Multiplayer Password Problems...

[Stargrove]

I played a game (4Humans/6 AI) this past Friday. Everything went falwlessly through Gamespy and we played for about 6 hours. I saved the game and we quit for the night. Later I was browsing the forums and noted a couple of posts about the Civ Password. So, I loaded up Civ4 and tried to load that saved game we just finished. Looks like all the human players now need a password. All of us left that password blank. None of the computer players need a password to get in.

I enabled logging today, just to see what the game was reporting, and here is what I got that seems relavent. It was located in a file called network-2056:

[128836.828] DBG: Sending Pick-yer-civ message to NetID 0
[128839.188] DBG: Received CivChoice message from NetID 0
[128839.188] DBG: Civ 0 already claimed! Prompting NetID 0 for password
[128845.453] DBG: Received CivChoice message from NetID 0
[128845.453] DBG: Rejecting NetID 0 from selection of Civ with AppID 0

I have attached a copy of the saved game for anyone who would like to take a look.

I do not know if this is relevent, but I would also like to note that I opened up the savegame file in Notepad and saw some strings like: 5 a 8 d c c b 2 2 0 d e 5 c 6 7 7 5 c 8 7 3 e a d 6 f f 2 e 4 3. I am not sure what these are, but they look like Windows GUID's. I have seem these types of strings in the registry and in MS Access. Coincidentaly, there are four (same number of human players in the game) of them at the very beginning of the file. I compared this to a PBEM saved game a friend and I started when the game first came out and noted that the strings were absent. Could they be the encoded "passwords" that we don't seem to know?

I would hate to have 6 hours woth of a game go down the tubes. Any help is always appreciated. Thanks.

 

[Stargrove]

I have found a way around this problem...

Referring back to my previous save game attachment. There are 4 human Civs...the Stargrovians (renamed Malise), English, Greeks and Russians. After some experimentation with the saved game file I found that the English did not have a password, but the other three did. In the saved game file there are four strings of hex values (edited here for easier reading), I assumed one for each Civ as follows:
Stargrovians: 5a8dccb220de5c6775c873ead6ff2e43
English: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
Greeks: 120e7b4c34cf9c377a81433c74e72ea8
Russians: 74be16979710d4c4e7c6647856088456

The string next to the English is the key one, since they do not require a password. So, using a good hex editor, Hex Workshop in this case, I carefully replaced the other three strings with d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e.

I then loaded the game up and was able to successfully get back into the game with no passwords needed.

I have not done any play testing to make sure all is still well since my friends and I won't be meeting until Jan 13th to continue our game. But if you are having password problems this is a solution worth trying. Just make sure you make a copy of your original save game file before attempting this.

I have attached a copy of the modified file for you to see. Also, I have attached a copy of what I pasted over the original strings in Hex Workshop, in case you don't want to fat finger it.

Good Luck and remember that this fix removes any password on any Civ you apply it to!

 

[asmodai]

Of course, with a random game having these GUIDs you are never certain which will be an empty password one. d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e just happened to work for your installation, but it does not mean it will work for others. YMMV.

 

[roadkill15]

this password works with every save file, tryed it myself on at list 10 different save files.
too bad the game knows you massed with the save file and the game crashes to dasktop....