it.

This is the most unstable program I have ever had on my computer. Before this game I would reset my computer maybe once a week. In that time I could play countless games and run as many apps as I wanted. No issues. I have beta tested games that are more stable. I seriously find it difficult to believe that not one of the review sites had at least one or two computers in the office see this. None of them saw the hot seat trade bug, or the non-random map generator. My faith in the reviews is even lower than it was previous to this game...I think I will just stop looking at those sites all together. Stick to forums like this to find out if a game is good and stable.

The fact that the game is fun means that I will wait for a patch and tough it out. Next firaxis game though I think I will wait till it gets a price drop. It should be stable by then.
 
Just an idea. It would be interesting to see what exactly is going on. If we can get 3 or 4 people (at least 2 with the crashing phenomenon and 1 or 2 that runs well) to upload games and try to play the other three. Maybe it is a corruption in the save method on some of our computers.
 
SmCaudata said:
Just an idea. It would be interesting to see what exactly is going on. If we can get 3 or 4 people (at least 2 with the crashing phenomenon and 1 or 2 that runs well) to upload games and try to play the other three. Maybe it is a corruption in the save method on some of our computers.
Click to expand...

Ya'll are welcome to toy with the file I uploaded. I am curious to see if it will crash on other machines -- since I have NOT been having any crashes except with France as my civ.
 
For me, CTD's have reduced by a large amount since reducing my rez from 1280*1024 to 1024*768.

Played 5 hours @ 1280 : over a dozen serious CTDs and lockups
Played 5 hours @ 1024 : about 3...

And of those three, all were "predictable" - adding grid, going out to globe view etc. Even then, two of them were me getting bored - my pc had black-screened out, but the disk activity and responsive mouse suggested that Civ4 was still chugging away trying to do its task. At 1280, I'd be back in WinXP.

Map is huge, all the civ's on, lot of the map showing. Was definitely close to unplayable at 1280, but have really enjoyed the last few hours - had to stop as I'm too tired to carry on, and also lacking a manual I'm unsure of the best Apollo strat...
 
Well into the ninteenth century as Japan/Standard World and the damned game is becoming unplayable. It ran as smooth as you like until I started getting the modern techs and the CTDs are becoming increasingly frequent.

Worse is that they are seemingly random - there is no common denominator at all. However I suspect that because the screen is getting busy with all the hundreds of worker improvements (there aren't that many units out and about) that this may be the key factor.

NVidia Geforce FX5700 if it helps. I have to give up on this game for now until the CTDs are addressed :(
 
Eyeoftiger said:
Maybe not the crashing, but there IS a memory leak in the game as evident to the slow down over time. If anyone ever played the retail version of "Birth of the Federation," you know what a really bad memory leak looks like. :eek:
Click to expand...

Very very true, On the slow down over time. Ive a 1 month old 3.4Gz P4 with well over quoted spec, and Ive had only one crash , which happened after I'd won first Un vote(very annoying).

But the game runs wonderfully until somewhere around the time you start hearing loads of Beethoven and Mozart, and then slowly...grinds......to almost.........a halt. And I dont mean just cos uve got more map,units and diplomacy etc going on, just clicking to bring up the "map grid" can take almost a minute of real time.

And this thing with game 2 crashes etc. I find that if I quit a game late in , with all the slowdown, it stays if you try and start another. Normally when you set up a game and start, the "Play the game" button appears just as Spock starts talking, but when the "accumulative slowdown carry over" is in effect,it didnt even appear until after he'd spoken the whole creation intro.

Only fix I've found is to reboot after a game.

So yes, thanks for your conformation that it definitely IS a memory leak, cos it had me worried about my PC for a while.

DrewBledsoe
 
My game seems to be crashing during one of the AI's turn. Usually right after/before I build or research something.

Kushan

(That doesnt make any sense.....)
 
I got the game on the 4th Nov and have played extensively every day since. Not a single CTD and the only slowdown I've seen is an extra second or two in the late game for the AI turns (this is despite playing for 12 hours straight on each of Saturday and Sunday without exits or reboots).

Loading a save DOES take ages (30-90 seconds) though.

I play almost exclusively on multiplayer over lan, 1024x768x32 in windowed mode. Huge terra map style.

Given that single player has some features that dont appear in multiplayer, have any of you tried playing alone in multiplayer (ie start MP and have everyone else as AI?)
 
Mazruk said:
I got the game on the 4th Nov and have played extensively every day since. Not a single CTD and the only slowdown I've seen is an extra second or two in the late game for the AI turns (this is despite playing for 12 hours straight on each of Saturday and Sunday without exits or reboots).

Loading a save DOES take ages (30-90 seconds) though.

I play almost exclusively on multiplayer over lan, 1024x768x32 in windowed mode. Huge terra map style.

Given that single player has some features that dont appear in multiplayer, have any of you tried playing alone in multiplayer (ie start MP and have everyone else as AI?)
Click to expand...

Well thats an original way around things, but isnt it a bit like buying a car and finding if you turn the wheel to the left , the tyres go right and changing down into 1st gear moves you up into 4th ?

No. it should work straight out of the box. Period.
 
For the fiirst week or so, the game ran great, and I was happy to have an NVidia card rather than ATI. Then I started getting random crashes to the desktop. I also noticed a slowdown in performance in conjunction with the crashes (memory leak?), so I tried bumping all the graphics settings down to medium. It said that the game would have to restart for the changes to take effect, but....

