Crash to Desktop: Support and Debug

[BleckLord]

kactus & buzbyticus,

Thanks for the suggestions. I've been running 256MB AGP Aperture with fixed 3GB virtual memory since before I installed Civ 4. I tried resetting BIOS defaults (the only noticeable change was cool 'n quiet was re-enabled, and the AGP aperture was reduced to 128MB). The CTD problem still happened, so I set everything back to the way I had it.

On the up side, The Movies comes out on Tuesday, so I'll have an alternative to Civ 4.

[ckreiter]

I too have been suffering from CTD's. I'm running the following:

P4-2.4ghz
512MB memory
NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440 with AGP8X (64MB)
Directx 9
Windows 2000

Upgrading the display driver only seemed to make to make the problem worse.

I changed my swap from 768/1536 to 1024/2048.

I haven't had a CTD for about 2 hours. Game slow is painfully slow. Watching the task monitor, I see CIV4 using 660MB of storage. One time, I watched it reach over 1 GB as it was Crashing TD.

I'm open to any ideas anyone has on how to get better performance. I'm going to try the suggestion to use 4096/4096 for swap file to see if that helps with game speed.

Thanks for all of your hints so far.

[BleckLord]

This is definetely a memory issue in my book. You could try bumping your virtual memory up, but its just going to be really slow as the game goes on (as opposed to crashing).

[CanusCerebus]

Been scanning the forums while I watch the Vikes play the Lions. (GO VIKES)

Based on the conversation here I'm going to try upping the page file and setting to a static number. A couple of questions though.

My Windows volume and my Games volume are on the same physical drive. Does the page file have to be on the same volume Windows? Can it be on a separate physical drive all together?

I've heard a few folks talk about installing Civ to a separate physical drive from Windows. Has there been any documented success with this tactic?

I'll post here if my changes help any...

[ckreiter]

I'm playing a large map. Even at 4094/4094, I'm still getting crashes to desktop. It seems to play a little longer than with 1024/2048, but only a few turns at a time.

[craigrc]

I was suffering increasingly frequent CTDs. I tried playing on smaller maps and tried every combination of in game settings I could think of. Nothing would work, and I got to the point were I couldn't even finish a single turn without a crash. I was ready to give up on this game until the patch comes out. I got the newest drivers for all my hardware, I tried all the virtual memory settings, I closed everthing running in the background, etc. etc. etc.. I did everything I could, except going to an earlier driver for my ATI card. I honestly didn't think that would help.

I was wrong!!! I loaded up the 4.12 Catalyst drivers and much to my amazement it worked!!! No more crashes to desktop now (that was the only problem I was having with the game). If you are having the CTD problem and you have an ATI card I'd recommend you give this solution a try. It worked for me and many others on another message board (which is where I got the idea from).

[graiford]

Crash to desktop

I was have the program crash every few minutes and after hours of wracking my brain and checking the sound and video drivers I took the advice of this form and started a game witha standard size map and all of the problems went away. It looks like no large maps until they create a patch.

Thanks!

[BleckLord]

CanusCerebus, you can have virtual memory allocated on any drive. You can even have it on 2 different drives.

craigrc, what ATI card are you using?

[craigrc]

I'm using a Sapphire Radeon 9600 Atlantis with 256 MB on card video RAM.

[Coogan]

I was about to post my problems with the crash-to-reboot problem I have been having. However, I decided to check one other thing out and see what happened. And amazingly enough, what I did worked.

