Patch News!

[Steve2000]

They posted this at Poly first?!

If they wanted to reach the widest audience, they should have posted it here!
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=140863

"They" did not post anything at Apolyton or Civfanatics. "They" posted in on their own website (2kGames). Then, someone at Apolyton noticed it and posted on their site. Then someone from this site noticed it on Apolyton and posted it here.

Relax

 

[warpstorm]

It also balances the horse line with the metal line of combat units.

 

[Schlomoe99]

Ah...I see.

 

[snepp]

I believe the hiding of horses to be a sound decision, for the reasons previously mentioned.

 

[nuke_man]

Posted at Apolyton:



Link: http://civilization4.net/

at long last .... it's been a hell of a wait..... thanks......

 

[Leuf]

That's not quite the same. Wild crops were used for food before agriculture. They just didn't know that they can saw the seeds to produce more crops. Stones were used even by homo habilis so that point is also moot. Those technologies just allow old resources to gain new uses.

Yes but they didn't know settling near a huge rock outcropping would be useful for building a giant pyramid, did they?

 

[Greek Plunder]

Don't they hide ALL Strategic Resources, and have ALL Luxury Resources revealed?

 

[MarcAntiny]

Okay, I feel marginally better about the Patch news now.

Fixing gameplay issues was on the top of their queue, though? I think some more tech issues should have been the focus and get those fixes out ASAP.

My guess is they were working on them since before the game was finished but because 2k rushed it to stores they didn't get to finish and implement them... probably changes that needed to be made and were in the works...

 

[MarcAntiny]

That sounds great. I hope it will let me play on huge maps


animal husbandry reveals horses? wtf? it's not like iron which you have to mine for...it's a friggin horse...it's a little hard to miss even if you don't know how to put a saddle on it.

Civ was like this before, makes sense to me... adds more dynamic to research and strategy.

 

[JakeCourtney]

It's still late and we have no patch yet. It was said to be released last week. I bet will we have to wait all the way till friday for it.

 

[The Last Conformist]

It's worth noticing that of a bunch of different equids that are all quite alike, only a couple have been domesticated, and only one has been used as a cavalry mount. It will not have been obvious to pre-husbandry people that the regular horse (Equus caballus) was any more "strategic" than donkeys, zebras, or kiangs.

 

[AER]

I'm pretty sure that the delay when your map expands is caused by the need to re-render the 3d map in the main game screen (which involves copying a lot of information either from the HDD or main memory into the graphics card memory.) It seems like they to not render the whole map at level load, for whatever reason.

This delay, at least, doesn't indicate a memory leak. If there is a memory leak, you can tell by watching the memory as you play. Start a game with one city, do not explore, and watch the memory as reported by the Windows Task Manager. If it climbs and climbs and climbs until it fills up the main memory and the page file, then you have a memory leak. If it climbs a bit then levels off, then you probably don't have a memory leak.

Planescape Torment had a memory leak at release. The memory usage would steadily climb until it filled the available space and your game crashed. I don't think that Civ IV does - or, if it does, it only affects certain people (not me.)

 

[Gulio]

personally i think hiding animals is dumb.

Oh look, we researched horses and all of a sudden these things appeared in front of us... i thought they were grubs.


---
Any news on the memory leaks Civ4 has? will they be fixing those?

 

[MarcAntiny]

Not necessarily... slowdowns can happen suddenly if there is a big change to the data being used... for example when a map is exchanged providing substantially more information.

I still suspect that there may be a minor memory leak (since people could often play an extra few turns after reloading a save), but it does sound likely that the main issue was simply that the system was using the memory inefficiently.

Personally, I am totally bummed because my wife said about an hour ago that she is not getting me the laptop I was hoping for and so I suspect that it will be a few years before I can actually play the game... I knew the patch info would be out as a result !

Yes, I am thoroughly whipped. <sigh>

Dude, Newegg preferred account is your answer... no interest, no payments for 6 months... that gives you six months to figure out how to pay for that new laptop b4 explaining it to your wife...

 

[combathanger]

personally i think hiding animals is dumb.

Oh look, we researched horses and all of a sudden these things appeared in front of us... i thought they were grubs.

The point is that before you learn to USE a resource it is hidden. Horses are not considered a valuable comodity until you advance enough to realize they are worth something. Its a way of keeping YOU (the all knowing player) from ruining your experiece and cheating into putting a city near a resource you know you'll need 'soon'

 

[snepp]

personally i think hiding animals is dumb.

