Memory-fix by Harkonnen is out!

[kettyo]

Screen print before the memory reset. Sorry to be Axxbackwards.

Wow your lead is impressive
Which difficulty do you play?

 

[staggerbite]

I just uninstalled civ4/deleted folders-installed 5.13-reinstalled civ4. I noticed that when I installed the game that it made an ART0.fpk file where it is supposed to be then when I installed the 1.09 patch it separated the ART0.fpk to Assets0,Asests1,Assets2,and Assets3. Then deleted the ART0.fpk file.

Should I 'unpak' the ART0.fpk file before I install the patch?

I just download the last beta of your patch and I'm going to try it out.

 

[NeoPolus]

Should I 'unpak' the ART0.fpk file before I install the patch?

If you do that you'll have some folders with unpacked files instead of some small packed files (Assets0, Assets1...).

I did, and it worked for me: install civ4 -> unpack art0.fpk -> install update -> install Harkonnen patch -> play

 

[staggerbite]

I just did that Neo and it still crashes. I'll just deal with only beable to play 20 turns at once and hope for better luck with my x800GTO. The first and second patch works better for me.

 

[tjfox]

Harkonnen, THANK YOU. You have made Civ4 playable for me. I have installed all your patches, the only problem I still have is that after playing awhile the terrain goes black and I need to load the game again before the black will go away.

 

[Steve2000]

Hello - Haven't played with it much but upon installing the 3rd version of the patch I immediately had VERY slow gameplay and FPS around 2-3!! Reverted back to second update and game speed was normal. At first look 3rd update seems to be worse for me - but i will probably fiddle with it and see if anything changes. I didn't change my Harkonnen.ini settings at all. Vid_Mem_Usage=82, Insanemode=0

BTW Harkonnen I have noticed that I get slightly improved game speed when I "hide" your patch overlay screen.

Specs in signature

 

[atomant]

Wow your lead is impressive
Which difficulty do you play?

Just a test game, a low setting just to get through it quick. Testing on the lower level also gives me all the wonders and that is where most of my crashes typically take place. Wonders can also start the slowdown process on my system.

My 8 year old son loves CIV and plays too. Can't make it too hard. Hark's patch really made him happy. He got CIV4 for a birthday present and he couldn't really play it until the Patch.

Merry Christmas to you and to everyone here.

 

[BlueLikeYou]

Ok, I have tried out this version. Unfortunatly, the memory allocation errors on saving still occur.

I experimented a little, watching VB_CACHE_SIZE. I had vid_mem_usage set to 160, and I noticed that I could save as much as I wanted without a crash as long as the vb_cache_size was around 120. Then I panned around to get it up to around 160 and tried to save...which is where it crashed. So I reloaded the game and used the ctrl+alt+left to lower the usage down to 142 (though it says 136 in the ini file). I wasn't able to get it to crash on saving at this level, even with the vb_cache_size very close to this number. So perhaps the answer is to lower vid_mem_usage? If anyone else is having this problem, try lowering vid_mem_usage and see if it goes away. I'll have to play around with it some more to see if I get any more crashes.

A couple of other notes:
-On a crash or exit, the application seems to hang around longer than it did before. At least, it is obvious that is still running because the music continues to play for several minutes. It might be that the program always continued to run for several minutes, but it didn't used to continue to play the music. Not really a big problem, but just though it was kind of wierd

-If you change the vid_mem_usage from within the game, it overwrites the Harkonnen.ini file. Which I assume is intended, but it also wipes out all of the comments in the .ini file. Again, not a big problem, but this is probably something you don't want to happen.

 

[jdurg]

Well this latest version gets the wonder movies running smoothly again for me. I really am not seeing any issues thus far, aside from the fact that when I exit the program the screen freezes for a good 10-15 seconds or so. Didn't do that before. I'll let you know if I come across anything else. (Now I just need to search to find out how to turn off that info screen with the FPS in it. )

 

[azzaman333]

BTW, the new patch (1.52) supposedly is better than this memory fix.

 

[staggerbite]

when does this new patch come out?

 

[azzaman333]

Its been out for about 2 hours

 

[BlueLikeYou]

Yeah I just noticed that there's a new patch...I'll have to try it out. Anyway, I did eventually get a memory allocation error with the lower vid_mem_usage setting, although it took a lot longer for it to come up that it had been. VB_CACHE_SIZE was at 142'033'400/142'606'336.

I'll give the new official patch a try and see how well that works.

 

[{ChinO_MorenO}]

---
Im having superior cpu usage (100% seen from the task manager) in terra scenario normal sized, in the middle stage of the game (when you begin colonizing the new continent).
Before I had harkonnen patch it would just crash to the desktop or the system would reboot. Now it just becomes unplayable, and as the task manager seems to point out, its not a ram problem (however, I have an AMD 64 3.2Ghz, so i cant see how the processor could hang the game).
I set 80 mb ram in video memory usage (I have a radeon 9600 128mb ram), should I set it higher? I dont know how to see my agp apperture size to make the calculations harkonnen told us to do. Finally, this all sucks... we should not go through this to play a great game... However, thanks for your hard work Harkonnen
-----
this problem was fixed increasing vid memory usage from 80 to 120, slowdowns still occur but the game is playable, hope this helps...

 

[staggerbite]

sweet
hope it helps me out
any sites to download it from?

 

[Caesar69]

I tried all settings 160 as recommended and kept on decreasing and im up to 110 and still get this error when i try to save a game.... see image for details of error

I have 1gb of Ram and 256 mb 6600LE PCI express video card

 

[sumoworm]

so the big question is did Hark get paid or did Hark get ripped?

of course the slightly less big question is whether Firaxis' patch is better than harks?

 

[Gaias]

Overall I would say that patch v1.52 is faster than patch v1.09. The problem is that I am still using the same memory when I load up Harkonnen's save as I did with patch v1.09. So no real improvement for memory reduction on the patch part.

 

[joethreeblah]

Sorry, that came off sounding differently than what we intended. Actually, we're very impressed by the work that Harkonen has done and are glad that it's been able to help people over the last few weeks. The point we were making is that people who are patching to v1.52 might want to be sure that they are using all of the default files when they first try the game out again to see how performance/stability has changed. Certainly, a great deal of the code-base has changed, so there is always the chance that user-made mods might function differently...

Thought some of yous guys might be interested in this comment, which was in response to a complaint about the note about unofficial patches in the readme.

 

[SithlordDK]

The new patch 1.52 runs good, though i first didn't know that you have to change "MemSaver = 0" to 1 in the civIV.ini...