Fixing Civ4 Problems: START HERE!

[lolmeup]

I have read that you can delete the cache folder by holding down and starting CIV 4. I'm not sure how long you're supposed to hold down for, but it shouldn't hurt to keep your finger on it until the game loads.

[nerfherder]

I have many of the issues reported here, specifically massive slowdowns (although I experience them around 0AD). It really seems that the slowdowns occur when the AI gets too busy - if I keep my exploration to a minimum I notice my speed stays relatively consistent (until the inevitable CTD). Also, bringing up the right-click menu consistently destroys mouseovers fromt hat point on. However, the CTD is almost always associated in some way with my graphics drivers, leading me to believe that much of the slowdown is merely bad DIrectX implementation.

I have the latest patch (v1.09). I will wait patiently until a patch is released, but I gotta say - I can't blame the developers for this. This reeks of a lack of quality control and there are only one brand of people that make those sorts of decisions - executives. And the comments made about "they've got our money, now why bother"... well those may be a bit unfair, but returning the game to the store you bought it from can really light a fire under the bean counters.

Sid, shame on you for letting this one hit the stands. This is worse than CTP. I love your games, I'm a firaxis addict, but this is really poor form. I expect this sort of buggy behaviour from FPS games and such, but frankly the FPS crowd has been getting better while you guys have obviously gotten worse.

[Leepants]

Originally posted by nerfherder
And the comments made about "they've got our money, now why bother"... well those may be a bit unfair, but returning the game to the store you bought it from can really light a fire under the bean counters.

Unfortunately, unless the disc is damaged or the game unplaybale, I can't return them.....

And I didn't know there were patches out....

[Tas Devil]

This is a disgrace ... what machines do the reviewers of this game play on ? or do they load the game play 2 turns and then write the review with whatever bullshit Sid has fed them ?

The game is plainly unplayable... I have upgraded all drivers... done everything a normal PC user can be expected to do to make a game playable...

I have now lost interest in this game and trust in Firaxis... the patch 1.09 has not improved a damn thing in overall performance...

The game is still hugely sluggish and sometimes crashes for no reason at all or freezes while I can hear my hardrive running like crazy endlessly...

One conclusion ... the game was realeased to hit the Xmas sales deadlines even thought it was hardly optimised and quality checked... and for that I will use what little impact I can have as a customer... I'm returning the game ... and will not buy any more games coming from this developper...

One last thing... the lask of a forum on the official website is a sign they aren't too keen on player reviews on their official pages... its a shame that the only forums are located on fan websites...

[Nikolai]

Yes, the game have had some problems, but they are being worked at, and Firaxis have given us loads of support, plus us users tend to help eachother where they can't find an answer fast enough. ATM my game works as a charm as long as I don't play with too big maps and use 16 bit colours.

[Grimreepr]

I am inclined to think something is leaking.

I took a look at the memory managet before I started playin and it's running are 1bout 168K + change.

On system crash, my memory manager reported using 1.02 GB then promptly dropped off to the normal 168 to 175K range when I killed the process. I believe that 1.02 GB is a little excessive memory useage.

I also monitored CPU useage an when the system went laggy, cpu useage DROPPED to 11% from about 86 +/- 5%. I found that rather strange.

I run a P4C800 Asus Mobo with 1 gig pc 3200 ram and a 3.02 GHz processor + Gforce FX 5600 XT. Video card runs slightly warm to the touch, it is nowhere near overheating.

I noticed the same thing, once you achieve a certain number of units on a HUGE map, the system LAGS bad.

I have tried setting vid opt's to low detail... doing the edits to the config with no luck, after about 10 minutes of gameplay, U get about a 35 second screen freeze then go for 2 to 3 more turns and total lockup and crash. When the system crashes I am booted to a 640 X 480 desktop with 4 colors. and other times the system hangs solid and wont kick the display back when I hit the windows button, byt the mouse WILL change from the game pointer to the notmal windows pointer when I mouse over where the task bar should be.

I checked the log files on a crash and there was literally TONS of error aboutLSystem failing to place objects. There was also a ton of errors about Grocer, Colleseum and obelisk .nif files not containing a "node" called "Shadow" and that if shadow was present it would be corrupt.

Now... I have noticed graphic slowdowns in other games that seriously lagged when something dropped off... for instance, use a cheat to fly outside the world in say Quake 4, and watch you sys performace drop to squat. This being said, a failed render on a shadow could in theory cause a similar system slowdown and in worst case scenarios, cause a program loop that causes a severe lockup then crash. Just tossing out some possibilities based on my limited knowledge of rendering and programming.

[Raion]

Try using 16-bit color depth. It will speed up the game, and perhaps use about 40% less Virtual Memory! I have not been through an entire game to see any Wonder Movies but the Opening Movie looked the same, and the game has been playing faster so far!

