Patch News!

[rob.derosa]

thast stpid that horses dont appear until that tech

i mean... they would have still been around even if man had not known how to raise them... its not as if our ancestors ignored them.. they probably ate them

 

[Mazruk]

This is not a memory leak. A real memory leak would result in the game eating up memory by just sitting there. What you describe could be easily explained by all Civs remembering every diplomatic contact (sort of history for the AI to check against when deciding future behaviour?). It may be designed suboptimal but on the other side, 40K isn't much.

Yay for softer pillage sounds. That annoyed me massively

A memory leak is NOT like a dripping tap. If you dont DO anything in the game, there wont be a memory leak.

A memory leak is where the code asks for some memory and then, when its done with it, forgets to give it back to the system. If the code isnt doing anything, it isnt going to be asking for more memory, and therefore it wont be leaking.

As it happens, its much more likely that its just innefficient memory management because they ran out of optimisation time. For those that get a slowdown in the modern era, its because you've hit your ram limit and are swapping to disk a lot. You've hit the ram limit because you've got more units/buildings/visible land/opponents units/opponents buildings/etc. Every turn there is more stuff going on so more memory is used. It just isnt leaking.

For those that crash a bit after the slow down, you probably have a fixed page file size and are hitting that limit where the operating system (not the game) pulls the plug.

Hopefully, the patch has improved the efficiency of the memory usage so that these problems are less likely to manifest themselves. However, on machines with low ram and small (fixed size) swap spaces, they will still get CTD if they try to play a large map because their system will still run out of memory eventually and the operating system will pull the plug.

 

[zagaz]

Horses are strategic resources, just like iron and copper and all the others, thus I believe it makes sense to require a tech to reveal them. Not like animal husbandry is useless, even if there are no 'animals' nearby, chances are there will be soon and you will want pastures. In civ 3 you required the wheel to see them IIRC.

Granted, I can see the logic in the argument somewhat over other animals and resources, however, it would logically make sense for a tribal/ancient society to know about different wild food types, like corn, rice and wheat. Also, they would have eaten other animals like roaming sheep and bovines, but once you research agriculture or animal husbandry, then you get more use out of those said resources by stabling them and breeding them and having a flock nearby as opposed to roaming around in a hunting party. Likewise, with the development of nets and other fishing implements, the yield , as it were would also increase.

 

[Innocence]

A memory leak is where the code asks for some memory and then, when its done with it, forgets to give it back to the system.

Right, or more precisely, the coder forgot to release it to the system

If the code isnt doing anything, it isnt going to be asking for more memory, and therefore it wont be leaking

Right on

 

[Commander Bello]

Because of all the whiners/flamers/trolls on this site they decided that 'poly is now the more friendly site?

Well, that is exactly the impression I have. They (Firaxis) just cannot accept criticism.
It is like with a 6 year old girl: "If I close my eyes, I don't see you. If I don't see you, you are not there. If you are not there, you cannot know that I took the sugar. If you don't know, you don't bluster!"

Following this route, many people here have qualified for a possible employment.

 

[Rexflex]

thast stpid that horses dont appear until that tech

i mean... they would have still been around even if man had not known how to raise them... its not as if our ancestors ignored them.. they probably ate them

Certainly they would have been hunted before they were domesticated. But then they would just have been on the hunt menu along with all the other creatures that man hunted. They would have not been special in any way and so not specially "notable". They would just be part of the generic food resource in that tile.

Anything that isn't notable at the time should in my opinion be hidden. We have the benefit of hindsight as to the extent that horses become useful, and so shouldn't get the foresight of knowing which tiles are going to get that benefit.

 

[Shigga]

phew! The patch, finally. Wonder if they finally did their homework. *fingers crossed*

 

[Innocence]

Anything that isn't notable at the time should in my opinion be hidden. We have the benefit of hindsight as to the extent that horses become useful, and so shouldn't get the foresight of knowing which tiles are going to get that benefit.

Exactly. Although you could argue that the discovery of Copper most certainly came before the knowledge of how to utilize it, the benefit of foresight would spoil the current gameplay...

