Working MAF fix for WinXP 32bit!!

[TAfirehawk]

Well this may help with one of the MAF's....but there are a number of them and one is when free physical RAM gets too low....1GB RAM will still get caught by this one.

Bottom line is try what you like, but BTS will fix at least some if not all of the MAF's.

 

[Lerinor]

I'll try it anyway. In Brazil games take aeons to arrive, and BTS will not be different. So i'll have rely on warlords for a long time.

Just a question: The MAF you mentioned about getting low on phisical memory... Would it happen on smaller maps? Like small, or even tiny?

 

[Roland Johansen]

I'll try it anyway. In Brazil games take aeons to arrive, and BTS will not be different. So i'll have rely on warlords for a long time.

Just a question: The MAF you mentioned about getting low on phisical memory... Would it happen on smaller maps? Like small, or even tiny?

I have not heard about any MAF's on such small maps. But I must say that I might have missed that, I have not been following all of the details of the problem. Do you have MAF's on such small maps?

 

[Bastian-Bux]

The "chokepoint" is somewhere between 1 and 2 MB save game size. So anything that increases the size of your save games, is increasing the chance of a MAF. Large map are the most important contributors, as is being late in the game -> many units, cities, buildings. And of course, playing mods with more contents means bigger save games also. But its not a mod problem only, mind you.

Any "epic" game (large map, many civs) will have a "dangerous" size. Depending on your precise system specs the MAFs can start firing when the save reaches 1 MB, or you might survive till 2 MB. Anything beyond 2 MB is, well russian roulette.

 

[thapagan]

So does this fix work for windows vista, has any tried that?

 

[MusX]

read carefully the first post, there is a link to fix for vista

 

[taketounwanted]

I'm the chief of getting MAF!
Windows Vista Ultimate running on a 4gigs dual core system..

I autorun ViSa modpack, BtS(in europe it's already in the shops, at least in NL) dunno if that's official, got it from a friend who works in a shop so i don't really care

anyway, i can confirm, both for Warlords as for BtS as for Vista as for XP, tested a big savegame on 3computers and different settings..works!

This does fix the bug(if you fix it properly)!

if you dont know how to fix it, i assume, earn money, and buy a 64bit system!

I tested a huge map, running over 2300turns, 18civs, no MAF!
but memory load is up to 1.8gigs(stabalized there since a few hundret turns) so i guess each map size has its MAX NEEDED MEMORY!
if you play Mods, they easily can take up to 500MB additionally!
if you use Smartmap, and generate anything bigger then large, you need more RAM as well, since default firaxis BtS on a huge map uses around 1.8Gigs
it means there won't be unlimted space left for modding and maps!

On my machine, for whatever reason, i also must substract my 512MB vidoe memory allocation from the Application RAM, meaning, i have only 2.5Gigs left for civ!
meaning, i have only 700MB left for mods and additional map size!
meaning, if you wanna play large Mods, like AMRA, VISA, TR...you might just hit the TOP there if you play 1000's of turns! (epic games)

if you also use smartmap to play anything larger then huge...you'll definatly go over 2.5gigs! and you're going to need a 64bit system i guess...

that's so much i've figured out by now using this fix..actually it's not a fix, windows just doesn't know how to handle more then 2gigs by default, or 3gigs if apply the "fix"...if you really need a fix, buy a 64bit system and install win 64bit. that's the real fix i guess.

 

[Dark Helmet]

Well, I just tried the MAF fix with only 1GB of physical memory. My computer did not approve of this action. My computer booted up as normal, and Civ4 played pretty nicely for about 5 turns - then my computer promptly shutdown. So I guess I will be waiting for BTS. Of course the pessimist in me is laughing at this naive hope, knowing that while BTS might fix the MAF bug, it will bring to the table a whole slew of other problems to make me want to pull my hair out in clumps.

AMD 3500+ 2.2GHz
Windows XP Professional, Service Pack 2
Physical Memory - 1024MB (1GB)
Virtual Memory - 3072MB (3GB)

Boot.ini

Spoiler :

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional with /3GB" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect /3GB

And last, but certainly not least -

Civ4 set to [App can handle >2gb addressest] in CFF explorer.

Did I miss anything? Is there a scaled-down version of this fix that could at least help alleviate this problem? Or this a feast or famine kinda deal between those with 2gigs of ram and those with only 1gig?

 

[taketounwanted]

You seem to misunderstand, Civ simply needs the memory! if you have only 1GB, you simply don't have it...swapping the other 2GB into the pagefile is out of the question! Unless you want to wait 2weeks/turn!
If I'm correct, modern HDD's can get up to 10MB/s(ok, they tell you 160MB/s on SATA II, but everyone knows that's a lie! LOL)
10MB/s is realistic, might get more though up to 30 or 40, if you never ever installed anything or any other service after you installed windows..
modern RAM get's a few tousand GB per second..really..if you wanna start using the pagefile, say your prairs!

 

[Dark Helmet]

Just to make sure there is no misunderstanding - BTS was supposed to do away with MAF, right? Like, the reason it was popping up in the first place was supposed to be changed so it could never happen again...right?

*removes doctor's gloves.

Sir...Ma'am. You best sit down, I am afraid I have some bad news.

Spoiler :

I just want to make sure I wasn't confused and missed out on some detail. I was correct in assuming this right? Or was this BTS fix only for people with 2g of physical memory? If so, I will be upgrading tomorrow.