Oh look, we researched horses and all of a sudden these things appeared in front of us... i thought they were grubs.

The problem, from my perspective, is that you (and others) are looking at it much too literally. Yes, the horses were there the whole time, they didn't just magically appear. It's a game mechanic, and a necessary one at that (imho).

 

[Greencardman]

I had crashing problems and reboots and everything was fixed after rolling back my ATI Driver (I'm on a laptop). So at first I thought it was a problem with the game, now I'm not so sure. I do know huge maps and lots of units give me lag, which I'm wondering if people with more ram than me still get, or if its something that just happens.

So in short, I welcome any fixes that will fix exploits, and allow me to use the latest driver. To those still having crashes, i think there's a fix out there for you now, somewhere...

 

[MarcAntiny]

Last year, as soon as it came out, I bought Far Cry, a first-person shooter. I had a pretty good system that had run everything I had thrown at it thus far and expected no problems. To my dismay, the game kept crashing at random points in the first half-hour or so of playing it.

I started navigating the forums, finding tons of users like me who were frustrated that CryTek has released such a buggy game, and was doing nothing about it. Lots of people were having no problems whatsoever with the game, but lots of other were having problems very similar to mine.

Then, I started finding posts suggesting that some of the problems may have been due to faulty memory. BS! My system worked fine with every other game, so it had to be the game's fault.

One of those posts mentioned a memory and memory torture test program that I could run on my system to make sure that my memory was fine. I ran it, believing it wouldn't find anything and... lo and behold, it repeatedly found faulty memory accesses within the first 20 minutes of running. I went into the BIOS and slowed down my memory access speed somewhat (which I shouldn't have had to do according to my system and memory specs) and the problem went away.

Bottom line: even though I, along with thousands of others, was convinced that I was stuck with a buggy game, in the end it turned out that the problem really was with my system, because the game was pushing some of its components beyond anything they had had to endure before. Something like that has to be happening to at least some of the people having trouble with the game...

Glad to see that there are people out there that can admit they were wrong about a problem before. I have to also mention I've found problems with my vid cards, memory, hdd only because I had issues with games and research the problems. Bottom line is games, expecially cutting edge new ones that use everything your system has are bound to cause problems in a many systems. I also found that once I installed a battery back up on my system that everyday around 6am there is a power surge in my area that was causing my components to fail... It wasn't enough to cause a black out of any length of time but to a electrical component it was enough to cause problems... somewhat off topic but my best advice is make sure you are running a quality surge and if possible a battery backup. This may just prevent your system from problems just as it did mine. In fact, I haven't had a hardware issue since I installed the battery backups.

 

[ieatlint]

It's impossible to deturmine if a memory "leak" is a bug or flaw in logic (from what we know). An improvement of coding logic/layout can solve memory "leaks" without an actual bug being in place -- and therefore called an improvement. Either way, it's a mere technicality of word choice, and I can assure you that unlike some law, this wasn't carefully written and scrutinized to ensure every single word perfectly and ambiguously gave its intent.
Furthermore, in regards to people freaking out about graphics card issues. Yes, obviously there is a problem, my fianc&#233; can't play the game on her computer due to the black map issue. But clearly 90% (probably more than 97%) don't expereince this issue, and the majority of them don't even know of its existence. On a standard PR move you do not openly insult the software you produce (it's common sense), so it keeps those in the dark (both figureatively and literraly) happy. Besides, despite how crippling this bug is, there are other tweaks and the like that will be much happier recieved by the overall user base.

Oh, and the map issue... chances are that's CPU. Having abosultely no idea how they store the data, there are any number of explinations as to why that delay exists, but it's probably not a memory leak. It's one of the things they could have improved, or still need to do.

In regards to the horses. Knowing that horses exist is one thing. Using them is entirely different. Perhaps you thought that nothing round existed prior to the "invention" of the wheel? Animal Husbandry is the realization of its use, and it shouldn't be of consequence until then. Not from a civilizations perspective when it doesn't know....
The real question is if they do that, why not hide sheep, cow, swine, rice, etc. until you can use them? Same principle, afterall...

 

[tyroneb97]

Good news.

Hopefully there are also some interface / advisor screens improvements, especillay the military advisor which I currently think is pretty useless.

Otherwise..

I agree. The advisor and information screens took a huge step backwards.