Instability difference between Medieval and Renaissance Eras.

[CainStar]

I didn't report this as a bug since I don't know if this is actually a bug. So in several games of mine(4 in total if I remember correctly) I have had real problems playing through the Medieval Era. And the reason is that when I "hit" Medieval Era I can only play maybe 5-8 turns before Civ4 either quits to desktop without any error message of what so ever, or I get Civ4 MAF screen, or I get a Windows error message box saying something about NiDX somethingsomething.cpl line 235 something like that. But the stability of Civ4 improves greatly if I just push through to Renaissance Era. So as I said I have no idea if this is a bug, so I decided to post here first.

In my current game I actually managed little better with the "crashes", because I enabled viewports so that helped actually a lot, but then again the view ports make action that require moving the screen a lot(exploration, spreading religion, war) quite a chore. Wasen't really that big of problem because I had already conquered my starter continent, and I just rushing for astronomy(so that the beast could be unleashed ).

 

[Thunderbrd]

I didn't report this as a bug since I don't know if this is actually a bug. So in several games of mine(4 in total if I remember correctly) I have had real problems playing through the Medieval Era. And the reason is that when I "hit" Medieval Era I can only play maybe 5-8 turns before Civ4 either quits to desktop without any error message of what so ever, or I get Civ4 MAF screen, or I get a Windows error message box saying something about NiDX somethingsomething.cpl line 235 something like that. But the stability of Civ4 improves greatly if I just push through to Renaissance Era. So as I said I have no idea if this is a bug, so I decided to post here first.

In my current game I actually managed little better with the "crashes", because I enabled viewports so that helped actually a lot, but then again the view ports make action that require moving the screen a lot(exploration, spreading religion, war) quite a chore. Wasen't really that big of problem because I had already conquered my starter continent, and I just rushing for astronomy(so that the beast could be unleashed ).

Interesting that it improved. My wife started having this problem around the same time and it just got worse until she couldn't get through a full round somewhere in the modern era. We couldn't find a way to fix it no matter how many things we tried, though we seemed to show some evidence that Win10 may have some contributing factor somewhere. The map was Huge and we do wonder if it was just too much by then because it was when the map was really opened up and revealed that it started being an issue. However, she won't play with viewports so it was hard to see if that would help it.

Either way, your use of viewports improving the situation tends to confirm that it has something to do with graphic memory limitations being reached. It seemed that panning the map could get it to crash rather quickly. I thus did a thorough audit of the memory usage on plot code and couldn't find a leak there. There's more to search through and maybe one will eventually be found.

This is NOT my forte unfortunately. But it has caused me to read up more and start to learn a bit about memory leak issues. Still can't find any.

 

[CainStar]

I chose the second biggest(at least I think it was) map option for this game, and I have already explored the whole map. Well there are few spots still black, but only because I could not get AI to open their borders(very small areas).

Anyway just wanted to bring this to the teams attention.

And as always thanks for awsome work you guys are doing.

 

[Yudishtira]

Touch wood but with Win7 I have had zero crashes on a Huge map through to late Industrial. (For that reason) I don't think there's any such stability problems with the mod itself, but Win10 is well-known to be broken from what I hear, and in particular has a problem "playing nice" with old programs. If it's not Win10, could it be a local corruption (requiring a clean redownload of the mod)? I know no-one wants to hear that, but it's a fact that not everyone is having such problems.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Touch wood but with Win7 I have had zero crashes on a Huge map through to late Industrial. (For that reason) I don't think there's any such stability problems with the mod itself, but Win10 is well-known to be broken from what I hear, and in particular has a problem "playing nice" with old programs. If it's not Win10, could it be a local corruption (requiring a clean redownload of the mod)? I know no-one wants to hear that, but it's a fact that not everyone is having such problems.

It's not the latter. Not in our case anyhow.

 

[irishhombre]

I have Windows 10, but I have no issues with stability.

 

[raxo2222]

The map was Huge and we do wonder if it was just too much by then because it was when the map was really opened up and revealed that it started being an issue. However, she won't play with viewports so it was hard to see if that would help it.

I scaled down generated map sizes (SVN 10447), but I kept 1:1.5 aspect ratio.
Duel - 1536 (Smaller than Duel of original C2C_World)
Tiny - 3456 (Somewhere between Duel and Tiny of original C2C_World)
Small - 4704 (Original C2C_World Tiny)
Standard - 6144 (Between Tiny and Small of original C2C_World)
Large - 7776 (Original C2C_World Small)
Huge - 9600 (Original C2C_World Standard)
Giant - 11616 (Original C2C_World Large)
Gigantic - 13824 (Original C2C_World Huge)

V38.5 (Not overridden by mapscript) VS SVN default sizes (overridden only by Three Planets, Smart Map and Full of Resources scripts) [Size comparison]:
Duel - 960 -> 1536 [Tiny-]
Tiny - 1664 -> 3456 [Halfway-ish Small/Standard]
Small - 2560 -> 4704 [Standard+]
Standard - 4368 -> 6144 [Large-]
Large - 6656 -> 7776 [Large+]
Huge - 10240 -> 9600 [Huge-]
Giant - 16000 -> 11616 [Huge+]
Gigantic - 24000 -> 13824 [Giant-]

As you see C2C World Huge had around 58%/86% surface area of Gigantic/Giant map.
Large and Huge are now most faithful to V38.5 map sizes, but over half of mapscripts made maps of different sizes before standardization.
Three largest sizes got their sizes reduced.

Original C2C_World Huge is upper limit for mod, so that size now is Gigantic.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Hopefully that'll help.