[Jackie Chiles]

Originally posted by trancer72
I just wish a fix would come out, I have tried everything on the list and nothing works. It all ends up with a black screen whether it be 10 minutes or 15 minutes of gameplay.

P4 2.0Ghz
1Gb RAM, 1.5 Gb Swap
nVIDIA GeForce Ti 4200

I had a stack of problems with a 4200 card. I increased the virtual memory and installed the v81.95 drivers and it works great now with the patch. I had the v81.94 drivers on it and it crashed all the time, so maybe this is the answer with Nvidia cards. I played for ten hours without a crash last night .

[dorg]

Long time lurker, first time poster!

First, some angst: Whoever authorized this game to be released as is really should be held accountable. The fact that they got the labels mixed up between the "install" and "play" disks pretty much sums up the whole sloppy mess.

I've combed through these forums as well as those on the CivFanatics site but still haven't seen a viable fix for consistent lagging.

I am running a 2.6Ghz processor with 2GB of RAM and an nVidia GEforce 5500 video card. I initially gave up on the game - it was utterly unplayavle - but after installing the 1.09 patch and updating the video card driver the game plays well enough that I've played it through three times so far.

However, to do so I have to go to the task manager and set the process priority to "High" every five turns or so. The game gradually grinds towards a halt and I find the priority set back to "below normal".

Any way to permanently set the priority to high?

[Just_Matt]

IIRC TweakUI would allow that? Perhaps also Process Explorer from SysInternals

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilitie...sExplorer.html

[Zydor]

Its still not generally gone round re the Harkonnen Patch. A group of about a dozen guys led by Harkonnen set to this mess to try and find out what the hell was going on. Boy, did they find out, its a disgrace, however details are a whole new discussion.

The point for the moment is that a very large number of CTDs - slowdowns - memory related problems are resolved by this patch. It really does work, and is putting Firaxis to shame. The thread has had 31,900 hits at the time of posting this, and will without doubt go through 32,000 hits in the next hour - all these hits in 4 Days .... (!)

Its works guys, is benign, touches vertually zero game code and is a serious acknowledged fix for this Carnage. Its not a fix-it-all, thats crazy, but it goes a long long way down that direction. Nip over and have a look

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=146309

Regards
Zy

[Zydor]

There is a Harkonnen thread on Apolyton

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...5&pagenumber=1

(CivFanatics thread just had another 2,000 hits in the last 2 hours)

He's very good at answering problems/questions but is somewhat under pressure due to the huge response so be kind folks

Regards
Zy

[Just_Matt]

I put the batch file one level above the cache directory. There is only one line in the batch file:

rmdir cache /s /q

Here's my shortcut

"C:\Documents and Settings\M@hew\Application Data\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4\CIV 4 Cache Emptying Device.bat"

[VampireBorg]

After finding out what I needed to play the "bik" files with, without opening Civ 4 I downloaded the program "RAD Tools.exe from
http://www.radgametools.com/
and played the "intro.bik" file with it. It worked fine and the movie flowed well with no problems at all. However since the movie in the game was 4 times the size of the original file that the "RAD Tools" program was playing it at I decided to alter the programs settings to give a more realistic test of the program under similar conditions to the Civ 4 game. I opened the "RAD Tools" program and altered a few settings to increase the size of the movie when played, setting it to anything more than the original file size caused the player to stutter the playback. I therefore think that this is the problem that is happening inside the Civ 4 game itself. I've only had the game for 2 days and have therefore not had time to see how well the game does as it increases in size and complexity as im still getting used to it, but I thought this might help someone find a fix to the current "Video Stutter" problem. I am running the game on an AMD 3000+, with 1GB Ram and an ATI Radeon 9250 graphics card (which has 256mb ram) Ive also installed the 1.09 patch (which incidentaly knocked out my onboard SiS 740 chip when I installed it, which is all I have for playing sounds with, so that I had to reinstall it before I could hear anything again. Other than that its a great game and I cant wait to have a complete fix for it.

[VernMcC]

Just wanted to add another voice to someone who was having crippling CTD in the mid/late game with larger maps. I switched to Windowed mode, 1600x1200 still, and can run the same larger maps with full graphics w/o a single crash or even noticible blip.

Video card is a Sapphire Radeon x700 w/256mb, sound card is the SB Audigy2. P4 2.8HT w/1G dual channel.

Game runs perfectly now in windowed mode.

[lolmeup]

Holding down while clicking on CIV 4 icon until game loads clears cache.

[conanav]

Hi Guys. Merry Christmass

I have been having a really strange problem with Civ IV and as far as I have loooked, it has not been adressed.