Background: in 3 of the 4 games I've played where I've gotten into the future tech era, the game has crashed-to-reboot soon after loading a saved game, with 2-5 turns, at the exact same point in each game. The first time I experienced it, I found that it was crashing every time a stealth bomber in one of my cities activated. I managed to fix that by sleeping it immediately after reload. The 2nd time I couldn't find the problem so I abandoned it. Now, this 3rd time, I think I fixed the problem. I couldn't figure out what was causing it to crash, so I dug into the error logs and found this in the ThemeParseLog.txt file:

[Nov 06, 2005 - 23:11:30] Messages while processing 'Resource/Themes/Civ4.thm'

Error : File - ('Civ4Theme_Custom.thm', Ln:4910, Col:47) Could not load bitmap 'Civ4/HUD/city_titlearrows.tga'
Error : File - ('Civ4Theme_Custom.thm', Ln:4918, Col:47) Could not load bitmap 'Civ4/HUD/city_titlearrows.tga'
Error : File - ('Civ4Theme_Custom.thm', Ln:4926, Col:47) Could not load bitmap 'Civ4/HUD/city_titlearrows.tga'
Error : File - ('Civ4Theme_Custom.thm', Ln:4983, Col:47) Could not load bitmap 'Civ4/HUD/city_titlearrows.tga'
Error : File - ('Civ4Theme_Custom.thm', Ln:4991, Col:47) Could not load bitmap 'Civ4/HUD/city_titlearrows.tga'
Error : File - ('Civ4Theme_Custom.thm', Ln:4999, Col:47) Could not load bitmap 'Civ4/HUD/city_titlearrows.tga'

I found the relevant location in \Resource\Civ4\HUD and discovered that the file city_titlearrows.tga did not exist there. I did, however, find it in \Resource\Civ4\Custom, so I copied it into the HUD directory. And voila, when I loaded the game up, it ran fine; no more crash-to-reboot. It ran right past the point where it was crashing without a problem.

I don't know if this was the reason for every crash I have (or anybody else is having), but I know that if it happens again, this will be the first thing I check.

Coogan

[cucu hara]

Yes, I noticed the same errors in my ThemeParseLog.txt last night, but didn't have time to copy the files from \Custom\ to \HUD\yet. I was enabling various error logging options in the Civ4 ini file to see what may pop up. After a reinstall of Civ4 I had 3 CTD's, each within the first 10 minutes of playing the game. Besides the ThemeParseLog errors, I found this in the resmgr.log:
RESMGR: Texture PlayerColor01.tga failed to load
RESMGR: Texture PlayerColor02.tga failed to load

..and this in audio.log:
[3113.843] AudioManager: Successfully initialized the audio system.
[3113.843] AudioManager: Successfully initialized the audio manager.
[3303.515] WRN: FAudioSystemMiles::Acquire3DSampleId: Could not acquire Id
[3303.515] ERR: FSound3D::InitHandle(): SoundId 440 could not initialize handle for variation 2
[3303.515] ERR: FSound3D:oLoad: Could not initialize handle for sound Sounds/Units/AnimalFootLargeSand.
[3303.515] WRN: FAudioManager:o3DSound(): Could not load scriptId 39./n
[3303.515] WRN: FAudioSystemMiles::Acquire3DSampleId: Could not acquire Id
[3303.515] ERR: FSound3D::InitHandle(): SoundId 431 could not initialize handle for variation 1
[3303.515] ERR: FSound3D:oLoad: Could not initialize handle for sound Sounds/Units/FootDirt.
[3303.515] WRN: FAudioManager:o3DSound(): Could not load scriptId 24./n
[3303.515] WRN: FAudioSystemMiles::Acquire3DSampleId: Could not acquire Id
[3303.515] ERR: FSound3D::InitHandle(): SoundId 431 could not initialize handle for variation 3
[3303.515] ERR: FSound3D:oLoad: Could not initialize handle for sound Sounds/Units/FootDirt.
[3303.515] WRN: FAudioManager:o3DSound(): Could not load scriptId 24./n
[3303.718] WRN: FAudioSystemMiles::Acquire3DSampleId: Could not acquire Id
[3303.718] ERR: FSound3D::InitHandle(): SoundId 431 could not initialize handle for variation 4
[3303.718] ERR: FSound3D:oLoad: Could not initialize handle for sound Sounds/Units/FootDirt.
[3303.718] WRN: FAudioManager:o3DSound(): Could not load scriptId 24./n
[3303.921] WRN: FAudioSystemMiles::Acquire3DSampleId: Could not acquire Id
[3303.921] ERR: FSound3D::InitHandle(): SoundId 431 could not initialize handle for variation 4
[3303.921] ERR: FSound3D:oLoad: Could not initialize handle for sound Sounds/Units/FootDirt.
[3303.921] WRN: FAudioManager:o3DSound(): Could not load scriptId 24./n
[3303.921] WRN: FAudioSystemMiles::Acquire3DSampleId: Could not acquire Id
[3303.921] ERR: FSound3D::InitHandle(): SoundId 431 could not initialize handle for variation 5
[3303.921] ERR: FSound3D:oLoad: Could not initialize handle for sound Sounds/Units/FootDirt.
[3303.921] WRN: FAudioManager:o3DSound(): Could not load scriptId 24./n