And please, don't be hostile at me. Please? I really am curious if I misunderstood. I know fanboyism runs strong in the first week of launch - and some people attack frothing at the mouth if something doesn't meet their expectations.

 

[tariqari]

Just to make sure there is no misunderstanding - BTS was supposed to do away with MAF, right? Like, the reason it was popping up in the first place was supposed to be changed so it could never happen again...right?

*removes doctor's gloves.

Sir...Ma'am. You best sit down, I am afraid I have some bad news.

Spoiler :

I just want to make sure I wasn't confused and missed out on some detail. I was correct in assuming this right? Or was this BTS fix only for people with 2g of physical memory? If so, I will be upgrading tomorrow.

And please, don't be hostile at me. Please? I really am curious if I misunderstood. I know fanboyism runs strong in the first week of launch - and some people attack frothing at the mouth if something doesn't meet their expectations.

Wow I was having that problem in Vanilla but since I've had BtS it's been great. If you can upgrade your RAM I would, it should lighten up the issue I think.

 

[Dark Helmet]

Ya, I *love* huge maps. LOVE. The standard huge map that Civ4 provides is 'so-so' at best as far as I am concerned. So I am using the "Land Masses" map script to make me some gargantuan sized maps. I know the dev team says they wont help with modding problems, but I was lead to believe that this problem was supposed to be non-existant after BTS came out. That some fundamental aspect of the game was the source of the problem, and that it was being changed so it could never rear its ugly head again.

Ya, right now I am using 1g of memory. It served me well, but it goes to show that in the tech world nothing is cutting-edge for long. (If only America could be convinced about that regarding dial-up!)

 

[Gyathaar]

There is one remaining cause of MAF in BtS...

This only happens in 32bit windows, and is due to the limitations 32bit windows has.. it only allows 2GB memory for a single program (actually 2GB minus amount of ram on your graphics card I believe if you use PCI-E )...
as described earlier in this thread, it is possible to raise this limit by up to 1GB extra.

If your physical RAM plus available swap space is less then this, then you will hit the limit earlier.

Civ4 uses a lot of memory on big maps... the only way to get around this problem is to buy more RAM (and increase the memory limit per application to 3GB) .. and for really big maps you need a 64bit windows version

 

[biggamer132]

Alright, I tried this solution for my game but I've run into another problem: After a couple of turns, the game freezes and the map suddenly goes blank, displaying nothing but the bare terrain (and for some reason, farms). Whenever this happens, I'm forced to restart the computer.

Help?

 

[Roland Johansen]

Alright, I tried this solution for my game but I've run into another problem: After a couple of turns, the game freezes and the map suddenly goes blank, displaying nothing but the bare terrain (and for some reason, farms). Whenever this happens, I'm forced to restart the computer.

Help?

Your video card drivers might not get the memory needed to perform adequately because the /3GB switch gives all the memory to programs and not to the (Windows) startup programs like video card drivers. You might want to experiment a little with the userva switch. It is briefly mentioned in the first post after I posted a bit about it in post 10 of this thread. My guess is that you haven't tried it yet. If you have already tried it at various settings, then I don't know.

Good luck.

 

[biggamer132]

Your video card drivers might not get the memory needed to perform adequately because the /3GB switch gives all the memory to programs and not to the (Windows) startup programs like video card drivers. You might want to experiment a little with the userva switch. It is briefly mentioned in the first post after I posted a bit about it in post 10 of this thread. My guess is that you haven't tried it yet. If you have already tried it at various settings, then I don't know.

Good luck.

In fact, I hadn't seen it. I've fixed the boot and am off to try it now.

EDIT: Alright, I've tried, and the game is at least working better, so I've lowered the value to around 2000 to see if it will run smoothly. With the saving problem solved, I just got a runtime error too, so I think I have to turn down my graphics settings.

EDIT2: Ok, now my game won't start. Whenever I load the save, it gets to "finishing" before blacking out and giving me an error report.

 

[Roland Johansen]

In fact, I hadn't seen it. I've fixed the boot and am off to try it now.

EDIT: Alright, I've tried, and the game is at least working better, so I've lowered the value to around 2000 to see if it will run smoothly. With the saving problem solved, I just got a runtime error too, so I think I have to turn down my graphics settings.

EDIT2: Ok, now my game won't start. Whenever I load the save, it gets to "finishing" before blacking out and giving me an error report.

That's a lot of different errors. I don't know enough about computers to help you. Hopefully someone else can. Based on your video problems, I thought it might have to do with the video card drivers not loading well, but apparently the problem is more elusive.

Note that if you lower the value to 2000, then you're back in the starting position before editing the boot.ini file, but I guess you knew that and just wanted to check how the video performed in that situation.

 

[HazeClarity]

Hey, I'm playing a rediculasly huge map with 32 civs (mod). I'm on a new kick-ass PC, but are still experiencing memory issues such as units and improvements being invisible as I'm approaching modern ages.

Would this same technique also fix this problem?

(PS: I used this to fix MAF in Warlords so thanks for that!)

 

[MusX]

Don't know for sure but I don't think so

 

[Enverex]

This is annoying. I'm getting MAFs when my savegames aren't even large. Each of my save games seem to be 2k larger than the last which means the one it crashed when saving last would have been 346KB. I have 2GB of RAM so any idea why that would happen?