Nil?

[Tomoyo]

I was looking for a good map to kill myself on, and I came up with this:

What the?

 

[Darix]

I got that couple times when I keep restarting games until I found a good map. It seemed that the data file of some sort is missing when creating the game. If you keep playing, you will encounter more problems. I believe you have to totally exit the program and re-enter again before the problem will be gone.

 

[Tomoyo]

I got that couple times when I keep restarting games until I found a good map. It seemed that the data file of some sort is missing when creating the game. If you keep playing, you will encounter more problems. I believe you have to totally exit the program and re-enter again before the problem will be gone.

That explains it. I was restarting for the last twenty minutes trying to get a good Sid map.

 

[tR1cKy]

Yeah, data curruption, probably due to a subtle bug.
The 'Nil' thing seems due to the program trying to access uninitialized data. Arrays, Strings or structures declared but not initialized, not given an initial value or without memory allocated for them.
However, it would be fun to play it, just to see how nicely it crash...

 

[Doc Tsiolkovski]

Note it doesn't case any gameplay problems. You can save, and restart Civ3 without any troubles.

 

[The Omega]

Nil, nil, nil, nillity nil!!!!

Never had that happen to me before....Tha'ts very weird.......

 

[Wolfwood]

Well, I almost never restart games, so I've not encountered this problem... Still, very interesting...

 

[Pounder]

I've had that happen before.

 

[Bagatur]

DOes it mean Civ III is writteln in Pascal(Delphi)? Null values there are presented with "nil" reserved word.

 

[Pounder]

Maybe a hanging chad on one of the punch cards when they compiled the program.

 

[Vegasgustan]

Yeah, but what about the Knights That Say Nee? Um, sorry did I really just type that... Note To Self: Never post drunk!

 

[Chieftess]

DOes it mean Civ III is writteln in Pascal(Delphi)? Null values there are presented with "nil" reserved word.

It was written in Visual C++. And let's not spam the thread.

 

[thescaryworker]

Never seen it before, yet never resterted a game before either.

 

[Cuivienen]

It's known; it appears if you use Ctrl-Shft-Q to restart enough times in a row. IIRC it only happens in Vanilla, maybe also in PtW.

 

[Doc Tsiolkovski]

Vanilla, PtW, C3C, no difference. Depends on your processor how many restarts you need. And, guess why Mapfinder restarts the game after a certain number of 'New Games'?

 

[Tomoyo]

This was C3C...

I restarted about 50 times, give or take... I normally don't do that, but I wanted a chance on Sid...

 

[Pounder]

There is a memory leak, buffer creap, whatever, it is grabbing blocks of memory and not releasing all the blocks when it is finished with them. The more memory you have the more times you can reload before you have problems.

If you do get a good map after several tries. Save, then restart the game, otherwise you won't be playing with all your memory and the game will be slower and at some point the game may be thrashing around for memory and things could be very slow.

 

[tR1cKy]

There is a memory leak, buffer creap, whatever, it is grabbing blocks of memory and not releasing all the blocks when it is finished with them. The more memory you have the more times you can reload before you have problems.

If you do get a good map after several tries. Save, then restart the game, otherwise you won't be playing with all your memory and the game will be slower and at some point the game may be thrashing around for memory and things could be very slow.

This make sense, but there should be more. Like the available memory ends, the call to a malloc function fails, and the program, instead of handling the error, goes on as nothing has happened. This causes the variable to point to a NULL pointer rather than at the memory allocated.

 

[thetrooper]

Yes, this happened to me when I started over many times to find a decent spot for a builder game. Doc T laughed at me...

I think it was in a thread 6 months ago, called something like "Kingdom of Nil"