Locks up between 2-5 minutes into game

[NoBull6]

Error description:
Between 2 and 5 minutes after I click on the Launch shortcut to start, the game locks my computer and turns off the monitor signal. I'll be playing, then all of the sudden my monitor goes into powersave mode from lack of signal, and the computer is locked. I have to hard reboot to start again.

Story:
I drove home from work for lunch today so that I could install the game and have it waiting for me when I got home later. The installation went fine - no hitch whatsover.

When I launched the game the first time, it crashed during the opening movie. I disabled dual monitor support, launched again, and this time I was able to start a game, but once again it locked/failed.

I can't imagine what on Earth is causing this problem. I built this computer myself in February of this year. Here are the important specs, in case someone can spot something in here:

Mobo: DFI LanParty UltraD
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Socket 939 90nm
GPU: nVidia GeForce 6600GT
RAM: 1GB Corsair Value Select
HDD: WD Raptor 74GB
Dual Disc Drives: NEC 3450A DVD/CD Burner, Forget what the second one is
OS: XP Pro

Any ideas? Also, does anyone know the number for Civ Tech Support? I can't access www.civiv.com from work (don't have latest version of flash).

 

[godochaos]

this is the same thing that is happening to me
monitor goes blank.
I hear a click

Sometimes i can play for 1 hour, sometimes 2 min.

 

[Raezal]

I'm running into exactly the same problem. As you can see my graphics subsystem is pretty similar. I'm running multi-monitor as well, but it doesn't seem to have much bearing on whether it crashes or not. Hopefully these major bugs get ironed out soon enough as the game seems really good when I can actually play it.

Mobo: Abit IC7-G Max II
CPU: Intel Pentium 4C 2.4GHz
GPU: nVidia GeForce 6800GT
RAM: 1GB Corsair XMS-3500C2
HDD: Hitachi 7K250 250GB SATA
OS: XP Pro

 

[NoBull6]

Raezal - How long have you been able to play at one time?

I've tried around 5 times now, and can't get past 5 minutes. I was looking forward to playing when I got home, but now I'm dreading getting to the house because I'll get frustrated with having Civ and not being able to play it!

 

[Bal Ur]

I'm having the same problem with mine, which leads me to believe it is a Nvidia issue, since my 5500 is nowhere near the same as a 6800. What drivers are you using? I have the newest ones, from the 20th I believe.

 

[Raezal]

I think the longest it ran for me was about about an hour and a half. I left it on during the tutorial and it ran at least that long before it hard-locked. It's probably coincidence but the game has crashed every time I've tried to run it since my second normal game session crashed. I haven't gotten too much in the way of troubleshooting done but reverting to an older nVidia driver than the latest got me nowhere.

 

[CelerityChip]

There are definitely some issues with a wide range of nvidia cards.

Still, make sure you have the newest drivers, and also check that your video card, cpu and in fact entire case are getting adequate cooling. I was having this trouble with some other games on my Leadtek 5950, and when I opened it up the filter on the vpu fan was totally clogged. (bad design!)

 

[NoBull6]

I checked my error log, this is what I saw:

[Oct 27, 2005 - 16:41:47] Messages while processing 'Resource/Themes/Civ4.thm'

Error : File - ('Civ4Theme_Custom.thm', Ln:4910, Col:47) Could not load bitmap 'Civ4/HUD/city_titlearrows.tga'
Error : File - ('Civ4Theme_Custom.thm', Ln:4918, Col:47) Could not load bitmap 'Civ4/HUD/city_titlearrows.tga'
Error : File - ('Civ4Theme_Custom.thm', Ln:4926, Col:47) Could not load bitmap 'Civ4/HUD/city_titlearrows.tga'
Error : File - ('Civ4Theme_Custom.thm', Ln:4983, Col:47) Could not load bitmap 'Civ4/HUD/city_titlearrows.tga'
Error : File - ('Civ4Theme_Custom.thm', Ln:4991, Col:47) Could not load bitmap 'Civ4/HUD/city_titlearrows.tga'
Error : File - ('Civ4Theme_Custom.thm', Ln:4999, Col:47) Could not load bitmap 'Civ4/HUD/city_titlearrows.tga'

I don't even have an HUD folder! So, I created an HUD folder under Civ4, and copied the city_titlearrows.tga file that I found in another directory. I played the game, having high hopes - made it 2 minutes in, and crashed again. Rebooted, checked the error log, and had the same error with a different time stamp.

Now I'm changing the .thm file to point to the correct location of the original .tga file. I'll let everyone know how it works out. I wanted to post my log file here before I tried this again. Does anyone have the same error log?

Wihle I've been messing with this, I installed Civ4 on my 2001 Dell. It didn't meet the minimum requirements, but I've been playing Civ without sound for the last 13 minutes! So why my old Dell works, but not my new computer, is weird to me.

 

[godochaos]

keep us posted. I am at work but when I get home I will try to replicate your solution. Please post with explicit details if you get it to work.

I have an Nvidia card- updated drivers and DirectX

Thanks mucho for working to together to get us all playing!

 

[godochaos]

would u mind letting me know where the error log is in XP?
i will post it when i get home.

 

[Guitarkalle]

Have you had any problems with other games?

I do not know if this applies to Nvida graphic cards, but my computer with an ATI card locked up a lot on some games.

Make sure you have FastWrite turned off and it may help!

 

[NoBull6]

Alright, so I was playing Civ on the new computer, after doing the modification I mentioned in the above post. Things were going smoothly for 12 minutes, then the same thing happened again. I checked the error file, and it's the same as above, except the location for the .tga is not 'HUD' but the new location I put in the Custom.thm file.

