Memory-fix by Harkonnen is out!

[Harkonnen]

Flash1
Well, as for me - my fix worked better. But 1.52 contains a lot of gameplay changes which I can't fix by myself, so I you probably will have to stay with 1.52 for a while. I am not sure that it is possible to bring the old speed into 1.52, I didn't try this yet.

If it is not possible, I'll give recommendations to Firaxis how to do that in their own code, and I hope they'll put my findings into one of their next official patches. Some posts above I told my fix is still alive in their code (not being my code, but being my ideas). Well, currently I see that's only 50% true as it performs worse in some places, so there is a reason to bring some more life into currently unofficial part of memory fix

gmanne
Just note that if you have installed 1.52, then normally my DLL won't be loaded, and this message shouldn't appear. If you have installed 1.52 and my DLL is still loaded (e.g. greets you with xmas), then something went wrong with installing official 1.52...

I_batman
Smidlee
kettyo
Thanks!

 

[illu]

Good job Harkonnen on the Memory Fix, and Merry Christmas to you too!

and everyone else !

 

[GqSkrub]

or he tried what i'm doing which is your DLL on TOP of 1.52.


MERRY XMAS!

 

[gmanne]

Harkonnen

All is well Santa - I ran your version first for comparison. If it wasn't for the gameplay additions I would be still running your patch with 1.09.

All the best for the New Year, thx again for your hard work and vision.

 

[Doc5thMech]

Baron Harkonnen : Finally, thanks to you, the game runs as it should have in the first place. Also, I only implemented the one-line change, and have not worried about your other suggesitons yet. It worked great.
I move that all management staff at Firaxis be fired summarily, and that the monetary savings be distributed to users who have found the solutions to a grossly inappropriate and unprofessional as well as premature roll-out game. I am totally angry because the hours of frustrations and some hardare changes suggested by the foreign-accented customer support folks (including ordering a new video card -- I had a Radeon 9800 Pro) may have been completely unecessary.
So, thank you Harkonnen for the very fine job.

 

[hardcoded]

I see this 1.52 announcement, and I guess that now my little 32mb vidmem card could maybe handle civ4, but the firaxis/take2 behavior really makes me mad for you. I'm suprised you aren't. Now I wonder if I should continue my "boycott", now that they effectively implemented your fix, but without rewarding you, which is unfair. Well, I sinked so many hours in civ3 that I think it's better for me to skip civ4 anyway, boycott or not . Because I am probably the only person boycotting civ4 for this reason, it probably won't have any freaking effect, but I'll do it anyway, for the principle.

Happy 2006.

 

[hardcoded]

EDIT: Sorry, double post.

 

[Harkonnen]

illu
gmanne
Doc5thMech
Thanks!

hardcoded
At my system 1.52 works worse than 1.09 + fix. They shared geometry, but did it not-so-well. Heck, I didn't put enough details

P.S: I am gathering more info on how 1.52 works. Right now I am 75% sure that work on the fix will continue.

 

[sabrewolf]

keep us posted, harkonnen. 1.52 has strangely slowed down my gaming experience massively. in fact more than 1.09 without your fix.

 

[David Smith]

Yours worked better!!!
With v1.52 installed, somethings worked ok, but now any time I try to work with Worldsaver and return normal play to check out the results, problems occur. In about 10~20 minutes later, I get an "video out of memory" error, this cashes the civ4 program. I have to reboot the machine to get program to run again.

So PLEASE PLEASE continue work on your memory patch.

 

[Raider62]

Hark, 1st great work. Only problem is now I am getting Freeze/Crash with 1.52 that your patch had fixed. Could this be a conflict with your patch and 1.52???

I disabled your patch via the .ini file but still get some lockups. Any ideas?

 

[Stele]

With this post Harkonnen you demonstrate that you are not only a gifted coder, but also an exceptional human being.

It would have been very easy for you to become bitter. Kudos to you my friend.

Thank you for your hard work. You have my gratitude and respect

I totally concur. It's not easy to see your ideas taken by someone else and used without so much as an acknowledgement, let alone a thank you, and not feel unhappy about it. Hats off to you Harkonnen!

CIV 1.09 + harkfix works very well for me - although the game is still pretty laggy, it's less so than before and, much more importantly, I am now consistently able to leave the game voluntarily. Not knowing of the problems with CIV when I first started the game, I chose to play 7 other civs on a huge map... in hindsight that is so asking for trouble, but I guess we'll see how the game holds up later (am now only in the 1600s).

The v1.52 official patch had some good (gameplay changes) but plenty of bad too (lags and crashes again....). Judging by what Harkonnen said about the vertex values and the other signs of an attempt at reducing mem usage, I suspect they tried implementing some form of harkonnen's fix (in their own way, no doubt, since they don't have hark's code) and promptly screwed it up (dare I say "again" ). In that I agree with Doc5thMech's opinion. It was interesting though how they sounded like they were dismissing Harkonnen's efforts in their 1.52 readme, then got blasted for it by the community such that they had to clarify what they meant

In any case, once again thanks for your untiring efforts, Harkonnen, and do keep up the good work!

