Troubleshooting CTDs?

[Niveras]

I recently started playing FF again (050 D at first a week or two ago, now G) and have noticed significantly increased crashes to the desktop, most notably that I cannot load saves at all, even to go back a couple turns. Lately I have been trying to win an Infernal victory, but it often crashes during the End Turn. Lately it has even started crashing during the turn, such as when I raze cities, or even just move a unit.

They seem to happen most often with Infernals, but I've been frustrated enough that I have not really tried playing other civilizations. I'd like to try to troubleshoot these things to some minor degree, so I at least know what to avoid and still be able to play FF (e.g., is it an Infernal thing? A hell terrain thing? A barb spawn thing on hell terrain? Barb spawns in fog of war that is virtually unavoidable?), but with no discernible log file generated when the game crashes to the desktop, it is hard to say. Is it essentially impossible for an enthusiast to help troubleshoot, and I should just wait for a more stable version to resume playing FF, or are there at least known issues that causes CTDs that I can avoid with game options?

PS: I'm not sure if this is an FF or FFH feature, but I feel the demon barb spawn rate on hell terrain should be toned down significantly. They should also not spawn inside Hyborem's borders. These barbs feel useless since they are governed by normal barb AI and pass up juicy targets right next to their spawn for whatever dogpile they are focused on. They also limit my ability to expand early after switching because I cannot use Ring of Flames to soften enemy stacks without declaring war on Agares.

PPS: Probably Guardian Vines should also be blocked from barb-spawning in hell terrain.

 

[xienwolf]

Demon spawns are completely FF.

Debugging CtDs is pretty hard unless you get the full tools for modding really. Best you can do without them is post a save of a reliable CtD, describe how to replicate it, and try deleting large chunks of suspicious items in the worldbuilder.


Are saves not loading even if you restart the game from desktop? Currently we have a known issue with starting a second run at a game without completely restarting the Civ program.


Anyway, back to the demons, spawnrate is linked to difficulty and current AC. You want fewer spawns, reduce the AC. And they spawn in any hell terrain (and only in hell terrain), no matter whose terrain it is, but it is especially fitting to spawn in Hyborem's terrain, why would you NOT want them to?

I'll have to check into the setup for spells declaring war to see if I can easily make the Barbarians ignore those actions. It is intended to be impossible to lose your peace except by our pre-defined methods (which currently is none for Hyborem). But we haven't specifically blocked out using spells to cause war yet.

 

[feydras]

I'm getting a ton of CTDs as well playing as the Dural. Sometimes i'll get 7-8 within a turn or three of reloading a save, same save or most recent autosave. Then i'll get a string of 20 or more turns with none from an identical reload. The crashes are never in the same place or same time each reload. Many are not at End Turn but during my turn as OP mentioned. Seems like some have occurred when nothing was happening but me moving the mouse over to scroll the screen but i can't be sure. One crash seemed to happen just as a deer appeared due to the weather warming. I am playing w/ End of Winter option enabled. Maybe that was a coincidence. The closest thing to a consistent crash i had was a series of crashes that occurred when i went from inside the city screen to exit or switched to another city.

I'd give up on the game and wait for a more stable patch, or reload patch F, but i've got a very fun game running. The save is a huge map so i don't think i can upload it. Plus the crashes are not reproducable as i've said as they change each time.

 

[Seven05]

And what'll get these guys to pull their hair out is that prior to patch G I couldn't make it more than 50-60 turns without crashing, on G I can play 400 turns without a single crash. The only FfH/FF specific game option I use is flavor starts and I disable all of the lightning and quick victory conditions. I also have my FF ini file setupt to force reading options from the XML so I don't get any wierd effects from options carrying over as I switch mods to test my map script.

I am running on 64-bit Vista with 8GB RAM so I'm probably all but immune to the MAFs that others are getting. But, I don't see any other CTDs at all right now, a few python exceptions now and then but nothing game breaking (yet).

 

[Master176281]

I am running on 64-bit Vista with 8GB RAM so I'm probably all but immune to the MAFs that others are getting. But, I don't see any other CTDs at all right now, a few python exceptions now and then but nothing game breaking (yet).

For me it is completely different. On my Desktop Vista 64 with 6 GB RAM I get CTD every 20-30 turns. On my Laptop WinXP 32 I started a game yesterday and no CTD until now (turn 135).

 

[Bitwise]

I get a lot of CTDs that don't reproduce, generally they get more frequent as the game progresses especially on large maps. Not sure if they're MAFs, I'm running on XP with 4GB RAM, but I set autosave to every turn so it's not too big a deal.

 

[Gedwyn]

Getting a few ctd's in my current game (050, patch G) that just seem so...completely random. Nothing to do with saving, autosaving, mafs (i don't think at least) or opening up worldbuilder.

Once I crashed when I told a stack of 3 workers to build a farm. Clicked on the farm icon, crashed.

I crashed when a barb Lich pillaged a Mine (screw you death @$@$@#$$55)

Had another crash when I destroyed a barb city.

And a 4th one that I can't remember what the cause was...

Funny thing is though that a quick reload and none of these happen again. No way to replicate them unfortunately. I'm kind of sad about that as I'd love to help nail down some of the bugs, but at the same time, I am happy to continue the game

 

[Willgar]

I have also been experiancing seemingly random CTD's since 0.50g. I though maybe it was instability in my system so played a full FFH game (latest patch) and managed an entire game with zero crashes (i won around turn 360)

The most maddening part is the CTD are of a type i had not experainced before. CTD's at turn end have always been a bit of an issue but reload from save normally fixes things. These CTD's trigger at simple things like selecting a unit or city, activating a spell, moving a unit etc - all things that i had never experianced CTD's before.