...unless... actually you might be able to make resources visible exactly one tech before the tech which utilizes it. That would still prevent players from seeing Horses, Oil and Uranium from the beginning, while still being able to make intelligent choices of whether or not to develop the tech which actually utilizes the resource.

 

[André Alfenaar]

Great news about the patch! However, they didn't mention the 'stuttering sound' problems that many (me too) are experiencing. I hope they have tackled this problem in the patch.

 

[statusperfect]

memory, caching and performance improvements

YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[statusperfect]

thast stpid that horses dont appear until that tech

i mean... they would have still been around even if man had not known how to raise them... its not as if our ancestors ignored them.. they probably ate them

I think it makes gameplay more fun if they appear later. Gameplay is for me more important that historical accuracy ,which civ has none of.

 

[WarX]

There is no memory leak.

As someone mentioned there is a very long thread dedicated to that in the Bugs section, yet the person who championed the memory leak idea does not suffer from so called memory leaks -when he downgraded his graphics driver-. Further more, if there was a memory leak EVERYONE would be suffering from it. As mentioned above a memory leak happens when code asks for memory but does not release it after its done with it. No matter what your hardware or memory setup is, the code that causes the memory leak will still be there. Since we know that not everyone is suffering from CTDs and so on, plus we know for a fact that alot of people fixed CTDs by using older drivers both for nvidia and ATI we can finally read the press release for what it really is. Memory "improvements" (read more efficient use of memory) and graphic card "fixes" (read fix bugs that cause crashes, black terrain, lines when zooming out).

 

[Shivam]

Well, that is exactly the impression I have. They (Firaxis) just cannot accept criticism.
It is like with a 6 year old girl: "If I close my eyes, I don't see you. If I don't see you, you are not there. If you are not there, you cannot know that I took the sugar. If you don't know, you don't bluster!"

Following this route, many people here have qualified for a possible employment.

you guys just don't read, do you? They posted it at the civ4 site, and then poly picked it up before we did here. that's all. no favortism involved.

 

[TyranusBonehead]

animal husbandry reveals horses? WTH? 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.

If this isn't truth, I don't know what is.

 

[Rhymes]

Some worker fixes uh? I wonder if they took off the worker chop strategy?
Hope not! Cuz many smart ass are gonna fall back a couple of difficulty levels

 

[Craterus22]

Nice to finally hear some official words about the patch!

For the record, Dennis emailed me earlier this afternoon about the patch. It's just that I was not able to check my CFC.com email when away from home (password is too hard to remember ).

Excuses, excuses... when will you guys realize that we expect you to update websites every 15 minutes? What?!? You don't get paid for this?

oh...

Seriously - great site... keep up the good work

 

[mrpresidentbob]

Certainly they would have been hunted before they were domesticated. But then they would just have been on the hunt menu along with all the other creatures that man hunted. They would have not been special in any way and so not specially "notable". They would just be part of the generic food resource in that tile.

Mmmmm....horses.

 

[niroe]

Looking forward to the patch..

Hope it fixes the problems for you guys who cant play

 

[dsplaisted]

Further more, if there was a memory leak EVERYONE would be suffering from it. As mentioned above a memory leak happens when code asks for memory but does not release it after its done with it. No matter what your hardware or memory setup is, the code that causes the memory leak will still be there.

It's not quite that simple. Just because we have the same code, doesn't mean that the same parts of it are run the same way. There may be different code paths for different video card capabilities, or what options you are using. Maybe there is a leak in the diplomatic contact screen, so someone that is always talking to the AIs would experience problems, while someone who never talked to them would be fine.

Also, someone said that if the game is not doing anything then memory can not leak. The thing is, the game is always doing something. Playing sounds, updating the screen, animating units, etc. It is less likely that these things would cause a memory leak simply because they are likely to leak a lot of memory and so they would be noticed and fixed.

There may or may not be a significant leak. It sounds like maybe there is not one, but just because some people don't encounter it isn't a bulletproof argument.

 

[onedreamer]

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'

all nice and true...

too bad that since everything you and others said does NOT apply to Elephants and Cattle, it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, even from a strategic point of view, since Elephants can be put at the same level of Horses in this regard.