Frequency of crash to desktop?

[dr_s]

I'm playing vanilla (with the Rev A) patch, and I find that crashes to the desktop are fairly frequent. If I play for more than a couple hours (and who doesn't?), then I eventually tend to get a crash. It often happens when I'm clicking on one of the advisor icons to pull up an info screen. This is on a pretty vanilla 20'' intel iMac running 10.4.7.

At one point I sent a crash log to Aspyr and they wrote back that I should eradicate all traces of Civ and reinstall, so I did, but that didn't seem to change anything. So I'm wondering if my experience is anomalous or typical.

If it makes a difference, I generally play in windowed mode, not fullscreen. I do sometimes hide Civ rather than save/quit if I go to do something else for a while, I wonder if that could affect things?

 

[Skippy_Kangaroo]

Your experience is not anomalous. Although you might consider upgrading to 10.4.8 as that reportedly fixed some (but certainly not all) graphics card driver issues.

I have had about three kernel panics over the past couple of days while playing Civ IV. (A crash to desktop would be a welcome change.)

The program remains buggy and I have sent a bunch of kernel panic logs to Aspyr in the past. Nothing seems to have come of it - as a result I have no plans of giving them any more money until they fix up Vanilla and there doesn't seem to be any point in sending them more kernel panic logs.

Finally, the response you got from support is just a script monkey kind of response that is typical of this situation. Whenever I have contacted them I have to wait for the mostly vacuous first response then write back telling them that their suggestion didn't solve my problem and it is still a problem before they will acknowledge anything. (Or one time I had to write back and tell them that I was not actually hallucinating and the problem I reported had actually occurred despite the support people assuring me that I couldn't possible be having a problem.)

 

[OscarWildebeest]

I've only experienced a handful of CTDs, but then my machine is way above minimum specs. My CTDs have virtually always come when adjusting the research slider. However, I think this may have something to do with clicking the mouse too quickly, as I've noticed a similar problem on other apps - so it's probably my machine having a problem with CPU-hungry software.

 

[Ankh-f-n-Khonsu]

Happens to me on a MacBook Pro, in full screen or windowed, thus far unpredictably. I thought it was my psyche's way of telling me to get some damn sleep already, say about the 45th time I tell myself "one more turn".

 

[Welnic]

It happens to me on my 24" iMac. I haven't noticed any kind of a pattern. It is not happening often enough that I have bumped up the rate and number of the autosaves. This is on Warlords which seems to do it a little more often than vanilla.

 

[NoMan]

Looks like a patch is on the way. Linking to dojoboy post in another thread to give full credit

dojoboy post

Here is the Glenda Adams posting.

 

[gfeier]

CTDs still happen occasionally and I'm running a Mac Pro with 2GB RAM and the X1900 XT, so I don't think it's related to the machine specs. The difference I'm seeing with Warlords is that I'm getting a lot more black ice. Still my game of choice, though.

 

[XxtraLarGe]

I'm playing vanilla (with the Rev A) patch, and I find that crashes to the desktop are fairly frequent. If I play for more than a couple hours (and who doesn't?), then I eventually tend to get a crash. It often happens when I'm clicking on one of the advisor icons to pull up an info screen. This is on a pretty vanilla 20'' intel iMac running 10.4.7.

At one point I sent a crash log to Aspyr and they wrote back that I should eradicate all traces of Civ and reinstall, so I did, but that didn't seem to change anything. So I'm wondering if my experience is anomalous or typical.

If it makes a difference, I generally play in windowed mode, not fullscreen. I do sometimes hide Civ rather than save/quit if I go to do something else for a while, I wonder if that could affect things?

I've only experienced CTD a few times. It seems to me that it happens mostly when I'm starting the game up. The other times I've experience CTD, it's been when a leader is going to contact me. I know this because it is usually when somebody declares war on me.

 

[AlanH]

Just to let you know, this game isn't totally stable on PCs either. We get reports of crashes from GOTM players, as they want to warn us of reloads as a result, and that mailbox isn't empty!

As indicated above, there seems to be no strong pattern wrt hardware spec, but crashes after long sessions do seem to be a recurring theme. If so, cutting your session times and save/quit/reload more often may help.

 

[bio_hazard]

I don't recall a single crash on my Powerbook (1.5ghz, 1gb ram 64mb radeon 9700) since installing the patch. I'm doing everything I can to avoid crashes, such as staying away from large maps and turning all the bells and whistles off...

 

[jbarry39]

First of all...I've been a fan of the game since way back in my PC days (when MircroProse put the game out...)

But on my system:
Early 2006 iMac 1.86GHz Processor - 1Gig RAM - 128Meg Video card

I usually get about 2-2.5hours on the game before Crash To Desktop rears its ugly head

I mean 1Gig of RAM should be good for ANY application like this.

Are there ANY plans to correct this in the works...it's very annoying b/c you have to load in one of your autosaves which means you have to re-think your strategy before the crash...

 

[AlanH]

First of all...I've been a fan of the game since way back in my PC days (when MircroProse put the game out...)

But on my system:
Early 2006 iMac 1.86GHz Processor - 1Gig RAM - 128Meg Video card

I usually get about 2-2.5hours on the game before Crash To Desktop rears its ugly head

I mean 1Gig of RAM should be good for ANY application like this.

Are there ANY plans to correct this in the works...it's very annoying b/c you have to load in one of your autosaves which means you have to re-think your strategy before the crash...

So save/quite/relaunch every 1.5 to 2 hours?

If you set Autosave to save every turn then you only have to go back the the start of the current turn. It defaults to autosaving every 4 turns. It's a line in ~/Documents/Civilization IV/CivilizationIV.ini. Use TextEdit to change it to look like:

; Specify the number of turns between autoSaves. 0 means no autosave.
AutoSaveInterval = 1

 

[jbarry39]

Thanks for the advices.

Will config the AutoSave to do so every turn and will do a "hard save" after every hour of play.

As an aside - I downloaded the January 24 patch 1.6 rev B (I think) - I notice the animations are crisper and not choppy and I put it through it's paces (opened multiple advisors and conversed with rival sim leaders - which usually led to crashes) - no slowdown, chop, or crashes experienced so far....

 

[NoMan]

I've had 4 cashes to desktop since I installed the most recent patch, the first day it was released. No kernal panics. I had 2 in one 2 hr session and gone for days without a crash. I can't figure out any method to the madness. The stability is much better than before the patch but still not good.

My MBP is well above the minimum specs, and I'm running 10.4.8.

The crashes are audio-related and Aspyr is aware of the problem. I am hoping that 10.4.9 might help but I don't see anything related to audio in the 10.4.9 fixes reported by the rumor sites.

 

[Bazzalisk]

No crashes on my Powermac Quad G5.