[BTS] Game crashed while BOTM-ing (on Linux)

[Pangaea]

Can't recall this having ever happened before (possibly extremely rarely), but the game actually crashed on me. Thankfully it was while playing the BOTM 194 Lockdown game, whose deadline passed long ago, so it's not as serious as if it was an active game. But it does make me concerned about it possibly happening during active BOTMs, or HoF play. If it did, the game may well have been disallowed.

The exact moment it happened was when BW was researched, and the popup for it was about to occur, and possibly a resource showing up. I don't know if there is anything very special for that in this particular game that prompted the game to crash (sounds unlikely, but you never know).

As mentioned, I am playing on Linux. That may raise some eyebrows and "ofc it will crash then", but the game has been incredibly stable and I've never had issues with it. It may still be related to Linux of course, or it can be a regular crash that would have happened on a Windows rig too. I don't know.

The backtrace may not say much to anybody, but I've attached it here in case somebody are able to draw something sensible from it.

The attached screenshot reveals map information about BOTM 194, which you may not want to see if you haven't played it yet, but intend to do so. The submission deadline was a few months back.

Spoiler :

If anybody knows why this happened or how I can remedy things so it won't happen again, it would be much appreciated. Would hate a game to get disallowed due to a crash, after spending 20-30-40 hours on it.

My system is Linux Mint 19.3 Cinnamon.
System info bin

 

[Pangaea]

Loaded the autosave after starting the game again, and this time the BW popup showed and the game didn't crash. The crash happened between those turns. Almost hoped it would crash again, as it would then be repeatable.

Anyway, if people have any ideas what could have caused this, please give me a shout.

 

[Termitnik]

From backtrace you attached it is clear you use wine in order to emulate windows environment. I would start with checking wine logs at the time of crash.
Also I would check for any recent python updates, because python binary is an entrypoint..

 

[Noble Zarkon]

Civ IV does occasionally crash - if it's happening regularly that's one thing, if it's just occasionally that's why we have the Crash Exception Policy, make sure you know what to do if it does happen during a competitive game.

 

[Pangaea]

Thanks @Noble Zarkon. I am aware of the crash exception policy, but my understanding was that it was pretty restrictive so no guarantees. Maybe it would have been fine here as it happened between turns, so I didn't actually have to retrace and steps as nothing had been done in the new turn, but the simple fact the game crashed while using Buffy/playing BOTM is the concern, since it can then obviously happen again, and possibly at a worse time (say during a war, after moving 30 units and fighting 20 combats -- imposssible to retrace). Can only hope it doesn't happen ofc, when I over the next week try to complete BOTM 197.

 

[Fine_Distinction]

I like to keep my civ game open in the background - in case I have some genius civ ideas during the time I work on something else - and it seems to contribute to crashes. But that is on an old Mac laptop, Linux maybe another story.

 

[Pangaea]

Cheers. I usually don't do that, unless I'm just eating dinner or something, and will soon start playing again. But my sessions tend to be really long, like 5+ hours, so the game is up quite a while, and sometimes I flip to a different workspace to look up something, or see what's new in the forum, or actual news in the world. Thankfully the game basically doesn't crash, though, so this really caught me off guard. Hope it doesn't happen again, and this only was a freak occurrence of some kind. Did play a long Buffy session yesterday after the crash and everything was fine then, so here's hoping

 

[Noble Zarkon]

But my sessions tend to be really long, like 5+ hours, so the game is up quite a while

If you keep getting crashes I would recommend restarting Civ every couple of hours, there is a memory leak on Windows not sure how that will be reflected on Linux.

 

[Pangaea]

Sure thing, just one more turn

Same issue with memory leak on Linux too. It's essentially the same experience, only that we need to use Wine to get it to run. The game gets noticeably more sluggish as these long sessions go on, which is why I close down the game every now and then, like when it takes a full second or more to go from one city to another with right/left arrow.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Civ IV does occasionally crash - if it's happening regularly that's one thing, if it's just occasionally that's why we have the Crash Exception Policy, make sure you know what to do if it does happen during a competitive game.

Exactly. That link is for the HOF competition, though what it says is roughly true for GOTM games too - except that for GOTM, you should PM the mapmaker as we don't have a central email address. And it's probably best to do it when the crash happens, rather than waiting until you submit - so you have more chance of remembering what happened ;-)