Issues running Ventrilo and Civ 4

[Rajai]

Have anyone else had issues with Civ 4 crashing while loading if you are running Ventrilo in the background?

When I try to run Civ while Ventrilo is running I get an error stating that the civlization4.e.exe has encountered an error and will shut down. This has not happened to any of my friends and we cannot figure out what's going on.

I can close Ventrilo and run Civ 4 without a problem, and I can also open Ventrilo while Civ 4 is running, however I'll encounter an error about the device already being in use, and then Ventrilo will not allow me to speak.

Can anyone please help with this? Anything would be appreciated.

 

[Yoshua]

Have anyone else had issues with Civ 4 crashing while loading if you are running Ventrilo in the background?

When I try to run Civ while Ventrilo is running I get an error stating that the civlization4.e.exe has encountered an error and will shut down. This has not happened to any of my friends and we cannot figure out what's going on.

I can close Ventrilo and run Civ 4 without a problem, and I can also open Ventrilo while Civ 4 is running, however I'll encounter an error about the device already being in use, and then Ventrilo will not allow me to speak.

Can anyone please help with this? Anything would be appreciated.

Yes I get this too. Though I get no error message, or even an error message in Civ's log files when I start up Civ 4 with Vent running. Just gets to the XML part and the loader exits.

I'm using a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS. Currently running the latest beta driver, though had the same problem with the older non-beta driver. DX is up to date as well. I do not believe this is or can be a driver issue.

Problem occurs even if I totally turn off sound in the game. And for some reason I cannot deselect a sound input device in-game. Is there an XML file or some config file I can edit to tell it to quit looking for a sound input device ?

Honestly with developers would stop trying to include poorly implemented voice chatting in their games. Their efforts produce nothing I would reccomend using and there are very good voice chat programs out there which are also free (Ventrillo, Team Speak, and others). Firaxis did me no favors with their built in VOIP. I tried using it, it lags me horribly and from what people tell me, it sounds awful. It irritates me to no end that there is no option to completely disable the in-game VOIP and free up the sound recording resource so I can play the game and use the voice chat program of my own choosing.

Actually, same thing goes with their game browser. It's awful, I mean really awful. There's no filtering options, and navigating the game list is obnoxious as it will keep centering the list on whatever server is selected. I don't particularly like Gamespy, but I can understand why they would go with it rather than spending time and money developing their own service (which might not be any bettter, and quite possibly worse).

 

[Yoshua]

Well called up tech support, actually got through this time (last time I tried calling, I wound up on hold for about 20-30 minutes, then they hung up on me for being on hold too long).

The guy I spoke to was nice and all, but not very helpful. His position was that since the game can be run by not running ventrilo, then that is the "solution". I call it a band aid personally, it doesn't really fix or solve anything, just gets things going in a sub-optimal sort of way.

Anyways, I learned that there is no config options or command line settings for Civ 4 that could fix this problem. That was about all I could get from him, he was pretty eager to just lay the problem at the feet of Ventrilo (despite the fact that Civ 4 is the only program I have that has this conflict with Ventrilo) and call it a day. I had to politely press him into looking into things a bit more (how much he did or didn't, I don't know, I'll just give him the benefit of the doubt and say he asked around and couldn't find anything).

Seems the only way around this issue is either with a second sound card dedicated to the game or ventrilo or a USB headset (such headsets act as sound cards). I don't have a USB headset, but do have an onboard sound card that I will be trying this out with. Not a terrible solution I suppose, this was something I'd been meaning to try anyways so that I could pipe voice chat solely through my headset and leave my surround sound to my games (don't really need to hear people chatting in surround).

I'll update if it works.