Ugh! My first C3C Crash!

[Metropolis Man]

Some games have never crashed on me at all. I guess I was hopeful with this new one. What sucks the big one is I had turned off Auto-Save in hopes it would speed up the turn times. So I basically lost almost 6 hours of gameplay.

Does anyone know if Auto-Save turned on slows down the computer? I was hoping C3C would be faster than MacSoft's GOTY edition, but their both very slow in turn time on huge maps. I'm on a G5 iMac with 2 GB Ram, so I can't believe it's my computer.

Brad, if you're reading this — where do I send a crash message to Aspyr? When the game crashed I got the option to send the info to Apple, but that obviously doesn't do you any good.

 

[dojoboy]

Does anyone know if Auto-Save turned on slows down the computer?

I always play w/ auto-save, ever since "they" stopped compressing the autosave files. That did slow the between-turn phase.

 

[Metropolis Man]

So, you're saying the way the auto-save works now compared to MacSoft's game....there's no reason not to use it?

Is there anything else I should check or uncheck in preferences to help speed up turn time?

 

[Brad Oliver]

Does anyone know if Auto-Save turned on slows down the computer? I was hoping C3C would be faster than MacSoft's GOTY edition, but their both very slow in turn time on huge maps. I'm on a G5 iMac with 2 GB Ram, so I can't believe it's my computer.

Believe it. Civ3 is and always will be slow on large maps during the endgame. This is not a Mac-specific phenomenon, except for the part where PC users generally have much faster computers than Mac users.

Brad, if you're reading this — where do I send a crash message to Aspyr? When the game crashed I got the option to send the info to Apple, but that obviously doesn't do you any good.

You can e-mail crash logs to brad@aspyr.com. You can also send them to Apple. They aggregate them based on application and will send them to us if they get a large number of similar crashes.

 

[AlanH]

If you send the crash message to Apple as offered in the Crash Reporter, it will get to Aspyr.

Autosaves were not cmpressed in versions 1.21g and 1.29b2 either, so slow interturns were not down to autosave in those versions. Huge maps are going to be slow on any system you can buy today - Win or Mac. The main delay is believed to be the time taken to update the trade route information, which seems to be a very tricky algorithm and may not be very well optimised in the Firaxis code. Brad doesn't change things like that when he ports the code.

[Cross posted with Brad - take his word for it, not mine]

 

[Metropolis Man]

Could video resolution also be a problem? 1680 X 1050 is the native resolution of my 20" iMac. What resolution should I choose for the game? I've got the 128MB Radeon 9600 video card and 2 GB Ram.

 

[ejday]

I've had a dozen crashes but most of those came from pushing the C3C envelope. They have a built-in version of the DYP but it barely has any graphics. I downloaded the graphics package from the suggested site, but there had to be twenty missing entries from the civpedia (which, of course, crash the game).

So far, using R&R (Rise and Rule, a DYP for the Conquests engine), I've only run into one problem: a missing .INI for a worker type unit. That was easily rectified by duping and renaming another worker unit in the art files.

So far, I can't complain...

 

[Metropolis Man]

Can anyone throw some light on my above post? What resolution should I be playing the game at?

 

[dojoboy]

Can anyone throw some light on my above post? What resolution should I be playing the game at?

It's your choice. I don't believe one supported resolution is any "better" for performance than another. Personally, I like playing C3C in a window w/ 1024x768.

 

[Metropolis Man]

It's your choice. I don't believe one supported resolution is any "better" for performance than another. Personally, I like playing C3C in a window w/ 1024x768.

Thanks. I'll stick to the higher rez then. 1024 X 768 (at least at full screen) looks very fuzzy.

 

[AlanH]

Sorry, my reply got lost somewhere between my fingers and the send button

With that many pixels I'd play at 1280 x 1024 in a window. I'm a window-mode junky, and I like that resolution for map visibility. I doubt if the resolution you play at will have much effect on performance, certainly not during the inter-turn where most stuff is behind the scenes and doesn't play on-screen.

I would never try to run a tft screen at other than its natural res.