wrong memory references cause CTD on 1.61

[Earthnail]

First of all: I have patched Civilization to 1.61 and tried several graphics drivers as stated in the forums, that doesn't help. I also installed the XML service pack, but that doesn't help either (that one probably is not connected to my bug at all). I found some other hints, like extracting a certain folder, but they seem to be related to older versions only.
Second, I'm German, therefore running a German Windows XP and getting German error messages. I'll try my best to translate them, but please don't take them literally.

Now to my problem:
Civilization crashes to desktop after some time of playing. The time it crashes seems more or less random to me. Afaics, it is not connected to a special event e.g. entering a new round or whatever. It just randomly crashes, telling me that a certain adress in my memory "...could not be read".Now, to me this seems as if my RAM was corrupt, but other games run absolutely fine, so why not Civ4?



I'll try to translate it (I did some Google searches and I think this is correct):

The instruction 0x26fb0b707 referenced memory at 0x00000000 . The memory could not be "read".

Click "OK" to terminate the program.
Click "Abort" to debug the program.

When looking at the screenshot you can see that the game crashed during a fight scene. It therefore is not connected to saving or whatever. And I also already had game crashes while not doing anything, because I was chatting with my sister (in real life, not IM ).

Also you can see that it tries to point to 0x00000000. This indicates that it is not my RAM that causes the problem, but a bug in the game.


Actually, I guess I'm not the only person having that problem, but I couldn't find a solution yet, neither via the forum search nor via Google. I hope someone can help me .

 

[crunch]

What is your system? Are crashes more frequent when playing bigger maps, later era?

 

[Earthnail]

I have a

AMD Athlon XP 2000+
NVidia GeForce 4 Ti 4200 AGP 8x with Forceware 71.89
512Mb RAM
ECS Elitegroup K7VTA3 (Mainboard)
Windows XP SP2, patched up2date (German version)

Hmm what else should I state?

Crashes seem to be more frequent in later era, yes. I don't know about bigger maps, I'm an absolute newbie to Civilization and at the moment I'm really struggling around with only getting four rounds further to 175 BC. But I would guess so.

 

[Zanmato]

I would check the RAM anyway using MemTest86 then double your RAM. Check for any kind of malware, spyware and viruses. I got these messages when the game first came out and found it was a problem with the pagefile. The CPU was too busy to read the disk whilst processing the game so it gave me those errors. I unpacked all the assets in the 'out-of-box' game then doubled the RAM to 1Gb and the messages stopped. Defragging you HD might help alittle too aswell as freeing up as much memory as possible.

 

[Earthnail]

Ok, I did all that. Took me some time though.
I checked with memtest86, I let it run overnight, and it found no errors. Which makes me feel quite good - actually I didn't like the thought of a bug in my RAM.
I checked for viruses and malware and all that stuff, nothing.
I quit ALL programs now, including services like my virtual cd device and a traffic shaping program, and it now ran stable for about 3 hours. At some time, the music stopped playing, and the whole sound hang, but that didn't hurt too much - though after some time of playing with no sound (there was a short sequence of ~3seconds which was repeated all the time over, so I switched off my speakers), I decided to restart the game.
It ran stable for another half an hour (I'm in ~1800 A.D. now!!), but then it crashed again. Nuts.

It definitely seems to be a problem with background tasks - though the problem itself is definitely located in Civ4 itself. I'll go and defrag my HDD now and see if that helps. It's not a solution, but at least a work around.

But does anyone here know a _REAL_ solution?

 

[crunch]

Sounds like you have the usual crashes when Civ4 is simply too much for your computer. Therefore:
- Get more RAM.
- Play smaller maps.
- Turn off all possible features (videos, animations, sounds, ...)
- Turn graphics to low, decrease your screen resolution.
- Quit all programs except of civ (which you did)

 

[Earthnail]

Well, if this is true, then I must say that I am very disappointed by Civilization IV. Other games just manage to run, though a bit slow, but they run and don't crash when the system is a bit too slow. And I'm not going to buy more RAM for a game that is unable to use my swap.

On the other side, I just tried to run Civ4 in cedega on Linux, and it ran quite fine. It also crashed after some hours, but at least it ran. Fascinating to see though that it hadn't even exceeded my RAM limit to that time, and that my swap was completely empty. It ran slower, of course, because cedega needs to translate all the DirectX to linux native opengl calls, but it worked pretty fine on 800x600 and high graphics.

This actually made me wonder why it then crashes on Windows? It obviously doesn't exceed my RAM size, but still, it crashes. Maybe there is a way I can send a log to the developers to make them fix that bug in the next patch?

 

[crunch]

Well, if you feel the need, you can always at least post the details in the bug reports sections of civfanatics forums (under general discussion I think)