Crash to Desktop: Support and Debug

[Akaoz]

Well, the 4.12's gave me the "Failed to Init..." error. Gah...

[BleckLord]

Open call to everyone who complains about people flaming in clomplaint threads:

Please help me fix my/our problem as described here.

I know I'll provide any information you need above and beyond what's already here. I won't reformat and reinstall windows again.

[rgaytan]

Steaming pile of monkey sh*t!!!

I have tries everything on these firaxis forsaken forums to no avail. I cant believe this so called game works on any pc. Everygame I have works fine except for this one. right out of the its a steaming pile of monkey shi*. I have tried changing my page file, installing old and new drivers omega and ati. All failed to solve the ctd problem. This has got to be the WORST damn thing I ever tried. I hope everybody pirates this peice of shi* so that they dont make any money off of beta crap.

[BleckLord]

rgaytan,

I sympathize with you. We're going to be waiting for a patch. Rumor has it that we'll get our patch next week.

Please feel free to vent on a thread thats been dedicated to thrashing Civ4/Firaxis/2k. I'd like to keep this one on the highbrow side. Thanks.

I'll post if I have any breakthroughs.

[Akaoz]

Any chance overheating might be causing this?

[radgen]

Ok for my graphics crawl and SOME of the CTD's, I had to update drivers for the SiS AGP chipset on my motherboard.

This completely eliminated the graphics crawl and fixed some (but not all) the CTD's.

[BleckLord]

Bump. We need some help here. Anyone sure they've solved this problem and know how they did it?

[rgaytan]

here is what I did.

uninstalled game.
removed ATI drivers. (9800SE 128)
installed Omega 5.10a driver
set page file to max 4096 min 4096
installed latest logitech driver.
reinstalled game.
no more CTD.

[BleckLord]

I run my system with a 3GB fixed page file.
I'm using the Omega drivers right now.

I'll try messing with the logitech drivers again.

Thanks

[buzbyticus]

Greetings to all. One of the best things I like about being a software developer is the challenge of solving weird-ass issues and this CTD issue was certainly a challenge. I am sharing my experiences and how I resolved them in hope that they may help someone else. I do not claim to have The Solution to everyone’s issues so, as always, your mileage may vary…

My system:
Athlon XP 2500+
1 Gb RAM
GeForce FX5500 8x AGP w/ 256Mb
NVIDIA nForce2 400 + MCP Chipset mobo w/ on-board sound
Win2k Advanced Server SP4

Short version: my CTD issue seems to have been memory-related. By ensuring up-to-date video and mobo drivers, a more-than-adequate pagefile size, and giving the video card some extra memory to work with (via AGP aperture size) I have eliminated (4 days, ~30 hrs of game play so far) CTD issues. BTW, memory usage has been peaking at just under 1Gb. Suuuuu-EEEYYY! If you don’t have at least a gig of RAM you at least have my sympathies.

Long version:
I did a standard installation of Civ4 including DirectX 9.0c. My first attempt at playing the game stalled at the “sunrise” screen with no menu showing. I updated my NVIDIA video drivers to 81.85 and the NVIDIA mobo drivers to 4.62. This got the game to run.

While playing my first game (standard map, high graphics) I was about 30 minutes into it when I clicked on something and suddenly found myself staring at the desktop. I restarted the game and the same thing occurred, this time a little sooner. This was a definite trend. I kept trying to play and began to be able to tell when a CTD was imminent when the game started to slow down. I also noticed that if I didn’t reboot after a CTD the next crash would come some sooner.

I perused the message boards here and at Civ Fanatics for some ideas on how to resolve the problem and tried anything and everything suggested with less than satisfying results. I was getting a pair of Application errors in the Event Log after each CTD, one “The description for Event ID ( 0 )… The following information is part of the event: 7” and another with “…information: 6.” I won’t pretend I have any idea what this means but I also noticed once that when the game CTD’d, peak memory usage (via the Performance tab on Task Manager) exceeded(!) the total memory available. So I kept an eye on memory usage while playing the game and saw that it was consistently bumping up against the total available. (Someone upthread asked “what could possibly be using 660 Mb of memory?” and my answer to that is “civilization4.exe.” Yikes! What a pig!) This suggested to me that my pagefile was (obviously) too small. I reset the initial pagefile size to the Windows-recommended 1532Mb and double that for the max size. (I should probably mention that the pagefile is on a secondary hard drive.) During the reboot after this change I also reset the AGP aperture in BIOS to 256Mb from 64Mb. I figured I was going to have a bunch of pagefile memory available so why not give the video card a little extra room to work as well. Changing 2 variables at the same time is, of course, bad scientific method but it takes a couple of minutes to reboot my machine and I am not a patient man ;-)