It seems that it's looking for the file correctly, but something's wrong with the .tga file. I opened it up in Photoshop, and it works fine - not a corrupt image.

So, I went back into the Custom.thm file, and put in an absolute reference to the .tga. Fired up Civ, and it couldn't even get through the opening movie before quitting!

I opened up the error log, and I'm getting the same message yet again.

So, I copied the .tga from my old computer to the new computer, fired it up - same problem.

So, I'm out of ideas. Anyone else been trying anything?

 

[Driftwood]

I've just started having the same problems you all have. The thing is that I shouldn't be! Last evening I installed the game with almost no problems. The only thing that might have went wrong is that disk 1 ended up being the play disk and not disk 2. I can't imagine this being a problem though, since the game ran without so much as a blip in performance for several hours last night. The only thing that eventually went wrong was that the music that's played during great wonder movies was coming through in bits and pieces about half way through my session. I believe that this is where my problem started.

I came to the forums to see if anyone else has been having problems with wonder movies. It appears that many had been and the solution seemed to be to defragment your hard drive. This I did. It was the last thing I did before I went to bed. Now, today I arrived home, fired up the computer, and started a new single player game. During the loading sequence the game froze up. This scared me. I restarted my computer and tried starting a game again. This time it loaded just fine, but about five minutes into my game the computer froze again! This really scares me. The only thing I've done was defragment my hard drive. Could that be the source of the freezing?

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

I have the same problem, the game freezes after about a few minutes to maybe half an hour.

I have an Athlon 64 3200+, Nvidia 6800 128MB and 1024MB RAM.

I looked at my log and it says the same, though I have now installed my older Geforce 4 MX 440 64MB, I can play but I get the black ground bug instead.

The log say the same thing as before, so I don't think that has anything to do with the first problem.

At first I thought that there was something wrong with my Graphics card until i spotted this thread, good to know that my new card is OK.

This is really frustrating... :-(

Tomorrow I'm going to actually reinstall my Windows XP Professional and se if that makes any difference, new fresh drivers and no other programs to interfere.

 

[Driftwood]

I don't even have an HUD folder!

That's odd. I have a HUD folder in my Civ4 folder. It had 30 files in it (31 now with the file that we all seem to be getting errors from). I'm going to try playing now and see what happens. If the game doesn't freeze up I'll edit this post and confirm that it worked.

 

[godochaos]

I looked in my log:
[Oct 27, 2005 - 19:13:37] Messages while processing 'Resource/Themes/Civ4.thm'

Error : File - ('Civ4Theme_Custom.thm', Ln:4910, Col:47) Could not load bitmap 'Civ4/HUD/city_titlearrows.tga'
Error : File - ('Civ4Theme_Custom.thm', Ln:4918, Col:47) Could not load bitmap 'Civ4/HUD/city_titlearrows.tga'
Error : File - ('Civ4Theme_Custom.thm', Ln:4926, Col:47) Could not load bitmap 'Civ4/HUD/city_titlearrows.tga'
Error : File - ('Civ4Theme_Custom.thm', Ln:4983, Col:47) Could not load bitmap 'Civ4/HUD/city_titlearrows.tga'
Error : File - ('Civ4Theme_Custom.thm', Ln:4991, Col:47) Could not load bitmap 'Civ4/HUD/city_titlearrows.tga'
Error : File - ('Civ4Theme_Custom.thm', Ln:4999, Col:47) Could not load bitmap 'Civ4/HUD/city_titlearrows.tga'

So i put the file in that folder, but i still lock up

let me know if u have any ideas!

I called tech support, got thru and they said go into DXdiag and override the refresh rate and set it at 60. THIS DOES NOT WORK

 

[Driftwood]

Ok, I think I've solved the problem!

I noticed that the crashes are not random. They only occur when the game is the process of autosaving. Solution: turn off autosave.

To do this, open the Civ4Config file found in C:\Program Files\Firaxis Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4. Actually, it's in My Documents, but this is where I was manipulating it from. Search for AutoSaveInterval and change it from 4 to 0. This will disable autosave. Doing this allowed me to play past the year the game was crashing (2400BC, an autosave year by default.) I'm going to keep playing and see if the game crashes or not. I'm confident that it won't, though.

 

[Raezal]

I made the change to my configuration file and it seems to be working so far. Maybe that is why I was able to play the tutorial successfully but not the main game. I can live without autosaves for now if it lets me play. Thanks for the tip.

 

[NoBull6]

Sorry I haven't put an update on here in a while, but I got it to work and didn't want to stop the game...

I ended up updating my video card drivers to ForceWare 81.85 (was at 69.something). Not sure why that fixed it, but if you haven't already, I would suggest doing that.

It isn't perfect on my computer, though. When I zoom out all the way, the terrain is blue/yellow streaks. My wonder movies are jerky with the audio.

All I know is I can now play Civ! I just finished my first game - space race victory in 6 hours (on Chieftan). Fun, but this game is pretty different from the old ones. Now that I've got the first game out of the way, I'll start to learn how to play this game.

 

[Crimson Shadow]

My GFX is Winfast A400GT-TDH (6800GT) (350 core /1000 mem). I have exact the same error message. The only difference is this screen.

Unless it resets automatically I must do it manually (hard reset or turn off).

Tried with two latest official WHQL drivers (78.01 and 81.85). With and without FSAA and AF.

The strangest thing is that only Civ 4 produces this (And FEAR demo did that 2 times). Other games work flawlessly.

Well, I will try if turning autosaves off can help. But this is some serious issue if I get a screen like that.