Late game huge map, lots of civs, corrupted game saves

[Llewen]

I'm having a problem with my late game saves becoming corrupted. I play single player with a huge map, marathon, with absolutely all the leaders, by this time in the game there are maybe eighteen leaders left. I have lots of ram and it isn't all used. I am generally able to go back to the last save and load it, but at this point in the game turns are taking a good half hour to complete, so it is a bit of a pain.

I'm guessing this is more of a Civ IV problem than a FfH2 problem, but perhaps someone here knows of some solution. Is it possible to repair corrupted game saves?

System Specs

- Windows XP Home SP3 32 bit (fully updated)
- Althon 64 X2 3800+ (all my chipset drivers are up to date)
- 4 GB ram (yes I am aware that even with all the latest updates the full 4 GB doesn't get utilized, system information shows 3.25 GB of ram - this is due to 512 MB of video ram and I'm guessing caches and whatnot taking filling out the 4 GB).
- Sapphire Radeon HD 2600XT 512MB (there are some text issues with the latest drivers in old games, so I am running Catalyst 9.1)
360GB SATAII Western Digital
- Creative X-Fi Gamer (I'm in the process of updating the drivers, will post if this fixes the problem... )
- Civilization IV - Beyond the Sword (latest version, I bought it on Steam so it gets updated through Steam)
- Fall from Heaven 2.041b

The ram and the video card are both overclocked, and the ram on the video card is significantly overclocked, but I've run memtest86 all night with no errors, and I experience 0 issues with the video (artifacts, lockups, or any corruption of any sort). There are also no overheating issues as well, as far as I can tell. The cpu runs fairly cool, and the gpu runs within normal bounds, especially in Civ IV. It's a bit hard to tell with ram, but as far as I can see both the system ram and video ram are well cooled (good airflow, with heat spreaders on the system ram, and I think the video ram is cooled by the video - it's all enclosed at any rate).

edit: I updated my sound card drivers, and got the newest version of the Catalyst drivers that doesn't have the text problem with old games. I will post with results. I should know before too long if I still have the problem, as it seemed to be happening every other turn or so.

 

[Llewen]

Updating the drivers might have helped, but I'm doing a couple of other things differently as well, and I don't seem to be having the problem anymore. After I have been playing awhile the game will start "catching", for want of a better word. I used to alt-tab out and back because that would seem to help, but now I just save the game, shut down and restart.

I noticed alt-tabbing, while it seemed to help the catching problem, it would eventually lead to a crash, so I don't do that anymore. If I have to go out of the program, I shut it down and restart. I guess my next step is to see if Civ IV can be run in a window (my guess is it can't)...

edit: And I was wrong. Windowed mode, here I come...

 

[Llewen]

Just thought I'd share a bit more of what I've learnt about this problem.

- I tried setting processor affinity for the Civ IV process. That was a complete bust. Performance degraded and the game became much less stable and I had more problems with corrupted saves.
- The real trick seems to be to absolutely never alt-tab, even if you are running it in windowed mode. If you need to access other programs while you are running Civ IV, run it in windowed mode and use the task bar buttons to switch programs. I don't even minimize it, although I have no idea if that helps or not.
- Don't let the program stand idle. If you have to leave, shut it down and restart it when you come back. I find if it sits idle for very long it becomes unstable.

I'm still having some problems with crashes, but not as bad as it was, and I haven't had a corrupted game save for some time. One other thing that I am doing which I don't know if it is helping or not is using Mz CPU Accelerator[/ur] to set active window process priority to real time. Many recommend you don't go higher than "high" process priority, but I have never had any issues with real time process priority, in all the years I've used it, on more than one machine, and it does improve performance.

 

[Llewen]

I does look like the corrupted game saves problem is fixed. I still get video related crashes after the game has been running for some time. The error tells me I'm out of video ram. I'm guessing it is some kind of memory leak affecting the video ram, because I have lots of video ram (512MB). But I can live with this. The corrupted game save problem was much more frustrating.

 

[Llewen]

It looks like I may have fixed the problem I was having with crashes as well. In the "CivilizationIV.ini" file, I changed the following options as indicated:

MemSaver = 0
GUIManagedTextures = 0
DisablePAKMemoryMapping = 1
DisableFileCaching = 0
DisableCaching = 0
ModularLoading = 0
D3D9Query = 0

The crashes seem to be getting better, I'm editing this post as I figure things out. Some of these are default settings, for those that are I have changed them, then changed them back to defaults. Either that or I guessed that they might be related to the issues I have been having.

 

[Llewen]

Well, for the final solution to this problem, see this thread. I'm just adding this in case anyone searching for answers finds this thread.