Game Initializes then crashes

[spiky82]

Someone please help a badly addicted Civ fan

I don't know why this is suddenly happening since my CIV IV used to work just fine...medium graphic settings huge maps no problem, right?

Well, now I can't even start a game...I tried to go down to 'standard' size maps, but that did not help either...it initializes, then crashes on the 'dawn of man' screen stating there's bad memory allocation. HELP!!!

 

[spiky82]

FYI, I'm XP Pro BTS latest version (installed the patch like 2 months ago)...it worked fine then.

 

[ori]

please post your dxdiag results file.

 

[spiky82]

Hi there!

Glad that there's an helpful expert here

 

[ori]

ok:
first I'd update the graphics drivers - they predate the release of the game.
then: is the game patched to date?
is there anything else running in the background?
is the hard drive very full (less than 10% free space)?

 

[spiky82]

ok:
first I'd update the graphics drivers - they predate the release of the game.
then: is the game patched to date?
is there anything else running in the background?
is the hard drive very full (less than 10% free space)?

Hi Ori, I updated the graphics drivers to the latest version, & yes, I was already up & running on 3.19 before this started to happen, there is nothing running on the background when I play CIV and the hard drive is 65% free...& I regularly defrag once every 2 weeks.

What else would cause 'bad memory allocation' error? Would getting more RAM or newer PCI-E video cards solve this problem? Please help

 

[ori]

the memory allocation failure usually is caused by the game either running out of RAM and page file to use or by the game hitting the 2GB hard barrier that is imposed by windows. Neither should happen when starting up a game (can happen when a save game gets really large).
another possibility of course would be general RAM problems (you might want to run memtest) - Apart from that:
please open the civilizationIV.ini and set all items with log in their name from 0 to 1 and then cause that error and post my games\beyond the sword\logs as a zip file

 

[spiky82]

Thank you Ori for looking into this. I've attached the Zip file of the logs like you said below.

 

[ori]

the log says it is with a mod loaded (terraform) is this also the case when the mod is not loaded?

 

[spiky82]

Yeah...this happens mostly when I try to run this mod...in other times the game seems to run okay but this happened once before when I was just doing straight single player...but again ALL of this started since about June '09.

1) Now, having said that, if this is because of the MOD, is there something I can do?
2) If I'm playing straight CIV 4 game, why did the game do the same thing?

3) If I upgrade my video card (say, SAPPHIRE HD 4350 512MB PCI-E DDR2)as well as add some RAM, would the problems get solved?

 

[ori]

well - if the MAF error happens on game startup with a mod - that is possibly because the mod is just extremely large and requires a lot of memory to start - if it happens in the unmodded game on startup I'd suspect a faulty memory address (i.e. a fault on the RAM chips - and would recommend checking your memory).