 

[Stele]

p.s. merry christmas and happy new year to y'all too! must be nice and snowing @ karelia, eh harkonnen? would lake onega be frozen over this time of the year? if so you could take a well-deserved break and maybe go ice-skating, hohoho

 

[analein]

Well, I guess that I will add my problems to the thread in the hopes that soimebody can tell me what I am doing wrong with the various patches and fixes.

System info first. I have a Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop with a 1.8 GHz processor, 512 Mb RAM and a Geforce4 440 Go Graphics Card (64 MB Memory).

I started out playing a huge map with five other civilizations. Hark's initial patch worked well for a while (I still had the other leaders faces doing the Cheshire Cat or disappearing altogether and the videos for the Wonders either ran very choopily or did not run at all, but I could live with that). I had the memory set at 64 MB and Insane Mode set to 0. By around 1980, things started to slow down in terms of scrolling across the map (it started to get slow around 1920, but by 1980 it was really noticeable and highly annoying). The game also crashed when I had finished building the Statue of Liberty (or some other Wonder - I forget which).

Hence, I installed Hark's second patch. That seemed to solve the Wonder problem, but the lag in scrolling only got worse. By 1996, it was unbearable. Turns took 2 or 3 minutes just to complete by moving units around. Add to that the fact that it takes about five minutes to load a saved game in the first instance (no matter whose patches are installed). I kept the memory setting at 64 MB only because higher values seemed to slow things down even more.

Any thoughts or settings I could try to solve the lag problem? Anybody? I tried Firaxis' Patch 1.52, but that only seemed to make things worse. Any help in this area would be greataly appreciated.

ESL

 

[Harkonnen]

analein
There was also a 3rd version: post #842. It allows to reset video memory and adjust vid_mem_usage in-game, just read instructions in that post.

sabrewolf
Stele
Thanks I will get back to the fix then.

Raider62
Well, with my system and 1.52:

1) MemSaver = 1 (civ4.ini) - memory fix works (shows FPS), but does not affect geometry allocations, so it's only showing FPS...

2) MemSaver = 0 (civ4.ini) - memory fix crashes at start-up.

All in all, current versions of memory fix are not compatible with 1.52. I know what to do to make'em compatible (needs time to code), but I am not sure that memory savings will be as good. I'll try anyway

 

[DesertWolf]

Harkonnen: i use the fix from the first page and it works on my computer with patch 1.52 (dunno how much youchanged in the mentioned 3rd version of your patch, i didn't knew there was a new version) except when i use your patch and the memsaver/fix/whatever it is called in the civ.ini together (then i somehow got a darkish/marsian kind of terrain as my bomber (chinese) in a german city got activated (and that happened twice, after the second time i turned the firaxian memsaver option off)

so at least your version 1 is compatible with v1.52

 

[Doc5thMech]

Well, after seeing the posts on 1.52, I updated from 1.09 to 1.52, and then re-installed your fix as well as Blue Marble. I still get your Christmas greeting and it looks like 1.52 installed corredctly. The only portion of your fix I dealt with was the D3D9Query. I think 1.52 with your fix is marginally faster than 1.09 with your fix. But in 1.09 I was using the large and with 1.52 I am in the fairly early stages of a huge map, so the comparisons are flawed.

Windows 2000 Professional Service Pack 4 (build 2195)
Dell Computer Corporation OptiPlex GX240
Board: Dell Computer Corporation OptiPlex GX240
Bus Clock: 100 megahertz
BIOS: Dell Computer Corporation A05 07/19/2002
1.70 gigahertz Intel Pentium 4
8 kilobyte primary memory cache
256 kilobyte secondary memory cache
1024 Megabytes Installed Memory
Drives
367.83 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
232.38 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space
Display
ASUS X850 XT AGP 256M

I am still enraged at Firaxis, and am thoroughly grateful for your fine assistance.

 

[Otterbear]

Harkonnen made my computer wish me a merry Christmas ... back at you Mr H.

Ditto! And thanks for the great patch...I can actually play this game with only one gig of memory now

 

[Harkonnen]

DesertWolf
Wow... I'd like to ask you installing version from post #842 - it behaves same way post #1 does, but also it contains FPS meter and shows amount of memory saved. I'd like to know what savings do you get with firaxian 'MemSaver = 0' since I can't run this at my system yet... MemSaver=1 allows my fix to run, but it does not save anything with this setting ON. Thanks in advance.

All
In case Merry Chirstmas greeting becomes annoying for someone, it'll vanish on 1st January.

 

[atomant]

Did I remove your patch to soon. I didn't see the Christmas greeting. Did it trigger on a certain day or was it just in windowed mode ? Darn.

DesertWolf
Wow... I'd like to ask you installing version from post #842 - it behaves same way post #1 does, but also it contains FPS meter and shows amount of memory saved. I'd like to know what savings do you get with firaxian 'MemSaver = 0' since I can't run this at my system yet... MemSaver=1 allows my fix to run, but it does not save anything with this setting ON. Thanks in advance.

All
In case Merry Chirstmas greeting becomes annoying for someone, it'll vanish on 1st January.