(Very) Possible solution to lock ups.

[DGoose]

Every time I tried to play Civ4 It would lock up every 5-10 minutes, and force me to cold boot my computer. After two days of this, I gave up. I figured Civ4 just wouldn't work on my setup, even though I had all the reccommended harware or better. The need for battle still in my veins, I borrowed Rome:Total War from my neighbor. Long story short, the same problem occured. The game locked up everything about 10 minutes into it. Beyond frustration. So I went to their tech support forums to see what was up.

Before I say anything else, I am not saying that this will fix every freeze, CTD, or whatever. I'm saying that it helped me and my problem and it could very possibly be extended to similar problems.

I found this thread here. And it saved my sanity. I have currently enjoyed 6, that's six, hours of Civilization 4 without one single lockup.

Here's what you do.

1) Start --> Control Panel --> Display.

2) Click on the settings tab.

3) Click on the Advanced button.

4)Click on the Troubleshoot tab.

5) The settings here should be for Hardware Acceleration. Pull the slider one notch to the left, and uncheck "enable write combining"

Make sure you click OK. If that doesn't work, try pulling that slider one more step to the left. If you go too far, you'll disable Direct3D, get an error message and the game won't run at all. Also, the in-game cursor may or may not blink chaotically. Running in Windowed mode might help the cursor 'problem'.

My hardware:

Windows XP Professional SP2
AMD Athlon 64 Processor 3200+, MMX, 3DNow, ~2.2GHz
512 RAM
NVIDIA Geforce 6600 GT, 128 MB (I think I'm currently running 'oldish' drivers here, but I'm gonna try reinstalling the current ones to see what that does.) EDIT: Works just the same with the current drivers

Any further questions, and all I can do is elaborate on other settings I may or may not have enabled.

Hope this helps.

--DGoose

 

[Scalpel]

I have that same exact video card and lockup problem, so I will try that, and report back. Thanks for the suggestion!

Scalpel

 

[Scalpel]

Nope, didn't work for me, still locked up after roughly 25 mins of play. Just long enough to wonder if it had fixed it or not! Well, glad it solved your problem...

Scalpel

 

[MorrisMcD]

Nope, didn't work for me, still locked up after roughly 25 mins of play. Just long enough to wonder if it had fixed it or not! Well, glad it solved your problem...

Scalpel

Isnt that a pain in the butt when you get all excited 30 min or so into a game.. You think.. YES!! Its finally working.. And then ...BLIP!!! and all you can say is F***!!!!

I am gonna give this a shot :crosses fingers:

At least the one good thing about this problem is you get to play SOME.. Testing is at least fun and actually a couple times after a reboot or lockup, I get the chance to alter what I did for one turn and can do things differently if something didnt work out

 

[MorrisMcD]

Well.. Damn.. It didnt work :*(

Thanks anyway

 

[DGoose]

Hmm... Have a look at these and see if there's anything different in mine that could cause a difference.

 

[dosage0]

try setting autosave length of time to 0 and manually save every now and then. Its more of a pain in the butt... and it doesnt completely stop the freezings for me, but it extends the time I can play by at least double.

 

[DGoose]

dosage0, The game runs pretty much perfectly for me. The only problem I have is the cursor blinks when I run in full screen. The only reason I attached my DxDiag and Civ.ini files was to see if I had anything left over from another fix. It very well may need a combination of fixes to run. I figure i'll make a backup of everything I've got right now, do a clean reinstall, and see if it still works. I'll prolly get back to y'all about that later tonight. This game is just too much fun to just let people suffer through lockups every ten minutes.

--DGoose

 

[EricTred]

dosage0, The game runs pretty much perfectly for me. The only problem I have is the cursor blinks when I run in full screen. The only reason I attached my DxDiag and Civ.ini files was to see if I had anything left over from another fix. It very well may need a combination of fixes to run. I figure i'll make a backup of everything I've got right now, do a clean reinstall, and see if it still works. I'll prolly get back to y'all about that later tonight. This game is just too much fun to just let people suffer through lockups every ten minutes.

--DGoose

Thats because you unchecked "write combining" which it says its for mouse.

Same thing happened to me in full screen mode , couldn't stand the blinking mouse cursor, drove me crazy. BTW I'm still having problems, have a similar v-card to.

What puzzels me is that sometimes I can play the game for like 6 hours straight no problems and then other times it just repeatedly get hardlocks or CTDs.

I'm really at my end with this game for I have tried just about everything I could to get this to run consistently. It's sad I have to shelf this awesome game "when it runs right".

I'm also kinda jerked off that peeps call us the 10 % minority of players having problems like this, like we don't count or something.
Personally by the amount of hits these posts are getting I would tend to believe its alot more than 10% and still its been awhile for me anyway were there has been no real official responce as to when they will fix the problem.
I have basically given up on them fixing this game for us players I personally believe they have like "moved on to other projects". But I still pop in every once in a while hopeing for some new news on fixes for this game.
Bottom line is, I still payed as much money as the players who's game runs great for them and crappy for me, and I have a pretty decent rig way above max spec ( P4 3.0 gig...2 gig ram....nv6800gt 256 vcard all up dated drivers).

Well later guys GL getting this game to run right , hope you all do , later.

 

[DGoose]

Well guys, turns out that I still have problems. I have 3 saves going that don't cause any problems at all (1 SP, 2 MP - one hotseat, one over a LAN), but every new game I've tried starting has frozen on me. I'm going to look into it some more before I do another clean install. Hopefully I can find at least one group of game settings that will work.

--DGoose

 

[DGoose]

Okay, I lied. It works. I had forgotten that I had re checked "enable write combining" when I didn't need to.

 

[MorrisMcD]

Thats because you unchecked "write combining" which it says its for mouse.

Same thing happened to me in full screen mode , couldn't stand the blinking mouse cursor, drove me crazy. BTW I'm still having problems, have a similar v-card to.

What puzzels me is that sometimes I can play the game for like 6 hours straight no problems and then other times it just repeatedly get hardlocks or CTDs.

I'm really at my end with this game for I have tried just about everything I could to get this to run consistently. It's sad I have to shelf this awesome game "when it runs right".

I'm also kinda jerked off that peeps call us the 10 % minority of players having problems like this, like we don't count or something.
Personally by the amount of hits these posts are getting I would tend to believe its alot more than 10% and still its been awhile for me anyway were there has been no real official responce as to when they will fix the problem.
I have basically given up on them fixing this game for us players I personally believe they have like "moved on to other projects". But I still pop in every once in a while hopeing for some new news on fixes for this game.
Bottom line is, I still payed as much money as the players who's game runs great for them and crappy for me, and I have a pretty decent rig way above max spec ( P4 3.0 gig...2 gig ram....nv6800gt 256 vcard all up dated drivers).

Well later guys GL getting this game to run right , hope you all do , later.

+1 Well said... I love this game dearly as I have for years since I picked up the original, but this is just not worth it.. Totally frustrating that this game is such a pain in the ass to get working right