Freezes when opening diplomacy screen - recurring problem

[EndoSTEEL]

I'm having a recurring problem. Usually (but not always) when the diplomacy screen is supposed to come up, either when I click for diplomacy or I'm contacted for it, the game freezes up. The faction-specific diplomacy music plays, and the cursor still moves, but no diplomacy screen comes up and nothing else works.

This is VERY annoying problem since I have to restart the program every time another Civ contacts me.

Any ideas?

[EndoSTEEL]

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[OutFlanked]

Originally posted by EndoSTEEL
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[OutFlanked]

Endo try posting this in the bug reports thread.

[WhiteHowler]

Yes! I'm having the exact same problem. Whenever a diplomacy screen appears, there's about a 50/50 chance that my game will hardlock (usually resulting in the screen going black).

My setup:
Athlon 1800+
1GB RAM
Radeon 9600XT
Windows 2000 SP4

The game runs perfectly other than that, but not being able to do any diplomacy (as well as having the game crash every time another leader decides to talk to me) is getting really frustrating.

[smellymummy]

my civ4 doesn't crash, except after there is diplomacy (or any display of that kind of art, ie the leaderhead anims) the game starts to lag, and it just gets worse from that point unless the game is restarted

[WhiteHowler]

Originally posted by smellymummy
my civ4 doesn't crash, except after there is diplomacy (or any display of that kind of art, ie the leaderhead anims) the game starts to lag, and it just gets worse from that point unless the game is restarted

That's kind of bizarre. Sounds more like a memory leak than anything.

Mine just goes black and hardlocks when a foreign leader is on the screen. It's not always right when he appears -- sometimes it takes a few seconds, and sometimes I can rush through the chat responses before it decides to crash. It's really annoying and making the game unplayable for me.

[EndoSTEEL]

Well, I updated my graphics card drivers and the diplomacy screen issue is now completely fixed......... but now the Wonder movies crash the game.

Oh well, I can live without Wonder movies I guess.

WhiteHowler, on my game the diplomacy screen wouldn't actually come up, it would just play the faction music and freeze the game, except for the cursor. No black screen. Still, you might want to make sure all your drivers are updated.

[WhiteHowler]

Originally posted by EndoSTEEL
WhiteHowler, on my game the diplomacy screen wouldn't actually come up, it would just play the faction music and freeze the game, except for the cursor. No black screen. Still, you might want to make sure all your drivers are updated.

They are. 8.18.0.0 with the DirectX 9.0c from the disc. My audio drivers are up to date, and Windows is fully patched.

[Sirio]

I'm getting the same problem as well, a high probability of crashing during diplomacy, otherwise no crashes. Sometimes the ATI VPU Recover will kick in and prevent a crash.

Windows XP SP2
1.5 GhZ Pentium IV
Radeon 9800 Pro
784 Mb RAM

[eruditehamster]

I have this issue too. I think every time the diplomacy screen is accessed it ties up a huge chunk of memory that isn't freed up after the screen is closed, causing the memory leak. After a few diplomacy interactions my game starts to go insanely slow (to the point where it takes as long as five minutes before the screen updates and things start to move again). Graphical weirdness starts showing up now, like menu options hovering without a blue backdrop behind them. Usually by this point if I do anything slightly taxing on the system, like zoom out to the globe view or open some advisor window, the game will actually crash. Before my first diplomacy interaction, I can play the game at a high resolution, all graphics settings maxed, 4x anti-aliasing, and it's smooth as silk.

This might be causing people with lower-end systems to crash to desktops or spontaneously reboot before they're able to see the first diplomacy screen if it's initiated by the AI, explaining some of the "random" crashes people are reporting.

[WhiteHowler]

Okay, a little more info on this...

I swapped out my Radeon 9600XT with the Radeon 9000 Pro from my wife's PC (and reinstalled the ATI drivers, obviously). The exact same crash happens, so it's not specific to my video card.

[WhiteHowler]

Yet more information:

I decided to run the game in windowed mode so I could watch Task Manager.

While playing, Civ4 was using anywhere from 75-99% of my CPU time (which makes sense due to my somewhat slow processor). When a diplomacy screen opened, suddenly Explorer.EXE started using 99% of my CPU time! Within seconds, my screen went black and the PC locked up.

Why would Explorer suddenly be using so many CPU cycles when a diplomacy screen pops up? It seems like this is almost certainly related to the cause of the crashes.

As an aside, other things I tried that didn't work:
Clearing the Civ4 cache.
Increasing the Windows virtual memory page file.
Disabling movies in the config file (which doesn't affect portraits anyway).

This is all after the obvious steps of reinstalling DirectX 9.0c and my video/sound drivers and Civ4 itself.

[sezyew4242]

Different Diplo. screen prob -- no side panels or info

I have a somewhat different problem with the Diplomacy screens. When I open up the Dip. screen, I get a great pic of the other player, and I can see the choices offered directly below the pic (your head would look nice on a pike, let's talk about something diffewrent, etc). I also get a statement about the other leader's attitude towards me.

But I don't get anything else that I'm supposed to get: no listing of what either he or I have to trade (including no list of things in red), no list of the factors going into his attitude toward me, etc. All of the things which (from screenshots I've seen), are supposed to appear in black boxes down the sides of the screen on either side of the portrait.

Has anyone else seen this problem? Any suggestions on what's causing it or how to fix it?

[cal_guy]

I only had this problem when I tried to play on a huge Map on Terra map. When I play Standard on Terra this problem doesn't occur and I can play at 1600x1200 (a bit slow but still acceptable). The strange thing was according to ATI tray tool (a tweaking tool for ATI cards) the System Memory used by Process fell from about 300MB to around 30MB. My theory is that on very large maps the memory system has trouble deciding on what to send to pagefile and what to keep in the RAM. I don't think a memory leak is the cause because the game seems to unload memory correctly when you exit the game.