Memory-fix by Harkonnen is out!

[Venger]

Un-FREAKING-Believable.

The games that I could no longer load, I can NOW load, in an almost reasonable amount of time, with Harkonnen's patch.

FIRAXIS - sorry, but a GUY ON A FORUM BOARD FIXED YOUR SOFTWARE FOR YOU, ya louts.

I literally could not load, post 1.09, any game that has the large map size. Simply would not load. Also couldn't START a new game with the large map.

It's been weeks since I played, and just got bored of waiting for the BFME 1.03 patch (another joke release), so I came back to see if anyone had gotten their head out at Firaxis to fix this. On a whim, I tried Harkonnen's patch.

WOW. I can now load my old game, and it loads it in just 2 minutes or so. I could NOT do that anymore.

I have a Dual Athlon, with an x850 Pro 256MB AGP card. Set the vid size to 180, insane is 1, and BAM, son of a gun LOADED AND RUNS SMOOTH.

Great work Harkonnen, and frankly, what an embarassment to the software engineers who released this game... shame on you.

HIRE HARKONNEN NOW.

Venger

 

[Steve2000]

(Answer to question of gray leader boxes being with the new update)

They did before, but (so far) seem to have not reappeared. But it was always sporadic, so I will update if they come back.

(SYSTEM SPECS)
Intel P4 2.8 GHz
RAM=1 GB
Nvidia GeForce 4 MX440 (64MB)

UPDATE:

Just got the cheshire cat leaders after playing for about an hour or so. Had those with your earlier patch as well.

Strangely enough - the cheshire cat thing goes away sometimes after ALT-tabbing out of the game and going back in. When I went back to play after typing my response it was gone! Weird.

 

[Snype]

Well unfortunately the wonder movies don't seem to work, they stop a few frames in, and then play for a few more frames after several seconds...but I'd be lying if I said I ever really watched those movies in the first place I did manage to load your 1961 savegame, and while it did run slowly, I was able to complete a turn without crashing or anything. I'll be rounding up some friends to continue our huge game with 8 AIs tonight, which kept crashing me like there was no tomorrow, I'll post back what happens

 

[FullyCompletely]

i just got black terrain for the first time. never seen grey leaderheads, and the globe view is fine. insane mode = 1, vidmem = 128 (9800pro), windowed mode

 

[Caesar69]

I keep getting memory errors when i save a game is anyone else having this problem???

 

[lord_graywolfe]

well Hark i tried your new patch. it still seems pretty much the same so far. i can play just great on custom maps but on the regular ones they run into problems about half way through. the standard maps arent to bad but large or huge are black maps right from the start. which doenst really bother me cause i play standard anyway.

 

[Varelse]

Where am I supposed to save these files to? The installation instructions seem to start off with the assumption that you've already unzipped the files to an unspecified location. Apparently I'm missing something obvious because this thread is like a zillion pages long and nobody else seems to be asking.

Edit: forget it, one too many beers. lol

 

[Zydor]

C:\Program Files\Firaxis Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4

(Thats the default install directory for the game when u first installed, change to suitif u installed the game in different directory on initial load)

Regards
Zy

 

[Snype]

I love you Harky. Had some problems with graphics glitches and grey boxes for leaders, but that was fixed by just lowering the video memory setting. I played for about 4 hours on my multiplayer huge game (1000AD) without any crashes

 

[Thrallia]

an update on my results...game still plays pretty good, but for some reason my gunships keep disappearing and reappearing at random....a tank did that once, but it happens almost every turn I do anything with a gunship, most notably when they attack someone.

 

[SithlordDK]

Your "old" Memoryfix worked fine, the new version is worse than 1.09 without fix... (reinstalled the old fix)

 

[Hardvark]

Harkonnen is my hero. If I had any goats, I'd gladly sacrifice some to him. Thanks to his patch I can now actually continue playing my large map game. All of my pent up anger has just disipated and I enjoy Civ 4 once more. Seriously, thanks a million Harkonnen. Your hard work is really appreciated.

 

[Harkonnen]

Ok, I am back, a little reseted for new deeds

Three_Crowns
Well, most troubles occured with Ti4200 cards, so it might be not as bad. Also, even some GF2/GF4-MX users had improvements.

Private_pAuLa
Thanks for the info.

Smidlee
Well, civ4 gets most out of geometry processing while Doom3 relies more on raster options and CPU. Shadows eat most of the time as as far as I know tech behind stencil shadows, it's more CPU-oriented (damn, my 1.3Ghz usually crawls with those shadows around ).

druade
Installer is not ready yet. This intermediate release was put to see if it's worth being put into 'installer' release.