As far as I can tell, each CTD does not always generate the same errors. Thus I conclude that there are multiple problems. Either way, I'll copy the Civ4Theme files tonight and see what happens.

[seebs]

I have a new save file which CTD's reliably with either Catalyst 4.12 or Catalyst 5.11(beta), in any case, when I try to build a cottage. Building roads and cities is fine, but building a cottage crashes it.

[doctor604]

Thanks craigrc, I have a ATI RADEON X700 PRO 256. Reverting back to the 4.12 Catalyst drivers did the trick.

I do get some garbelled gfx when the Wonder Movies run but they clear up after a few secs.

I will be fine until the "patch" or "newer" drivers come out.

[sidnitz]

Gradually increasing slowdown/dropped frames after playing for an hour or two on any size map (small-huge so far). Crashing to desktop or bluescreening semi-randomly after hitting the modern age/uncovering the most of the map on Standard-Huge map sizes so far. Once the game gets sufficiently advanced/developed, I wind up crashing 3-4 times per turn until I give up.

Started a Small map/Epic timescale game this weekend and have crashed to desktop twice so far and have only made it to circa 1200AD (but have roughly 50-60% of the map uncovered)

All the above is happening w/ all graphics options to low or disabled at 1680x1050 (native resolution for my LCD panel). Have tested at 1024 X 768 w/ same results as well.

Have seen <2.9 GB commit charge through Perfmon with Huge map just prior to bluescreen (due to lack of available memory, presumably).

Have reinstalled WinXP and Civ4 and uninstalled and reinstalled different versions of NVidia drivers and reinstalled DirectX 3 times

Change of NVidia driver version has made no difference in stability or performance of game in general other than allowing me to view Wonder Movies w/o stuttering.

No crash issues with any other games I had installed on this system (HL2, Doom 3, SWG, EQ II, B&W II, AoEIII, Civ III Conquests, Sims 2, etc.)

Experienced "Renderer failed to initialize" error for first time this weekend after being able to launch the game reliably for a week and a half or so w/o errors.

System specs are almost 2x the recommended specs in all areas:

Abit IC7 MAXX3
Pentium 4 3GHz HT
2x 512GB PC3200
Asus FX5900 Ultra 256MB
2x 80GB Seagate SATA 150 in RAID0
Realtek AC '97 6 channel

Windows XP Pro SP2 w/ all critical updates
Last three releases of NVidia drivers(70.x something, 71.89, and 81.85)
DirectX 9c from Civ4 CD
2GB static Page file

[BleckLord]

sidnitz, your memory commit charge levels match what I've seen. Something in the game likes to gobble memory. I'm not 100% convinced that its an all out memory leak (I'd have expected a patch by now for a leak); I think some Fixarian code is rather wanton with its memory allocation.

cucu hara, I've seen similar errors. I think its a symptom of the code failing to allocated resources for a sound. You can see a huge difference between the timestamp of the audio system starting up and the first error, with nothing in-between.

My guess is that most of the game's procedures hobble on in this RAM anemic state until a critical routine fails to malloc some resources and just bails. The game seems to bail fairly graciously on my computer (it’s giving back its entire RAM and doesn't cause graphics problems). I'm guessing that Firaxis is having to go back through and 'trim the fat' (so to speak) on some of the game's procedures.