Task Switch Freezing

[cianos]

Hello,

ALT-<TAB> to switch windows tasks did not crash the game, but I was not able to get back to it. Windows thought the game was runni g fine but the graphics would not come up. The little sowrd curser did come up however.

Running nVidia Geforce 6600 w/128 on Athlon 3000+ w 2 Gigs system RAM. XP/SP2

I had to terminate the task and restart it again.

 

[DaveShack]

Try making your windows desktop resolution match the in-game resolution.

 

[cianos]

Confirmed, tried both above bellow and same resolution. All give the same result.

Task is alive but screen wont present itself.

 

[ainwood]

Ok - this might help. Shut-down all other applications (internet windows, office programs etc). The go to task manager, select Civ4 and choose "switch task".

 

[dunno]

It usually takes the game about 20-30 seconds to rerender everything again on the screen. So after you click on the game in the task bar (or alt-tab), don't click on anything else for like 30 seconds. It should run then. (although I posted an earlier thread about the game crashing if I alt-tab quickly and doing that many times...so these two issues might be related)

 

[Nicole]

I experienced the same thing. Coincidentally (sort of), I also bought another gig of RAM today. Alt-Tab works fine now.

However, I think I can confirm the memory leak. After only an hour of play, it's using 608,628k of RAM and climbing. Extra RAM appears to put off the eventuall RAM crash, but does not appear that it's going to solve it.

 

[ainwood]

Is it that there is a leak, or simply that the amount of data is increasing? If you exit and reload, is the memory released?

 

[Nicole]

I've been playing with it, and it seems that if you escape straight to desktop, it does NOT release the memory, but if you go back to the main menu and then exit the game, it does. Or at least that was my experience just now. It's the first time I've tried it as a two step process, and whadduknow, the memory is cleared up.

It might be worth a try to see if other people can duplicate this.

 

[cianos]

Yeah ALT tab wont come back even if I wait for 10 minutes, however windows does not report the task as Not Responding, which is one of the few things windows does that I gerneally am happy at. its reporting of screwing the pooch on a task.

I played a game tonight for about 6 hours and at the end of the six hours the process was using 1.2 gigs of ram.

There is a def memoryleak, thankfully I have 2 gigs to keep it at bay.

Other notes onthe game will be posted in appropriate sections.

The quality of the game and the improvements makes these anomolies intersting and not frustrating. Best 60 bucks CDN I spent in a long while.

and I am an old fart.

 

[sgrig]

You people aren't patient enough! When alt-tabbing back to Civ4, wait for about 20 minutes and it will be back up.

When i alt-tabbed out of Civ4, I noticed that it's memory keeps increasing, even though it's in background - in a few minutes memory usage increased from about 80MB to 130MB, while VM usage stayed constant at about 650MB.

 

[Shepherdboy]

I've had success by clicking on the map (even though it is all black). When I ATL-TAB back into Civ the screen is all black. Once the sword cursor reappaears I click the mouse button (even though the screen is all black). For me, the screen begins to redraw, centering on the location where I clicked.

Shepherdboy

 

[Chieftess]

Where you in Windowed mode, or full screen mode?

 

[sgrig]

I always use the full screen mode.

 

[cianos]

Full screen mode, and I waited 30 minutes. Mouse cursor came abck as I stated, nothing else. I have 2 gigs of ram,,,, no come back. I am going to try windows mode, but I understand I can only doo that manually in the .ini file. Conrifm please.

 

[mrgenie]

it seems you just need to wait, some need to wait for 10minutes, others for 60or longer...its quicker to just reboot pc and reload the last autosave that's the only thing firaxis did well!! at least the autosave works perfectly