Now every time I try to start the game it fails and gives the following error message: "Failed to Initialize Renderer- Check DirectX Version and Graphics Settings" during the "Init Engine" stage. I've been poking around the config file to see if I can manually change the graphics settings, but no luck so far. Guess I'll try a reinstall next. So, if you are adjusting graphics settings, TREAD CAREFULLY!

I have tp say I'm starting to agree that they really did a crappy job of developing and debugging this game- the Microsoft disease is spreading!
 
lebowski said:
^Will check it out.


I turned off the autosaves and it doesn't crash AS much. It still is frustrating because now I save every 3 turns. I think I already have a gig of saved games because of this problem. :mad:
Click to expand...


SHIFT F5

quicksaves your game. If you don't care havein a single "restore point" for your game.

Then in load window you can find your quicksaves in ...\singleplayer\quicksaves directory.
 
sometimes the game runs smootly, sometimes it crashes..just had a savegame that crashed to me yesterday every 2nd next turn..today it ran for hours..i shutdown the comp to drive my wife to some friend, then i start pc to play again, and hops, crashes like rain falling from sky again? random crashes..I think some people are just more lucky then others..maybe you pray louder at church or so...but people telling me the game is all fine are not worth to mention :)
anyway, less errors occured by setting all graphics to minimal, reducing AA, switching to windowed mode, increasing virtual ram, I now just read a topid to use older drivers..people with such dont have crashes? is this driver related? no, its performance, the older driver just dont push your card to the limits..they just programmed some big failure in this software..and I wonder why they didnt take any stance so far..i guess they'll think:"if we dont admit something is wrong, people will buy it, and we'll fix it later some day..meanwhile we can drive big mercedesses" which i can live with, but fix the bloody code firaxis!! and admit something is wrong!! tell people the truth! :) it's not bad admitting something went wrong, it's called:"beeing Human" denying I call:"lying" just give is a fixed patch! :) damn, i want to play this game, it looks so great on standard maps with no crashes...but all the crashes i get on huge maps makes me sick :)
 
ok, tried the older catalist drivers 4.10..the game is running like a mad rocket outta control now and pressing 30turns next next and no chashes yet wooohoo :)
 
On my fourth proper game now, and it's the best one I've had - in the lead and in constant warfare with neighbours, with the exciting subplot of the space race just around the corner.

But, Civ4 being Civ4, it's decided to go from being reasonably stable (1 crash in about 5 hours) to now being totally unstable - crash every turn. 1860, all map visible, 6 civs left, lots and lots of units (mainly mine :D ). I've tried clearing all cache's, temp dir's etc. but even with that, it still CTD's. I hope the save game isn't screwed.

Shame! Direct2Drive have just released a patch for Civ4 so I get the manual and Spock... so I finally have the "full" product. Or, ermmm, "full of bugs" product.
 
I was having CTDs every second turn or so in my second game (singleplayer, huge, 14 AI, mid game) kicking ass but getting seriously annoyed by the constant reboots. :confused:

I got sick of it and decided to reinstall the game. While doing so I noticed in the readme file that it recommends running chkdsk and defrag on your drive BEFORE installing the game... :rolleyes:

3 hours later i'm playing a huge terra map fullscreen, 18 AI, max graphics and anticipating it to crash anytime soon... except it hasn't... yet.

Could this be related to difficulty level? first game: settler, second :warlord. Third: settler

I got a month old top of the line PC, so I KNOW it isn't hardware. I didn't upgrade the latest ATI drivers.

Don't know about you guys, but I had 75 000 fragmented files on my HDD!?!
 
I am also experiencing annoying CTD's.

First, I am running on a Pent 4, 3Ghz HT with 3Gb RAM. nvidia GeForce 6600.

Second, I am playing a hotseat game, Epic, 2 Human players, 10 computers.

Ran smoothly for quite awhile until probably the 19th century. Then it started experiencing occasional CTD's while playing. Those are relatively rare.

HOWEVER, I am experiencing a fairly regular CTD when attempting to save. Every so often when I hit ctrl S and then hit the button to save there is a CTD. When I reopen the game I see a saved file has been created but it is 2x as big as the other saved files(for instance a saved file from 1942 is 948kb but the saved file I attempted to create in 1945 is about 1500kb).

This is of particular annoyance because I can not save and just reload after a CTD because it is the act of saving that seems to be causing the CTD. There does not seem to be any pattern to it. I can save one turn, try and save the next and CTD. But then I reload and can save or pass through that turn no problem. I can go and play for 45min without a problem but sometimes it happens after only 5min. I have not been able to find any way around this.
 
After 3 pages of posts and reading, NO-ONE has come up with a solution??? Well, not one that I understand, anyway.

I have CTD with about 20 turns left in a game, but after a DRAMATIC slowdown. EDIT: - Single player only, Terran map, 2nd to largest map.

I have a 3700+ Athlon 64 with 2 Mb cache, 2Gb matched Corsair RAM, an Nvidia 7800GTX, NONE is overclocked and the temperatures / voltages are stable. EDIT2: - and 2 x 250Gb SATA HDDs, with LOTS of free space on them.

So, why the slow down, then crashes? And in laymans terms, please, as I am a luddite.
IF it does it a couple more times after over 5 hours or so of play, then I'm going to HAVE to uninstall it. Which is a VAST shame, as I love Civ.

EDIT3:- I posted on the "other" "developer / tester" forum too. http://apolyton.net/forums//showthread.php?s=&postid=4135725&t=3484#post4135725
 
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