Hello everyone.
For those of you having some trouble getting Civ to run properly on Vista (32 or 64), Lemon Labs has been working feverishly on the problem. (Yeah. My room mate and I sat up late last night snooping the internet.)
Ori pointed out yesterday that there was a recent increase in the number of people posting about problems with Civ and Vista. He speculated that there must be a recent update or patch that would cause this issue, and we agreed. We did some investigation in the threads and we realized that the bulk of the problems seemed to be happening to people with Nvidia graphics cards, or nvidia based motherboards with recent driver upgrades. We didn't notice anybody having a problem with ATI based cards, but since we aren't ATI-biased, we checked our 6 ATI based machines in the house for issues with Civ, just to make sure that they were ok, too.
Some technical details for those that care:
We used a late game save from machine number 4 in all of the tests to stress the components and played 20 turns on each computer. There were no problems whatsoever.
Let me point out here that we are not biased against Nvidia, it's just that all of our machines have ATI cards at the moment. So we did some research and found this...
1. Vanilla and Warlords are Vista compatible with the current patches. BTS is already Vista certified (32 and 64 bit)
2. Civ must be installed and executed in administrator mode. To ease the installation of mods, when installing, you should override the automatic Vista install location of Vanilla and place it in C:\Program Files\Firaxis... like XP does. Vista puts the game in a different place if you don't override it. BTS will install wherever the registry says Vanilla is. We don't think this trick is possible with the Gold Edition or D2D/Steam versions, as they install differently. (But we don't have those and can't test that, sorry.)
3. Sometimes a DLL file is required to be placed in the main Civ directory. We found this:
5. Some other problems encountered by users of other games including Civ were caused by:
- Incorrect or old drivers for USB keyboards and mice interfering with Nvidia and DirectX drivers.
- HDMI driver issues. (DirectX interference)
- Hi Definition Audio driver issues. (DirectX again)
- If you're overclocking, put your machine back at stock and check if Civ runs ok. If it runs fine at stock, it may be stressing the machine too much at overclock settings. Fiddle accordingly.
- Not enough voltage being applied to RAM. This results in the BSOD and/or game shutdown, instability, or a reboot for no reason. If this is happening to you, bump up your RAM voltage, and make sure that you run your RAM at its recommended voltage and timings. Example: My OCZ RAM runs at 1.8 volts, but is rated at 2.0 or more. My machine will reboot if I stress it while at 1.8 volts (the motherboard automatic setting), but works fine at 2.0.
- There are a couple of mods out there that change CVgamecore.dll. A couple of these mods cause 64 bit Vista some stability problems. An example is BetterAI version 0.60. (I'm not slagging BetterAI here. I love it, and it's a great mod, but it simply wouldn't work for me on 64 bit. 32 bit is no problem. I hope they can fix that.)
So there are a few little things that we found with some research. Thanks to Ori for giving us the idea. We hope this will help some of you who are having problems.
That's all from Lemon Labs.
For those of you having some trouble getting Civ to run properly on Vista (32 or 64), Lemon Labs has been working feverishly on the problem. (Yeah. My room mate and I sat up late last night snooping the internet.)
Ori pointed out yesterday that there was a recent increase in the number of people posting about problems with Civ and Vista. He speculated that there must be a recent update or patch that would cause this issue, and we agreed. We did some investigation in the threads and we realized that the bulk of the problems seemed to be happening to people with Nvidia graphics cards, or nvidia based motherboards with recent driver upgrades. We didn't notice anybody having a problem with ATI based cards, but since we aren't ATI-biased, we checked our 6 ATI based machines in the house for issues with Civ, just to make sure that they were ok, too.
Some technical details for those that care:
Spoiler :
We used a late game save from machine number 4 in all of the tests to stress the components and played 20 turns on each computer. There were no problems whatsoever.
Let me point out here that we are not biased against Nvidia, it's just that all of our machines have ATI cards at the moment. So we did some research and found this...
1. Vanilla and Warlords are Vista compatible with the current patches. BTS is already Vista certified (32 and 64 bit)
2. Civ must be installed and executed in administrator mode. To ease the installation of mods, when installing, you should override the automatic Vista install location of Vanilla and place it in C:\Program Files\Firaxis... like XP does. Vista puts the game in a different place if you don't override it. BTS will install wherever the registry says Vanilla is. We don't think this trick is possible with the Gold Edition or D2D/Steam versions, as they install differently. (But we don't have those and can't test that, sorry.)
3. Sometimes a DLL file is required to be placed in the main Civ directory. We found this:
4. Users of Nvidia cards who are having problems may try rolling back their driver. There have been a number of Vista related problems ecountered after the release of GeForce driver version 178.24, particularly with software packages enabling CUDA. (That comes from the programmer boys and girls at Zylornck Davis' office, and they're pretty smart.) Note: To completely get rid of an Nvidia driver, you may have to use a driver cleaner.
5. Some other problems encountered by users of other games including Civ were caused by:
- Incorrect or old drivers for USB keyboards and mice interfering with Nvidia and DirectX drivers.
- HDMI driver issues. (DirectX interference)
- Hi Definition Audio driver issues. (DirectX again)
- If you're overclocking, put your machine back at stock and check if Civ runs ok. If it runs fine at stock, it may be stressing the machine too much at overclock settings. Fiddle accordingly.
- Not enough voltage being applied to RAM. This results in the BSOD and/or game shutdown, instability, or a reboot for no reason. If this is happening to you, bump up your RAM voltage, and make sure that you run your RAM at its recommended voltage and timings. Example: My OCZ RAM runs at 1.8 volts, but is rated at 2.0 or more. My machine will reboot if I stress it while at 1.8 volts (the motherboard automatic setting), but works fine at 2.0.
- There are a couple of mods out there that change CVgamecore.dll. A couple of these mods cause 64 bit Vista some stability problems. An example is BetterAI version 0.60. (I'm not slagging BetterAI here. I love it, and it's a great mod, but it simply wouldn't work for me on 64 bit. 32 bit is no problem. I hope they can fix that.)
So there are a few little things that we found with some research. Thanks to Ori for giving us the idea. We hope this will help some of you who are having problems.
That's all from Lemon Labs.
