Daftpanzer
canonically ambiguous
This is a nasty little problem which I encountered tonight. I can't find any threads about it, so I thought I'd make one, just in case its ever useful to anyone else..
I noticed that civ3 had suddenly started crashing at the end of certain turns, or when trying to load certain games, but not all games. I eventually realised it was because I had been playing some of the civ3 music in media player (for nice varied background music while working on other things). I remember an issue with Age of Empires 2, where the game would crash is music files had been played in Media Player 10+ (or something... I think any version above that which comes with XP basic). IIRC it adds some data to the MP3's, probably storing your playcount or rating or something, which should be harmless. Except that it isn't always. So yeah, I realised it was crashing whenever it tried to load one of the tainted music tracks.
The obvious solution is to replace all the music tracks with the originals - either from reinstalling, or an old backup or something, whatever hasn't been touched by media player. I ended up replacing all the 'sounds' folders entirely, which are in the civ3 base folder and in the PTW and Conquests folders. The game runs fine now. I believe the crash details message thing was listing the related module as 'MP3aci' or 'MP3asi' (because I'm such a genius, I didn't make a note, and don't want to repeat the problem on purpose).
For listening to the music out-of-game, I guess its generally good practice to copy game music to a separate folder, before playing in media player etc
Hope this helps someone sometime
I noticed that civ3 had suddenly started crashing at the end of certain turns, or when trying to load certain games, but not all games. I eventually realised it was because I had been playing some of the civ3 music in media player (for nice varied background music while working on other things). I remember an issue with Age of Empires 2, where the game would crash is music files had been played in Media Player 10+ (or something... I think any version above that which comes with XP basic). IIRC it adds some data to the MP3's, probably storing your playcount or rating or something, which should be harmless. Except that it isn't always. So yeah, I realised it was crashing whenever it tried to load one of the tainted music tracks.
The obvious solution is to replace all the music tracks with the originals - either from reinstalling, or an old backup or something, whatever hasn't been touched by media player. I ended up replacing all the 'sounds' folders entirely, which are in the civ3 base folder and in the PTW and Conquests folders. The game runs fine now. I believe the crash details message thing was listing the related module as 'MP3aci' or 'MP3asi' (because I'm such a genius, I didn't make a note, and don't want to repeat the problem on purpose).
For listening to the music out-of-game, I guess its generally good practice to copy game music to a separate folder, before playing in media player etc
Hope this helps someone sometime