Before starting the game again, I shut down every extraneous application possible. After starting the game I “end process”-ed explorer.exe and set the thread priority on civilization4.exe to “High”. When the sun came up the next morning I was still playing (huge map, low graphics). I have had one CTD in the five days since that occurred when I tried to play the game again without rebooting the machine but I have not been able to recreate the problem since then. Yesterday I stopped doing the “end process…set priority” thing and haven’t had any problems yet. I have completed a huge map, 7-civ, Noble-level single player game and am now at 1750AD in a huge map, 10-civ Prince-level single player game with high graphics and using the “custom music” option. Just to be safe, shift+F5 is now my favorite keystroke. Gotta love that Quick Save.

Good luck.

[seebs]

AGP aperture is not "amount of memory for the video card". I have actually been advised, in another context, to reduce it to eliminate a crash!

[yiapap]

I'm keeping a log of all my efforts and crashes on this thread.
I'm doing so for two reasons:
1. I have an nVidia card that fully supports T&L so it's definitely within specs
2. I can't play huge maps for more than a few minutes without a crash

Plus, IT is my job... So hopefully I'll find something that will help others as well.

[clem]

Thx for all the effort, but I'm starting to feel sorry for all the guys trying to figure out how they need to tweak their rig just to get this game running: it's not your rig, it's Civ4!!

The game is buggy, period. No amount of tweaking on the end user's side is going to change anything about that.

Different people with different specs that get CTD's all experience CTD's around the same point: when a huge map get's crowded with cities and units (I stopped playing when I got a CTD every one or two turns or so, and yes I'm well above minimum specs). Not to mention all the other CTD instances I've read about. Firaxis should have kept the release back a month or so to test and fix these things. I could live with a random CTD here and there but right now it's practically impossible to even finish one (1) game And the worst thing: no acknowledgement from Firaxis, the tech support page for this game is a farce, and no 'inside' info on them even working on the problem. Basically they're just giving the finger to the community (you included).

[seebs]

As one of the people with regular CTDs after a map got large, I haven't had one since I changed to the Catalyst 4.12 drivers. I was to the point of a crash every couple of minutes, and then I played that same game for three hours...

[kactus]

Hi All, not wanting to curse my self (touch wood) but it seem civ is working great now for me. The short and curlies? Set your min and max swap file to 4 GB. I was scepticle at first too.

Originally on multiplayer maps (4 people vs 4 comps) huge pangea we would give me CTD roughly every 15 min, very frustrating, game would run very choppy and slow. Alt tabbing and bumbing the priority seemed to help a little bit with the choppynes but CTD plagued the experience and resulted in much frustration. I was also coming across some weird graphical anomolies where moving the screen would result in it going black for 20 seconds before redrawing it. Every time I tried to move it /cry

Also once in a while I would get a really weird bug where the graphics would suddenly improve 20 fold, the grass was bright flourecent green, everything looked like it was glowing and using fancy lighting effects, unfortunately this would usually make my frame rate at around 1 frame every 20 seconds. This would happen in game and usually was accompanied by a full system lock up a few minutes later.

I took the above posters advice and increased the swap file.

Now everything runs great on large and huge maps, was able to finish my first game last night and played for 5 hours today in a 4 player lan +4 comps with no slow down or CTD or network glitches what so ever.

Set your swap file to 4GB min and max

The game is fantastic now. It runs on all the systems in the house including my laptop. Nvidia users, also make sure that your AA and filtering settings are turned off in the driver.


Thanks buzbyticus! You saved my sanity

Cheers - Kactus of the purple