When I tried to startup the game, the game first showed a message box stating something like this (can't really give you the exact phrase as you will find out in a second): "procedure entry error, can't locate _binkshould@4 in the binkw32.dll library" so I tried updating the .dll library using the file I found on the web, then another yet similar error appeared "can't locate the procedure entry point binksetvolume@12 in the library of dynamic links binkw32.dll". Then I found another binkw32.dll version on this forum, and after I used this one, nothing happens. The game just loads for 5-10 seconds (no change on the screen though, just the "load" light on the tower flashes) and then nothing happens. Does anyone of you have any idea what might be the cause?

I have never encountered such a strange problem dealing with the dynamic libraries, usually just using a newer version of the library did the trick, however I tried that here already. Thanks for all the help and merry christmass.

[Berzerker]

Are there instructions on installing patch 1.52? I dl the darn thing (dial up) and it does nothing when I click on it in the civ4 folder.

I set the priority to above and it keeps reverting to below

Oh ya, and I get a message on start up at the earth/space screen telling me my machine aint up to snuff but doesnt tell me why. But it plays anyway, albeit more sluggish as the game progresses as described by many people.

Am I in the minority for thinking software should work right out of the package?

[Urban Ranger]

The patch should install itself after finishes downloading.

I feel your pain, though. No broadband.

[Berzerker]

I tried to dl thru the game and it doesn't register. I just sits at 0% and says its downloading.

[Penta]

OK, I'm going to go batty here.

New laptop for Xmas; Since I also got Civ4, and my desktop is up at school, I figured why not try it?

Laptop specs:

Toshiba Satellite L25-S119
Intel P4 1.5Ghz
ATI Radeon XPress 200M series
256MB RAM

Now, here's what happens...

First: This game is SLOW. Loading up a savegame (or a newgame) takes 10-20 MINUTES. Yes, I timed it.

Second: I open the console, hoping there's some relief there.

I type help, and hit enter.

Freeze. I can't exit the console, can't type anything else, get no response.

What the heck?



Why won't my game WORK with me?

[Berzerker]

because the software industry seems to be exempt from quality controls required for other industries

[Berzerker]

Well, finally got the patch dl'ed again and unzipped it into the game and I no longer get machine under specs messages and the game seems to work okay.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Penta
Why won't my game WORK with me?

256MB seems to be a tad low.

Try setting all the graphics opinion to "low."

[sarukun]

Here's one. My system refuses to acknowledge the existance of the Install Disk (Disk 1). It can see Disk 2 just fine, but Disk 1 simply does not register when it goes in the drive. The "reading" light flashes for about 20 to 30 seconds after I insert the disk, and then remains lit without flickering; generally when I insert a disk, it flashes for about 15 seconds and then goes dark unless something is being read from the disk. It also seems like the disk isn't spinning: the drive is totally quiet. As I said, Disk 2 reads just fine, but I can't access the installation and setup .exe's because the disk just doesn't show up. Even if I double-click on my DVD drive, it shows up as empty. The drive is a CD/DVD writer; could that have something to do with it? I know that a lot of back-up programs cause issues with SecuROM, but I'm not getting ANYthing at all from this CD, not even a "Disk not found" error. Any ideas?

[ZikChil]

Moved: see "Cursor Issues?!"

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by sarukun
I know that a lot of back-up programs cause issues with SecuROM, but I'm not getting ANYthing at all from this CD, not even a "Disk not found" error. Any ideas?

What do you get when you try to access the disc from Windows?

[dw153]

I get the following error when I attempt to install civ4. it comes up after disc 1 has installed, and pops up immediately after i put in disc 2.

Feature Transfer Error
Feature: DefaultFeature
Compenent:
File:
Error: Catastrophic Failure

I have been on the phone with take2's worthless techsupport for the past 10 days in a row and each solution they have provided has done nothing. I have also tried the one solution posted on this thread relating to the one similar problem posted.

If anyone has any idea on how to fix this I would be eternally grateful.

thanks

[troglodyte]

I initially found the game frustratingly slow (2.4Ghz, nVidia GForce Titanium 128, 512 RAM, XP Home SP1) - I was one of the fortunate ones that could play the game though.

However, a friend suggested that I download a copy of IOLO Memory Manager from their website. Initially I thought this is just another one of those damn memory managers... but, I discovered that if you use this tool (and I suppose others may do the same thing) and defrag the RAM once or twice consecutively to get about 410-430 MB free, the game works wonderfully.

I found this works and maybe others might find this useful.

==troggie

[CoJo]

I think I have the same problem as conanav... I keep getting the error "The procedure entry point_BinkShouldSkip@4 could not be located in the dynamic link library binkw32.dll"

At first I got an error that said something like insert DVD, but it was already inserted... so I downloaded a no DVD patch for the .exe and I get that error. Is there a way to fix either of these?