Increase Memory on 64bit Machines

[Akbarthegreat]

First obvious question: do you have issues with any other games? It would make sense to first check if your computer is having issues if you suffer from issues worse than other people. Really slow disk access and crashes could be a corrupted disk or some other nasty error.

As for turn loading times, modern games are big. Say you have a 20 GB game (they exist) and you have to load 3D graphics into memory. This is usually bottlenecked by disk performance. If you have a mechanical disk with a 100 MB/s bandwidth or a RAMdisk with say 50 GB/s bandwidth. Now the game starts up and you need to read 10 GB, process it and then place some of it in the VRAM (the GPU RAM). Which disk will perform the task the fastest? That's where it's very beneficial, particularly if disk access is needed during the game. Decent NVME drives will also boost a lot here, though RAMdisk would be even fast and cheaper if you already have the memory.

I got a little caught up in civ5 and completely forgot about this thread, so I apologise for the late reply.

Regarding issues with other games, I've realised that I face a fairly similar issue with Vox Populi (civ5). In-game performance is completely fine, my laptop is above the recommended specs for the game, and I've played civ5 on a far worse (almost ancient) tower CPU. But beyond a certain point in the game (around turn 250 for standard maps), save games don't load. I don't get a CTD or anything, the game stays on the load screen indefinitely. Again, this problem never surfaces while I'm in-game. So theoretically I could play an entire game without any crashes or issues (I am extrapolating here, but I have good reason to believe it's true). The only problem arises when I try to load savefiles.

This issue along with my problems with DoC has me thinking about what you wrote about disk corruption or something along those lines since my problems are specific to loading. I have just one nonpartitioned disk, and I've thought about partitioning for some time now. Might do it finally. I tried defragging but it didn't help (and I believe windows occasionally does it anyway).

The last solution is trying a factory reset of my laptop. Every time I plan on doing it, I just get lazy and go back to playing unmodded civ4

Edit: I actually performed a disk speed check shortly after writing this post. I typed

winsat disk -drive c

(replace c with disk name) on windows command prompt with admin privileges. Here are the results I got:

Spoiler :

> Running: Feature Enumeration ''
> Run Time 00:00:00.00
> Running: Storage Assessment '-drive c -ran -read'
> Run Time 00:00:14.64
> Running: Storage Assessment '-drive c -seq -read'
> Run Time 00:00:10.09
> Running: Storage Assessment '-drive c -seq -write'
> Run Time 00:00:11.45
> Running: Storage Assessment '-drive c -flush -seq'
> Run Time 00:00:09.30
> Running: Storage Assessment '-drive c -flush -ran'
> Run Time 00:00:13.34
> Dshow Video Encode Time                      0.00000 s
> Dshow Video Decode Time                      0.00000 s
> Media Foundation Decode Time                 0.00000 s
> Disk  Random 16.0 Read                       1.32 MB/s          3.6
> Disk  Sequential 64.0 Read                   88.12 MB/s          6.3
> Disk  Sequential 64.0 Write                  73.46 MB/s          6.1
> Average Read Time with Sequential Writes     8.412 ms          4.9
> Latency: 95th Percentile                     22.191 ms          4.4
> Latency: Maximum                             101.271 ms          7.7
> Average Read Time with Random Writes         10.093 ms          4.5
> Total Run Time 00:00:59.31

If someone else tries this, post your results too. I don't really have much of a benchmark to compare myself to, apart from the numbers to the right of the results (which are presumably a score or percentile).

By start, do people mean the loading of a game save file? I always load, wait for Setup Map, then hit Windows key, program gets minimised, then click back into the program and it has usually skipped the longest loading step. If that helps.

Ah, I see I was unclear. In my previous post, I was referring to loading the game from desktop. The bit where "init xml" etc appears.

 

[Nightinggale]

But beyond a certain point in the game (around turn 250 for standard maps), save games don't load.

Maybe it has to do with the file size. I have run into weird issues once the size exceeds something big, like there is a buffer issue in the exe file. Weirdly using the debugger to set a breakpoint just before it fails and then start again after a few seconds seems to fix the problem. It's really weird.

If someone else tries this, post your results too. I don't really have much of a benchmark to compare myself to, apart from the numbers to the right of the results (which are presumably a score or percentile).

Your numbers look as I would expect from a standard mechanical drive. It's not impressive by modern standards, but clearly within specs of running civ4/5. In fact everybody had numbers like that when the games came out. You can see the speed difference between random read and sequential read. That's the head moving around on the platter. You can change the reading pattern from random to sequential by defragging your disk and in most cases it will not really get fragmented if you make sure you have at least 20% free at all times.

What you should do is go to my computer and right click your C drive and select properties. Here you click the tools tab and first you error check and then you optimize once you know there are no errors. I think that is what you can do to make the disk access faster, other than replacing hardware.

