Late Game CTDs

[strategyonly]

Yeah, I'll look into barbarians and try to persuade them to work with me.. but you know how stubborn and ruthless they are and they try to deceive me whenever they can when I try to crush them bugs

I think there has been several causes for CTDs:

1) art file problems (these should be all fixed in v2.3)
2) unit animation problems (few might be left)
3) MAFs (can't really do anything to these)
4) Barbarians (conflict between RoM settings and RevDCM addon somewhere in code)
5) some other that I can't now think of...

It's just a matter of time to find all the bugs and fix them. The Barbarian code bug is most difficult for me to fix since my programming skills are near zero and looking the python code doesn't make me any wiser (but I keep trying to learn ). Any help from python gurus is appreciated to locate and fix the possible bugs.

Yeah from what i have been testing, all i can get is the MAF's but i dont play on anything bigger than Large maps and less than 17 civs.

 

[Nemesys]

Update

made it until 1961 and so far no problems, I'll try to get to the very end but for now I think the CTD bug has something to do with barbarian Civ component only, whit that turned off the game just runs smooth...

@zappara

thanks for the time you will decide to spend after barbarians, but personally the game is already good enough even without barbciv on...

cheers
nem

 

[BlackCobra009]

playing on gigantic with 5 other nations

until now (year 2005) i have had only 2 non reproducible CTDs (no maf)

without barbcivmod and revolution

 

[ADP101]

im really sorry for being a complete noob, but what is a CTD? It sounds serious lol

 

[BlackCobra009]

Crash to Desktop

 

[ADP101]

o well the farthest ive gone into a game was early 1900s and i quit cuz of long loading times, and it was my first game so i really played to see how it works, not to win. No CTDs in that game

 

[Nemesys]

bad news.
I got a CTD on year 1988, was running RoM with Revolution and barbarians on, but without barbarian civ. i won't be able to go any further in the game. I guess I have to play with barbarians off completely to have a stable game. It is a pity, I will misss those barbs

Will still be awaiting some kind offix for that; BTW, i think someone who has more experience about programming and encoding could take a look at that, since we know now at least where the problem is (barbarians in the late eras). Do you know anyone on this forum who may be able to do so? that would be great

Cheers
nem

 

[Nemesys]

bad news.
I got a CTD on year 1988, was running RoM with Revolution and barbarians on, but without barbarian civ. i won't be able to go any further in the game. I guess I have to play with barbarians off completely to have a stable game. It is a pity, I will misss those barbs

Will still be awaiting some kind offix for that; BTW, i think someone who has more experience about programming and encoding could take a look at that, since we know now at least where the problem is (barbarians in the late eras). Do you know anyone on this forum who may be able to do so? that would be great

Cheers
nem

In addition to that, a quick update.
resumed playing with my latest game, managed to get over a CTD by going into world builder and eradicating a minor civilization who had started war in the turn before (it was Persia declaring war on Gengis Khan and Louis XIV, with both persia and mongolia being formed by revolution from other civilizations). If that happens again then I will quit the game and start another one with no barbs at all, it seems that the game should remain stable till the end that way...

i confirm my thoughts that CTD is caused by barbarians (barbs or barb civs i can't tell), so that is what to look after, sirs..

cheers
nem

 

[Nemesys]

final update on the above posts.
got another CTD on year 2017, this time I cannot get past it. I'm glad I saw some modern units for the very first time in the game but that is still not good enough. Now I'll try to start a new game without barbarians nor barbarian civ mod, everything else on.

I'll let you know

Cheers
nem

 

[DrwHem]

so are you just clicking the no barbarians button as well or is the crash just related to the barb civ option?

 

[Nemesys]

I tried with barbarians on and barb civ off first, game lasted much more but still crashed. now I am trying without barbarians nor barb civ. hope it's clear!

 

[alireza1354]

I tried with barbarians on and barb civ off first, game lasted much more but still crashed. now I am trying without barbarians nor barb civ. hope it's clear!

U should turn off revmod too.

 

[strategyonly]

final update on the above posts.
got another CTD on year 2017, this time I cannot get past it. I'm glad I saw some modern units for the very first time in the game but that is still not good enough. Now I'll try to start a new game without barbarians nor barbarian civ mod, everything else on.