Gen
Switching antialiasing (or resolution) to something different and back might also help to reset video memory cache. I will investigate histographs problem.

Thrallia
If post #640 is the first thing you have heard about memory-fix, then someone has given you wrong link... Initially you should try post #1 version, it's the most stable/improving version so far. Though, it requires more things to config.

David Smith
Heh, thanks I'm going to ballance it in between 1st and this version...

Caesar69
Well, you might want to play with this setting. Some folks with 256Mb had to set it to 80 or 150 or 180 to run nicely. Something is badly estimated within that update, I'm checking what exactly...

MourinhoPortuga
I mean 'vid_mem_usage' in 'Harkonnen.ini'.

Pheoni
There might be error message appearing. The only way to avoid rebooting is to press ctrl-alt-del, 'c', (down if you have 'ccApp' of NAV2005), del, Enter. Yes, it kills civ4.exe with blind clicks in task manager. A better solution is to run it in windowed mode. I think you are getting an error like Walter Hawkwood did. If exactly same message appears, try reducing 'vid_mem_usage' with the new fix. He had to decrease it from 256 to 150... oh.

Thrallia
Thanks for report. FPS during movies doesn't kill them. Something other does. As I have noted, the movies stutter wehen game swaps right before starting to show one. It looks like it predicts movie FPS during loading, and this makes it showing them badly. I myself saw movie stuttering, but background 3D workers still dug the earth with their usual rate of 20-30 fps, no matter that movie frames were occasionally frozen.

I batman
I still have to make two things:
1) Make it independent of 'vid_mem_usage', so it does not trouble anyone and can be put into offical release.
2) Make installer out of all that, so that everyone can download it and see all those who helped writing it

Serene1
No, I don't affect keyboard input in any form. The only keyboard-relative thing in patch is calling 'GetKeyState' WinAPI call to toggle FPS meter. I myself had my keyboard layout switching disabled for some reason (alt+shift for rus/eng), and I don't know what could have caused that...

Smidlee
Yes, I have noted that globe view depends on cities. In one of my previous posts I said that it is not graphics-related as I suspected before. This might be something with game logics about cities with globe view. This happens even with 'duel' map when the globe is actually flat.

Aeon221
The main reason of that update was to keep 'vid_mem_usage' a "moron" term - amount of video memory (it's written on the box whe one buys his/her videocard). Though, estimations based on it were not as precice as I'd like them to be...

atomant
It looks like 2nd fix still hits AGP memory (tried to avoid that) - and that's slow with civ4 except 64Mb video cards.

Thanks for your kind words! (no pin here) It might be interesting that I had same thoughts when I dared to start this
thing

Zibby
WEll, it's definitely not ok how it looks... Do you have 'texel alignment' adjusted anywhere? It was a known problem when D3D games started appearing (Diablo2, NFS3, etc...). It looks like it's the problem again here...

With P3-1.3Ghz / ATi Radeon 9800 Pro I usually also have ~20-30 FPS.

antracer
Thanks for being honest on those issues! I think these are the problems everyone is going to experience with this update sooner or later in their games... So I am coming with another intermediate release within few days.

DTRemenak
Don't hesitate to play with 'vid_mem_usage' even with the update... My expectations derived from video memory usage were incorrect, so absolute values of 100/128/etc... might be fine.

Walter Hawkwood
Well, 'total memory' is the thing I meant. I'm sorry for mistake.

MrDrizzt
Probably it causes Direct3D to flush its rendering buffers since I start a new 'scene' (in D3D terms) to draw FPS meter. I will check this thing with civ4 calls. Thanks fro pointing that out.

Michelangelo
You may try 'vid_mem_usage = 128', this should help with non-tnl card.

Briareos
You are right.

maxon and others having problems with 'hapdbg.dll'. Look a few posts above (or post #1) - I've put 'hapdbg.dll' from my installation of civ4 there.

godzilla_hiper
Though I've alredy replied with 'vid_mem_usage' suggestions, this might be some flaw with drivers or invalid Direct3D version (debug run-time for exampel if you are developer).

Memory savings won't be greate with start of the game. They grow as the game progresses (saves some % of memory).

Steve2000
Woody
Thank you for your repors!

Venger
Thanks!

Snype
FullyCompletely
Ok, at least it didn't get much worse... look forward for next intermediate release. I hope that will be the last of 'intermediate' series.

Caesar69
This should be something around physical memory management. Probably increasing swap file size will help.

lord graywolfe
Ok, let's check it with the next release...