Would it be worth re-installing FFH up to the current patch and then installing FF 0.50 as it copies the base FFH install before then patching?

 

[Gedwyn]

Well I have a pretty fresh install of FF...I reformatted less than a week ago. Fresh dload via steam and FF patch G install, and am still getting the random ctd's.

Could just be me though. Fresh install never hurts I guess, maybe it will solve the issues for you.

 

[WarKirby]

I'll have to check into the setup for spells declaring war to see if I can easily make the Barbarians ignore those actions. It is intended to be impossible to lose your peace except by our pre-defined methods (which currently is none for Hyborem). But we haven't specifically blocked out using spells to cause war yet.

This would be a neat idea.

Barbarians, whether they be orc, or demons, aren't really an organised race. They don't have a central government structure, code of laws, or any such thing. So attacking them shouldn't cause you to declare war on the barbarian nations. Since the 3 barb nations should essentially exist only for game mechanic purposes, not as actual nations with defined states of war or peace.

Would it be possible to make individual barbarian units become hostile when attacked, without that whole barbarian faction declaring war? If you hit some orcs with a fireball, it's understandeable they'd be annoyed, but the orcs on the other side of a mountain range shouldn't know or care about it.

 

[xienwolf]

It would be possible, but potentially quite difficult to handle properly. You could limit it to only make them hostile if hit with spell damage from a civ who was at peace with them to begin with, but then the barbarian unit might wander away to another civ who thinks they are at peace with the barbarians, hasn't used any damaging spells at all, and is suddenly being attacked by a stack of orcs because they had been wind-blasted a few hundred turns ago on the other side of the continent...

 

[zup]

But could you make the different barbarian factions hostile to each other?

 

[Thunder_Gr]

One factor that may help, could be the frequency of the CtDs. How many turns after you start/reload a game? Do they come more frequently as the game progresses?

 

[Song Rui]

ive been crashing every few turns after about the 100turn stage with a decent rig. 9600GT 2gb ram e6750.

my father who plays with a junkheap (integrated graphics etc) hasn't had any crashes over the course of two games both which have gone over 200 turns.

 

[Willgar]

Been having frequent CTD recently but the last two games (300+ turns) have been crash free. It may be a coincidence but i did a fresh install and then manually went into the option file at set long string for game options to all 0000's.

I then set all the new game options around victory conditions all to standard and turned off flavour start, broader alignment, etc all off to try and get it to a pretty "standard" game. I have also not reloaded any save games and through this combination - i have had no CTD's at all (except when i tried to exit a game that i had clearly won at 300+ turns)

Playing my forth game now, using same principle and 150 turns in - no crashes....

 

[Locust-71]

I want my FF to autosave every single turn. How do I do?

 

[xienwolf]

Change AutoSave interval in your ini.

 

[Locust-71]

Thank you, xienwolf. I couldn't figure out where to change that...

 

[Niveras]

Sorry for letting this go so long without a reply to your questions, Xienwolf, I just kind of forgot about it.

Are saves not loading even if you restart the game from desktop? Currently we have a known issue with starting a second run at a game without completely restarting the Civ program.

No, they are loading as you say (with a complete restart of Civ4), it is just that game would crash again within a turn or two, or even just moving a unit in the same turn. I assume this is just going to be something that will take a lot of trial, error and feedback to correct.

On a hunch I started a new FF game as (eventually Order) Calabim, Tectonics map (versus Erebus that I normally play), no Orcs, no Demons, no hell terrain, and no Hyborem/Basium. My thought is that the constant crashing had something to do with barb spawning, possibly unit spawning in general, and I believe I don't recall any crashes with this 300 turn quick game - certainly not as many as I did in my original post. I may have seen one or two on a new turn (great people?), and perhaps once it crashed (with a 'pure virtual function call' message from Windows) while panning mid-turn. With my next few games I am going to be turning on Orcs, Hyborem/Basium, Hell Terrain, Demons in that order until I start to see the same frequency of crashing as I did originally. A curiosity: I can even reload my games without having to restart Civ4. My current hypothesis is that it has something to do with unit spawning, but I'm by no means a rigorous tester and that is just a guess. Given my ability to reload the game without a restart, the problem may be with Erebus maps themselves (units attempting to spawn in mountains?).

Anyway, back to the demons, spawnrate is linked to difficulty and current AC. You want fewer spawns, reduce the AC. And they spawn in any hell terrain (and only in hell terrain), no matter whose terrain it is, but it is especially fitting to spawn in Hyborem's terrain, why would you NOT want them to?

I'll have to check into the setup for spells declaring war to see if I can easily make the Barbarians ignore those actions. It is intended to be impossible to lose your peace except by our pre-defined methods (which currently is none for Hyborem). But we haven't specifically blocked out using spells to cause war yet.

As I mentioned earlier my belief was that unit spawning (particularly barb/demon spawning) may be the reason for the crashing (crashes certainly seemed a lot more common after I switched to Hyborem and the AC started ramping up), so reducing their frequency would reduce the frequency of the crashing. Obviously this is not a final solution and it would be better to solve the reason for the crashes than simply reduce their frequency because of a wild guess I have.

The other reason was, as I mentioned, they get in the way when I am doing my early expanding with Hyborum, because Ring of Flames is an automatic declaration of war. Hopefully, as you mentioned, you can fix that in a subsequent patch.

 

[xienwolf]

Aye, war against Barbarians is solved. And thanks for devoting yourself to trying out various options and paying attention to how it affects crash-rates. Such testing is priceless for us (we had one crash which prevented release of 040 for almost a month which would have been spotted instantly in a non-AutoPlay game because it happened as soon as you attempted to build a certain building which simply didn't have a button assigned yet. It would be nice if all crashes were solved so easily at some point )