Renaissance-Era Repeated Crashing

[Nightstar]

Sigh. After playing my last 1.19 game with virtually no crashes all game I thought this was behind me, but apparently not.

Once again, the game is repeatedly crashing shortly after reaching the Renaissance. In my current 1.20 Sejong game, I had it crash three times in about five turns!

Crash logs attached. I'd really like to figure out what the heck is causing these, because they're making the game nearly unplayable.

 

[Xyth]

The logs all seem to be aliases rather than an actual crash report. I can't open them.

 

[Nightstar]

So they are. Weird, I have no idea how that happened.

Trying again.

 

[Xyth]

All three seem to be music related crashes. Try opening a diplomacy screen with each of the leaders in your game, see if their music plays correctly. The only new music I've added to HR are the sounds for the new religions but it's possible that one or more of the leaders have messed up renaissance music definitions. Post your audio.log too, from a session that ends in a crash. resmgr.log can be helpful sometimes too.

Another thing to check would be completely disabling audio via your CivilizationIV.ini file and seeing if the crashes cease. While that's not at all an ideal solution it will at least indicate whether the audio is the culprit or merely the casualty of a low memory situation or something. If the crashes stop it's probably (but not certainly) the former, whereas if you get MAFs or some other type of crash or error instead then we know we need to look deeper.

Finally, I notice you're still on Snow Leopard. Post a saved game if you could, I can test to see whether these crashes occur on Mountain Lion too (and do some additional testing). Different versions of Quicktime may have some effect.

 

[Nightstar]

Attached is a zip file containing the two logs you mentioned, plus a saved game. I contacted Topiltzin, Ezana, & Nzinga with no (apparent) difficulty, then it crashed while I was talking to Timur. I haven't tried the rest yet.

 

[Xyth]

I've played your game for a while. Had one crash which seemed to be texture-related but no audio crashes so far. Was able to talk to all leaders without issue. Your logs aren't showing anything particularly helpful but my audio.log from the session is showing a few things worth investigating.

Have you tried disabling audio? That would be a very useful test.

 

[Nightstar]

I'm most of the way through the Renaissance now, and have had no further crashes since disabling the audio.

 

[Nightstar]

Update: Started a new game, disabling audio upon reaching the Renaissance, no crashes. Entered the Industrial-era via Refrigeration and turned the sounds back on, game crashed three turns later. Reloaded from the last auto-save and kept going, played several more turns before it crashed again.

Now, this game *is* on a Huge map (most of which has been revealed), so these might just be the usual MAFs, but I've attached the crash logs just in case it's something else.

 

[Xyth]

Both same crash, both audio related. Wish I could figure out what it is. I do get such crashes myself but nowhere near the frequency you seem to.

 

[Jarlaxe Baenre]

Could it be caused by a unit or units that don't appear until then?

 

[Nightstar]

It might be caused by the theme music for some particular civ(s) or leader(s). I generally play with 18 civs, so I'd have a higher chance of getting a bad one. Certainly I've had some games where there were no crashes (outside of what were probably MAFs in the very late game), so there's pretty clearly some random element involved, and which civs/leaders are present seems a likely culprit.

 

[Xyth]

It's worth noting down what civs and leaders were in a game where you didn't get any of these crashes. This crash isn't a just a case of looking through XML or Python files; it could be a bad audio definition called from inside a unit's model or animation file and there's over 1000 of those to look through. Anything we can do to narrow the search is a big help.

 

[Nightstar]

This may or may not be significant, but after several hours of playing off-and-on, I've had no further crashes after I wiped out Hayam Wuruk.

 

[Nightstar]

I actually got a traceback pop-up on my latest crash. Is this still just a standard MAF?

 

[Xyth]

I actually got a traceback pop-up on my latest crash. Is this still just a standard MAF?

That's unusual. That's a Python memory error and shouldn't have anything to do with your audio crashes, or crashes at all. Do you still have the crashlog from that? It's also strange as the referenced line is in a section of code that I haven't touched at all. Could be that you were running very low on memory and the UI managed to trigger that error before an MAF occurred. Let me know if you see it again.

 

[Nightstar]

I think this is it.

 

[Nightstar]

Here's another one. I've gotten several of these in the Modern era, but it doesn't always crash immediately. Sometimes (as in this case) I was able to close the pop-up, save, and then quit normally without an actual crash.

 

[Xyth]

Here's another one. I've gotten several of these in the Modern era, but it doesn't always crash immediately. Sometimes (as in this case) I was able to close the pop-up, save, and then quit normally without an actual crash.

Does this error trigger randomly or always on a certain screen or while the mouse is over certain parts of the interface? The function which is throwing the error is related to help text, in tooltips and the likes. This one is going to be quite tough to narrow down without more specifics to go on.

 

[Nightstar]

It seemed to be pretty much completely random. It only started cropping up at the point in the game when I was getting MAFs every turn (sometimes twice in a single turn!).

 

[Xyth]

It seemed to be pretty much completely random. It only started cropping up at the point in the game when I was getting MAFs every turn (sometimes twice in a single turn!).

In that case it sounds more likely to be caused by MAFs than to be causing MAFs. Do you have the unit art unpacked?