Crazy compatibility problem between ssd and hdd

[kipkuhmi]

Good morning,

yesterday my friend and I tried to play Civ IV BtS (a modded version) in multi player mode. I'm using an SSD (OCZ Vertex 2 Agility) in my computer, my friend a traditional HDD. My system's specs are the following:

Mac Pro (Early 2009)
8-core 2,0 GHz
12 GB RAM
Windows 7 Ultimate over Bootcamp
ATI Radeon HD 4870, 512 GB VRAM
OCZ Vertex 2 Agility 120 GB

My friend's computer is a normal Windows 7 Home Edition machine. I guess it has an AMD CPU of some kind and 4 GB RAM.

Now here's the story:

1.
When I run BtS in single player mode, everything's okay.

2.
When I copy the mod to my friend's computer, we can start Civ, enter the setup lobby, but Civ crashes on my machine in the moment we want to start the game (according to WinDbg it's some command like "getUnicodeString" that causes the crash).

3.
I still have my old Windows 7 Ultimate partition on traditional HDD. Now I'm copying my whole "My Games>>Beyond The Sword" folder from my SDD to this HDD (strangely only 3 GB large, not 4 GB as it should be). When we go to multi player, we can start the game all right, but I can't see any units! I mean, they are there and ready to be given commands, but they totally invisible!

Now when this has happened, my whole Civ installation is ruined. The units will remain invisible from then on even if I run Civ Vanilla single player afterwards. The only thing that helps is changing the user account or removing and reinstalling Civ completely (all three parts).


All these problems only seem to affect my computer. My friend could easily play on.

Could this be some problem with Windows running on Bootcamp? - For example, I'm also not able to set up Email games, but I can play already existing games.


Thanks for any help, I'm totally lost over this one ...

 

[The_J]

2 things:
a) What mod? If the mod has a custom CvGameCoreDll.dll, then it will not work on Macs.
b) the error sounds like a problem with "special characters". Stuff like ö, ä, ü, ´` etc. are differently encoded on Mac and Win machines. If there's such a character in one of the text files, then the mod will not be recognized as the same version on both machines.

 

[kipkuhmi]

Thanks for the reply.

a) It's a mod that I'm writing myself. We've been playing it for quite a long time now, never had this kind of problems however. It appeared for the first time after I had installed my new SSD.

a) + b) I think there's a misunderstanding. We're both running Civ under Windows 7. I'm using Ultimate, my friend Home Edition. My SSD is formatted with NTFS.

 

[The_J]

sorry for not carefully enough reading your post.

Read now some short infos about bootcamp in wikipedia (relatively short articles, supprisingly), and i still think b) might be the problem here (Can't say it for sure, because the technical infos are very sparse).

 

[kipkuhmi]

No problem.

I'm sorry there's not much more information that I can give. To my understanding it's very probable there's a compatibility problem between the ways SSDs and HDDs store their data.

So for a beginning I would just like to know if anyone has ever tried Civ multi player between two computers running on SSDs and HDDs, respectively.

 

[kipkuhmi]

Good news is, multi player games seem to work between SSD and HDD computers when setting up un-modded Civ BtS games. So it must have to do sth with my mod. As I have certainly never written any command for the CvCoreGameDLL.dll to fiddle around with memory allocations, the error could be about wrong compiler flags or so. I think I will look into this.