I'm not sure you will really benefit from stats from other people, particularly not if they use a HD, which has significantly different specifications, but if you really want some numbers, then here goes.

Spoiler :

Drive: Samsung 970 EVO plus (NVME)

> Disk  Random 16.0 Read                       1095.95 MB/s          8.9
> Disk  Sequential 64.0 Read                   3048.40 MB/s          9.2
> Disk  Sequential 64.0 Write                  3412.05 MB/s          9.3
> Average Read Time with Sequential Writes     0.052 ms          8.9
> Latency: 95th Percentile                     0.147 ms          8.9
> Latency: Maximum                             0.225 ms          8.9
> Average Read Time with Random Writes         0.048 ms          8.9
> Total Run Time 00:00:02.38

 

[Akbarthegreat]

Maybe it has to do with the file size. I have run into weird issues once the size exceeds something big, like there is a buffer issue in the exe file. Weirdly using the debugger to set a breakpoint just before it fails and then start again after a few seconds seems to fix the problem. It's really weird.

Great point. I'll see if I can find a "cutoff size" above which save files give problems. Do you use visual studio for debugging?

Your numbers look as I would expect from a standard mechanical drive. It's not impressive by modern standards, but clearly within specs of running civ4/5. In fact everybody had numbers like that when the games came out. You can see the speed difference between random read and sequential read. That's the head moving around on the platter. You can change the reading pattern from random to sequential by defragging your disk and in most cases it will not really get fragmented if you make sure you have at least 20% free at all times.

What you should do is go to my computer and right click your C drive and select properties. Here you click the tools tab and first you error check and then you optimize once you know there are no errors. I think that is what you can do to make the disk access faster, other than replacing hardware.

I have a 1 tb disk with 100 gb free, and I just freed up 100 gb more. Currently defragging again. Thanks for the tips. I'm definitely getting a SATA SSD once the quarantine eases a bit.

 

[Nightinggale]

Do you use visual studio for debugging?

Yeah. It just works.

I'm definitely getting a SATA SSD once the quarantine eases a bit.

Make sure you get one with a DRAM buffer/cache. It cost a little extra, but it can make it significantly faster in a number of common usage cases. SATA is capped at 600 MB/s, which makes it slower than NVME, but it's still significantly faster than mechanical HDs. Also keep in mind that if you really want to, you can get NVME to 4xPCIe cards, which can be used to add NVME drives to motherboards too old to have any directly on the motherboard itself. If your goal is to play civ 4/5, then you will likely not be able to tell the difference between SATA and NVME though. In fact it might be questionable how much you benefit from upgrading from a mechanical HD.

 

[Logoncal]

Had to come and pick this up again because i just crashed right at the end before my Space Victory as Great Germany, Lmao

It gave me an error saying "You need to lower the graphics" and afterwards the usual "runtime error"

 

[Kieran J Taylor]

Hi recently re-bought Civ4 and can remember this mod in its early development amazing to see were it has developed, although I'm a bit rusty after not gaming for along time on how to get this patch to work.
first off my game is on steam will this effect the patch and secondly is there a step guide anywhere, using my memory and the simple patch it to the exe has only lead me to testing it on warlords and its now not working hahahah

i get the feeling im going to need this late game

Cheers

 

[Leoreth]

Welcome back!

Yes, it works with Steam as well. Look for Civ4BeyondSword.exe in your Beyond the Sword folder. You can use "browse local files" in the Steam client to get there.

 

[Kieran J Taylor]

Cheers worked fine, although not sure what i done to war lords lol
thank god for the second UK lockdown as ill not be sleeping til x-mass

just found my old civ fanatics account aswell, 2011/12 was playing this mod jesus @kieranjtaylor

 

[lymond]

How in the mother luvin' black hole of obscurities have I not heard of this thing? I just stumbled across this today when looking for something in the PAE folders and tried it out (Pie includes a copy with the mod extras). I don't play big mods much, but this thing had a dramatic affect on playing vanilla BTS. IV usually starts slowing down after 30 mins or so I played several hours after installing this with no slow down at all. Complete shock and I'm still a bit incredulous.


This should be announced with a banner a the top of CFC in blinking pink neon!

 

[Leoreth]

Seriously! I don't even remember where I first heard about it, but it also was by word of mouth. No idea why this is such a secret tool.

 

[Nightinggale]

Yes, it works with Steam as well.

The only issue I know of regarding steam is the steam anti-cheat code, which intentionally crashes games if people use wallhacks or similar. Sadly it views the debugger as a cheat. Not an issue unless you are a high end DLL modder and even then the problem can be fixed with steamless.

 

[Leoreth]

I now own Civ4 on three platforms at this point (original CD I cannot use anymore because I lack a CD drive, Steam, GOG) just so I am able to see what works and what doesn't in those different configurations.