Varelse
Where civ4 resides... or you may subscribe Releases Info thread to get notified when installer is ready.

Thrallia
Please send me your savegame to headden@karelia.ru - I will test it locally. Please also specify your 'vid_mem_usage' within that mail and write a word 'gunship' in mail body or in subject, so I won't forget what's this savegame about Thanks in advance.

SithlordDK
Yeah... I that already. Please don't give up trying next one when it becomes available

Hardvark
Thanks!

Everyone
Thanks for good words and staying with me in this thread, and for helping testing it! Much appreciated. I am going to release another intermediate release which will have just a profiler which will simulate civ4 behvior and detect when it slows down or crashes, just to adjust that damd "vid_mem_usage" to best suitable value.

 

[Loopy]

Thanks again Harkonnen. The 640 patch works well for me and fixed the CTD I was getting when Alt-Tabbing while loading games. The FPS meter is nice but kind of depressing -- it just serves to remind me that I really need to buy a video card for my machine.

I know you had said that you weren't looking for a payday (at least not from users). And I don't think sacrificing my goat would benefit you much (and I know my goat wouldn't be happy with that). But knowing that you're in Russia, is there anything I could get for you in the US and send to you to show my appreciation?

 

[KonraDe]

here comes a new challenge(r)
how about playing CIV on my machine:
PIII 733 mhz
256 RAM
GeForce 32MB DDR agp

with 1.09 patch i'ts really playable.. till 1800 on small world when i reavaled whole map. And now i wonder if MostFamous Harkonnen's patch can reinforce my ancient geforce
sholud i set vid_mem_usage to 32 value?
should i go insane_mode?
sholud i forget about playing CIV further...?

many thanks to our benefactor, Harkonnen.

 

[godzilla_hiper]

Harkonnen
Ok... thanks for trying to help me out!
I´ll see what I can do!

By the way, dont you think that´s really strange the huge amount of memory that the game saves?

 

[Pheoni]

Pheoni
There might be error message appearing. The only way to avoid rebooting is to press ctrl-alt-del, 'c', (down if you have 'ccApp' of NAV2005), del, Enter. Yes, it kills civ4.exe with blind clicks in task manager. A better solution is to run it in windowed mode. I think you are getting an error like Walter Hawkwood did. If exactly same message appears, try reducing 'vid_mem_usage' with the new fix. He had to decrease it from 256 to 150... oh.

Well I have tried patch #1. I just replaced patch #2; I didn't change any settings (which means I'm running 128 for ram on a 128 card). Game runs just fine. The only trouble I have is alt tabing in and out of the game after having it up and running 24 hours strait. Oh, and sometimes the leader heads have bright white eye lashes. Those are the only problems I've noticed.

 

[Harkonnen]

Loopy
You can help me with some info. I have PM'ed you

godzilla hiper
Well, only around 100 Mb are saved fairly with huge map (still pretty big number) by eliminating duplicate geometry. Another X mb comes by sharing video memory with physical memory in case of 'insane_mode = 1'. Generally speaking, 'insane_mode' will help any game with memory usage (though probably under bandwidth speed penalty). 100Mb duplicate savings shouldn't help well-coded games which do not produce any dupes by design.

 

[Harkonnen]

KonraDe
First of all, ensure that AGP is on (by default it is).

0) Install original version from post #1, follow instructions about low graphics settings. Yes, your case requires that... especially set low textures (or crash), and set AA=0 (a it'll be verrrrrryyy sloooow).

1) Set 'insane_mode = 0'

2) Try values of 'vid_mem_usage' 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 80, 100, 128 in increasing order until you start getting visual bugs, CTDs, etc...

3) Roll back to the maximum 'vid_mem_usage' which caused no bugs.

4) Set 'insane_mode = 1'.

5) Play full-screen, do not alt-tab.

That's the most I can suggest... Small maps should handle that. I managed to run it under 150Mb with them, this should avoid swapping with 256Mb of RAM.

 

[Ad Hominem]

I just want to say a huge THANK YOU. Huge maps have become playable with your patch and that's a great, great, great gift as I absolutely love to play huge maps but was unable because by mid-game the lag and especially file swapping was unbearable.

My specs are
Athlon 3200+
512 DDR 400
Nvidia 5900 XT vid card (w/ latest beta drivers)
Win XP Pro

The only problem I experience (I haven't tried to zoom out fully, I never do that anyway) is that the wonder videos and leader videso fail to properly load - I get a blank blue space instead. But they don't delay the game.