I'll let you know

Cheers
nem

I really dont think it will matter (in my opinion), i think in late games, if you have over 9 civs included, its too much of a strain on your puter and the game, and it causes crashes, NO matter what you have on or off. I dont play with anything on except events and i still get unknown errors for NO reason at all, ie transport is causing an error?? When infact i know the transport is ok, cause its a Civ4 vanilla units. Just happens this way is all, its Civ. Very frustrating i know, cause for the first time i made it to only fifteen techs left and poof crash, for NO reason at all. And its like you said after the year 2015 the errors and crashes occur quite a bit and more often. But thats life.
One thing i did notice is they occur less when on HIGH graphics.

 

[Nemesys]

U should turn off revmod too.

No way, mate.

I'd rather quit playing RoM.

By the way, I think the weirdest thing in all of this is: if the bug is into any of the mod's components (rev, barbciv, dynamicnames etc..), then the CTDs should recur regardless to the age. Instead, they always happen only in a certain era (industrial, or modern sometimes). This should enable us (and Zappara first of all) to reduce the number of potential issues to :
- graphics (units, animations, buildings etc..)
- technology-related issues (again graphics)
- units being given to barbarians (both when they are rebels revolting outside cities or left-alone setllements)
the CTD recurring so strangely cannot be explained in other ways. I mean, if you turn off rev or barbciv or dynaimc tech or whatsoever and the game still crashes, it means those were not the problem (or, worse, those were not the only problem).

honestly in the last couple of months I have been spending more time writing here and awaiting for some tips than playing civ. I'm getting sick of this, and I would urge Zap to focus solely on this before getting involved into other projects, as this happenings are not a great advertising for future mods in my opinion.

Cheers
Nem

 

[alireza1354]

I admit that much of the magic of ROM gets lost when u put off revmod. I hope we can still play it with the revmod on, but as I have understood, we cant do that. I hope I am wrong.

As for Zappara. I think we are wanting too much from him. I think he needs help from some good modders/programmers to find the errors/bugs in his mod. A single person cant fix this all, unless he wants to himself and unless he takes his time, and that can take months.

So... where are all the volunteers?

 

[Hyronymus]

Do any of you get a Windows pop-up that Civ performered a bad action and offers to store a crash dump or does it really crash to desktop without a trace?

 

[JosEPh_II]

I got my 1st one, Windows Popup, just a few days ago, with a mini dump address thingy.

I've updated the Drivers for my ATI Radeon 9550 vid card. And as of today havn't experienced the "mini dump" crash. My fingers are crossed.

JosEPh

 

[zappara]

Do any of you get a Windows pop-up that Civ performered a bad action and offers to store a crash dump or does it really crash to desktop without a trace?

That depends on what setting you have in Civ's ini file options - you can turn on there crash dumps. Those crash dumps are pretty useless since you'll need hex editor or some programming tools to go through them.

 

[Hyronymus]

OK, so if I switch debugging of it should just crash to desktop at the blink of an eye. Cleared that up then, still my problem remains. You'll come across it somewhere.

 

[styfken]

is there any way to switch off the Revolution component of the game AFTER A CERTAIN DATE (or Era or Tech discoverd)?

This could be a middleway between keeping the Revolution component for the large part of the early game and avoiding the CTD's of the late part.

In the Revolution.ini file there is an entry called "MaxCivs", which controls whether a new civ will be added to the game via revolution. If the number of civs already in the game is not larger than "MaxCivs" then a new revolution may happen, otherwise it should not. The default value is -1, which means that the revolution component will keep adding new civs until the DLL limit is reached. If you change the "MaxCivs" entry to 1, it will prevent (I pressume) new revolutions in your game (since there is already one civ in the game: you).

My hypothesis is, that if you get a CTD at late game, you can go to the revolution.ini file and change the "MaxCivs" entry to 1. You can then go to an old autosave file (where the last revolution, that pressumably created the problem, did not already happen) and restart the game from there. If indeed no more revolutions are in the game, then there should not be any CTD's.

I wonder whether this can work.

Alternatively, as said in the beginning of the message, it seems to me that it would not be too hard for a programmer to slightly change the code and allow revolutions only before a certain date or before a certain tech is discovered. That would prevent new revolutions in the late game where the problem exists. Although I have done quite a bit of programming, I have close to zero knowledge of C++ and python. Therefore it "seems" to me that such a modification can be done relatively easily, but I cannot be sure.

In any case, let me know if any of the above is feasible.

cheers,

styfken.