 

[lymond]

I now own Civ4 on three platforms at this point (original CD I cannot use anymore because I lack a CD drive, Steam, GOG) just so I am able to see what works and what doesn't in those different configurations.

Yeah..I've had all that too...except a D2D version instead of GOG. I run that and a steam version on another machine currently. I have not tried this patch on the Steam version yet, but don't see why that would not work.

I plan to test this out a bit more to assuage my skepticism, but once I'm past that I think I will post a thread over in Tech with a link to this thread. Then request a stick. This info should not stayed buried here.

 

[Leoreth]

You're right! The more this gets spread, the better.

 

[Temujin8k]

I lost my games (including my pirated copy of Civ IV) to a game-breaking bug in Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition early this month. I'm currently preoccupied with other things, that's why I haven't been able to take time to reinstall and return to Civ IV and DoC. Now that I'm working, I'm highly considering finally buying the game. Would you recommend the Steam version or the GoG version? And why?

 

[Leoreth]

The GOG install is basically identical to the original CD release of the game, so that is a plus for me. You don't have to do things like mess with the release version to use mods, and Steam's anti-cheat mode isn't getting in the way like Nightinggale mentioned (though that is relevant more for devs). Also, Steam is problematic because it leads to extremely long directory paths because of the base path it puts its games in. For some people this leads to VD file assets being missing because their path exceed the maximum allowed characters in Windows.

I generally prefer GOG over Steam just for DRM reasons, unless you really care about some of Steam's bells and whistles features like friends or achievements.

 

[rmontaruli]

I own the original CD of Complete edition of CIV IV, and after installing the game from CD, and after applying the patch
Civ4BeyondTheSwordPatch3.19.exe (original patch downloded from firaxis years ago)
the DRM is removed.

 

[Leoreth]

Yes, I mean the Steam DRM.

 

[Akbarthegreat]

Surprisingly, my problem isn't actually turn times. It's the large loading time for the game to start, and more importantly, very frequent crashes during the first turn after loading a save game. From what I've read online RAMDisk does seem to help with improving game startup times, but I'm not sure whether it will help with the crashes.

This issue along with my problems with DoC has me thinking about what you wrote about disk corruption or something along those lines since my problems are specific to loading. I have just one nonpartitioned disk, and I've thought about partitioning for some time now. Might do it finally. I tried defragging but it didn't help (and I believe windows occasionally does it anyway).

The last solution is trying a factory reset of my laptop. Every time I plan on doing it, I just get lazy and go back to playing unmodded civ4

Edit: I actually performed a disk speed check shortly after writing this post. I typed

winsat disk -drive c

(replace c with disk name) on windows command prompt with admin privileges. Here are the results I got:

Spoiler :

> Running: Feature Enumeration ''
> Run Time 00:00:00.00
> Running: Storage Assessment '-drive c -ran -read'
> Run Time 00:00:14.64
> Running: Storage Assessment '-drive c -seq -read'
> Run Time 00:00:10.09
> Running: Storage Assessment '-drive c -seq -write'
> Run Time 00:00:11.45
> Running: Storage Assessment '-drive c -flush -seq'
> Run Time 00:00:09.30
> Running: Storage Assessment '-drive c -flush -ran'
> Run Time 00:00:13.34
> Dshow Video Encode Time                      0.00000 s
> Dshow Video Decode Time                      0.00000 s
> Media Foundation Decode Time                 0.00000 s
> Disk  Random 16.0 Read                       1.32 MB/s          3.6
> Disk  Sequential 64.0 Read                   88.12 MB/s          6.3
> Disk  Sequential 64.0 Write                  73.46 MB/s          6.1
> Average Read Time with Sequential Writes     8.412 ms          4.9
> Latency: 95th Percentile                     22.191 ms          4.4
> Latency: Maximum                             101.271 ms          7.7
> Average Read Time with Random Writes         10.093 ms          4.5
> Total Run Time 00:00:59.31

If someone else tries this, post your results too. I don't really have much of a benchmark to compare myself to, apart from the numbers to the right of the results (which are presumably a score or percentile).





Ah, I see I was unclear. In my previous post, I was referring to loading the game from desktop. The bit where "init xml" etc appears.

Thought I'd report back here since I managed to solve this issue last week. I can finally play DoC after many many years

All I did was install civ4 on steam (I had bought it a while ago but I always preferred playing my old non-steam version) - and the DoC loading (startup) time went down from 10+ minutes to ~1 minute, which is pretty much in keeping with the times for other heavy mods (like Magister Modmod). I'm playing a game as Portugal and the experience is fairly smooth - I've had one crash till the 1500's, but since I've reduced the autosave frequency and can restart the game within a minute, it isn't too much of an inconvenience.