Unpredictable bluescreen/reboot when loading saved games

[lesnessman]

This one's a particularly nasty and difficult problem. Some of my saved games will crash Civ4 upon reloading; as soon as the game allows you to select a unit, the system crashes and reboots (though I expect this is Windows rebooting after a BSOD, as it saves a memory dump file as expected after a BSOD). Any tasks beforehand—selecting new city production orders, for example—go on as usual; the map even moves to the next selected unit, but crashes before you can do anything.

The especially strange thing is this only happens with some of my saved games, not all of them. I haven't been able to figure out what the bad saved games have in common, nor the reason why some saved games load fine. Curious to find out if anyone else has experienced this behavior; I haven't seen anyone else report this problem as yet.

 

[mazra]

Curious to find out if anyone else has experienced this behavior; I haven't seen anyone else report this problem as yet.

Hi lesnessman,

I am getting this problem too! The system crashes have become so severe that I fear damage to my computer. I have just uninstalled CIV IV. My computer has beyond the recommended requirements, updated drivers, etc.. It doesn't seem to matter. There is clearly a problem with the program. When it is working, it is the best Civ ever. But the crashes are becoming intolerable.

I guess I will go watch WKRP in Cincinatti where there is more news and...

Have a Blessed Day,

Mazra

 

[Neubauer21]

The blue screen and restart is usually a dll error like graphics drivers you can turn off the restart at blue screen so u can read the message to find out shich dll file it is and hopefully correct it, I used to get this error in FF7 every time i fought a certain monster if you installed new drivers uninstall your graphics drivers and install new ones don't just install over the top as this can also cause errors.

 

[Koson]

I don't get blue screens (I have yet to see one under Windows XP) but sometimes the game freezes while loading a save and the only cure is a manual reboot. After which the same save loads normally .
This happened just a couple of times, but it's not pleasant at all.

 

[Salarakas]

I have the exact same problem. Load a save, click on a unit and the whole computer reboots. There's no blue screen of death that I can see, it's just an old fashioned reboot. I have turned off the 'automatically restart' option from system properties/startup and recovery but it has no effect.

Running WinXP (installed a week ago) with SP2, all the security patches, DirectX 9.0c installed from the Civ4 setup and Sapphire Radeon 9600xt with Catalyst 5.10 if that makes any difference. My machine is otherwise stable and runs other games perfectly fine.

 

[Salarakas]

I should add that the game has run (apart from some minor bugs) perfectly fine for many days now.

Edit: I tried to attach the save here but for the love of me can't seem to get it to work. It gets uploaded but for some reason won't shop up as an attachment in the post. Tried with Firefox, Opera and IE. Maybe I'm just too dumb.

 

[Otrebor]

100% same problem as Sarakas.

It happens with EVERY saved game sooner or later. I should add it happens only if I shut Civ4 down and then start it up again and load a previously saved game. In other words, if I start a new game and play it non-stop I can save-load, save-load, save-load all day(s) long...

So, I can't load a saved game unless I delete config.ini prior to starting CivIV (or whatever it's called, in My Documents\My Games\CivIV\), but it doesn't help always, sometimes I gotta delete it once again, or twice even, so I'm kinda stumped as to what to do, lol. (btw, the game makes a new config file if you delete the old one, so don't worry about damaging the CivIV installation)

Automatic restart is off, no BSOD, no freeze, just instant reboot. No other problems with the game at all (other than well known slowdown in later game ages on large or huge worlds). This is the first time ever I've seen my PC reboot like this. All other new and old games run just fine, and I have plenty of them.

WinXP SP2, Barton 3200+, 1GB DDR400, Abit NF7-SL (nForce2 MCP-T), DX9.0c (reinstalled it off CivIV just in case), 9800PRO with 5.10 Catalyst (properly installed), all other drivers updated too. And no, I ain't gonna flash bios for just one buggy game, the system is just fine, lol.

It's gonna be a great game when it's ironed out, don't despare Devs, hang in there

P.S. - oh yeah, deleted config and new config that the game makes afterwards are completely the same to the last letter in the last line, so....I dunno boys, I just dunno

 

[Salarakas]

Automatic restart is off, no BSOD, no freeze, just instant reboot. No other problems with the game at all (other than well known slowdown in later game ages on large or huge worlds). This is the first time ever I've seen my PC reboot like this. All other new and old games run just fine, and I have plenty of them.

I've played dozens if not hundreds of games since the early 90s and I too haven't experienced anything like this since the good old DOS days... what's that, 12 years ago or something? There's no hardware problems as I can pass system stability tests like memtest86 and the torture test of Prime95 just to name a few.

I haven't dared to touch the game much in the last couple of days as reboots like that are extremely annoying. I deleted my old savegames and started a new game yesterday from scratch. I played to something like 1000AD, I really hope I can actually continue this game today when I get home. If this one fails to load too then I suppose we'll just have to play a complete game from the beginning to the end on one sitting

 

[Clown2TheLeft]

This is pretty much the problem I'm having.


Does anyone have a release date on Civ IV?

I just want to know when they're going to release it for real, because it appears I have pre-ordered a beta version...


Later!

--The Clown to the Left

 

[Otrebor]

ATI Radeon 9xxx owners, try uninstalling 5.10 (control panel first, then driver) and install 4.12 graphic drivers. It seems they've solved my problems with saved games and even the game lag (more testing needed, I haven't been home much these days, but my PC runs silky smooth in 20th century and I can load a saved game anytime, without rebooting when I click on a unit or when I try to enter the city screen). I've read about it in some other post (can't remember where, sorry) and it actually helped quite a few people. As for newer X-whatever ATI owners or nVidia people, well, best of luck guys...

 

[Salarakas]

I managed to reload the game last night and played some 20 more turns. No luck today... reboots again

I took a closer look at how it happens this time.
1. Load a save game
2. You can do everything EXCEPT click on a unit (or a city? Not sure as I don't have any cities without units). You can play with the advisors, the map, press enter to end the turn but the computer reboots as soon as you either select one of your units yourself or the computer does it for you.
3. It takes about half a second after a unit is selected before anything happens. Then, for maybe about 0.2 seconds the screen turns blue. It's for a very short period of time, that's probably why I didn't notice it before. The screen is just blue, there's no text on it whatsoever. Again, I have disabled the 'automatically restart' option from 'system properties/startup and recovery'. There's nothing on the Windows event log.
4. Then it's time for the fun, run chkdsk on every disk, reboot the computer manually so that Windows can fix the errors on your Windows disk.
5. Pray nothing has broken.

CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 3)...
Deleting index entry wmiprov.log in index $I30 of file 144.
Index verification completed.

Errors found. CHKDSK cannot continue in read-only mode.

I'm getting seriously pissed off now.

 

[Otrebor]

I can now confirm with absolute certainty that installing 4.12 stopped my reboots AND there's no more lag, even on huge worlds (except for memory leak which I can fix by reentering the game every couple of hours) AND I can even load and play scenarios (which I couldn't do before).

Oh, the only thing that I've done besides installing 4.12 is upping my virtual memory to 3 GB. It didn't make any difference before 4.12, so I can't say how relevent that info is...but that's all that I've changed in my system.

Salarakas, stop trying before you damage your Win installation, lol, wait for the patch bro. You have my simpathies..

 

[LeGrandCharle]

How do i get the 4.12 driver that you are talking about (otrebor)? I am having the same problem. It has just started recently. very very annoying...

Please tell me where do go. thanks.

 

[Otrebor]

This is the topic I've been talking about, there's a link to 4.12 in the first thread:


http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=137255

Ok, the link to 4.12 is http://www.fileshack.com/file.x?fid=5984