Crash to Desktop: Support and Debug

[Wildcat]

Originally posted by ckreiter
Got a first tonight. Played about 2 hours with a CTD about every 15 minutes. The last one created a DR Watson error report and dump.

Dude, now thats dedication or stupidity I've had 5 late game crashs on the huge maps in 2 days and I won't try playing again untill the next patch. If that was me the CD would have been a Frisbee by now.

[edwardj]

I'm getting pretty discusted here. I have reformatted my computer, got all new drivers, reinstalled the game three times and installed the 1.09 patch...plus tried all the lame stuff that Take 2 suggested, BUT I still cant play the game more then 15-20 turns before a CTD. I realize this game wasn't Syd's baby, but most of us here respect him and I believe that it is about time for him to at least come out and have something to say about all the prolems this game is having...at least SOMEONE from Frixas should talk to us and explain what is going on. I like the game, or I wouldn't be going to all this trouble to get it working!

Come on, someone respond to us!

Ed D

[Drachasor]

Try turning off "Dynamic Animation Paging" in the Civilizationiv.ini.

Also set a frame rate clamp (I did 20, but I think you could go higher). This tends to make the game a lot smoother if you are experiencing choppiness late-game. The game seems more stable as well.

Also, put the game in windowed mode (this seems to help).

This however, has not completely gotten rid of my crashing.

Things I plan on trying soon:

1. Turning off the drawing of individual buildings for cities. Debugging indicates there are a lot of rendering errors on this. It complains about not finding shadow node for a number of buildings (obelisk and others). Also it seems to have a great deal of trouble doing the Islamic Monastary. Turning this option off should make it not worry about such things.

2. The audio also has a lot of screwy problems. I figure turning it completely off would fix a lot. Someone said just turning off the background music (an option in the ini) helped him a great deal. I am going to try no sound, then no music if no sound helps.

-Drachasor

[Hawk Firestorm]

Well overall there's a few common things to most people, they can't play larger maps, the game bombs later on in the game etc.

There seems to be a definate link in the number of objects in game and how long it takes to go pear shaped, which kinda says to me that it's doing something screwy with the systems memory especially when you consider the after effects of a Civ4 CTD on the system.

Never have I come across any app that utterly trashes the system after a CTD, corrupt video etc or cause critical system errors.

As for a potential Cache problem it is possible however, cleaning out all the cache etc made absolutely no difference to myself or many others.

Problem is unlike any other app that just CTD's and leaves the system intact Civ4 doesn't, well not on XP pro anyways on this system.

While on my system I've never gotten any of the ingame graphics corruption using a Nvidia 5200fx with any of the driver revisions, As per many of the screenies in here.

The forground cells such as the menu and unit and city frames vanish after playing for a while, there's a huge pause in gameplay then it occasionally catches back up a few times then usually bombs utterly corrupting the desktop to 4 bit depth (unchangeable) then eventually going black and white. lol

[Imminence]

the good message for me is, that I'm not alone with all these strange occurances.
Sometimes I really thought, it must be me and my system, because I cannot imagine, that something like this game and the patches can be released by a well known and serious company.

[Drachasor]

Well, completely turning off the audio does get rid of all the audio errors in the logs. However the game still crashes. It seems you can't tell the game to not render individual buildings for each city....though you could probably do this in a mod...

...right now I am trying some other things. I'll give another update later.

[Guy Saults]

ok, many things are pointing to audio overflows. How many people actually have a sound card in their systems, vs having an on-board sound chip?

My systems have sound chips, and now, both of my systems are crashing from turn 1 on.

Is anyone with a sound card having CTD or BSOD problems with CIV 4?!?

[Chernobyl2]

I have a Sound Blaster Live! Gamer (circa 1999) and the only sound related problem I really had was sound from the movies skipping, whch the patch appears to have solved. I did get some other sound...errors...but I basically attributed those to late gameplay and system resources getting slammed. Thats my gut feeling anyway. The music playback was fine, the sound effects worked well, I could hear the different levels of ambient noise (as you zoom in and out from the map).

Chern

[DocMWood]

Well, just for an update, I'm still getting crashes after the patch. I can say that it 1) goes about 1/2 turn longer than before the patch, and 2) now just locks up my machine without the CTD, so I am forced to hard re-boot.

For those who didn't know, my system is a brand new out of the box Sony Viao, dual 3.0GHz processors, 1 Gig RAM, 128MB ATI x300 video card, no other games, fully updated drivers. Yeah, and it still crashes.

On the plus side, at least I now know not to buy Oblivion (Elder Scrolls IV) when it comes out, as it's a 2K game as well. Kinda sucks, as I was really looking forward to getting that game.

[ckreiter]

Yeah Wildcat, I'm pathetic

I was trying to find some type of pattern where CTD's tend to occur. I found that I had 6 chashed while scrolling around the map and the other 2 were while a unit was moving.

[Drachasor]

I think I have gotten rid of my CTDs, though it will require further testing to be sure (I played over 10 turns without a crash, which has never happened before).

Here is a link the thread post where I discuss what I have done

-Drachasor

PS. Read both posts

[spa]

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=137706&page=13

I saw this fix over at this Civfanatics thread. It solved my problems too and made the game playable again

[ckreiter]

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showt...=137706&page=13

This, too, made my game playable. Just finished 1958 with a Domination Victory.

I started experience choppy video and sound on the movies, but no CTD's so far.

Watch memory usage in Task Manager playing in windowed mode. Saw 800+ meg being used for my game (1 notch less than normal size map).

[Egress1]

Outstanding!

Originally posted by spa

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=137706&page=13

I saw this fix over at this Civfanatics thread. It solved my problems too and made the game playable again

Good job! I must be something to do with sync dunno but the only probs I was having were the CTD's the longer the game went the more frequent the CTD's and changing these .ini settings killed the CTD's with the only sacrafice being movies now don't like to play but I've seen EVERY wonder movie at least once in play ;-) so I don't need 'em.

These are the changes as posted:

AllowScreenShots = 0
SyncInput = 1
D3D9Query = 1
LoggingEnabled = 1

I did the first three ....the logging didn't make any sense whatsoever. Screenshots is a no brainer. I'm going to toy with checking Sync vs D3D9Query see if it turns out to just be a sync issue. I am very suspicious of DirectX though wouldn't surprise me one bit if down the road they discover all along the new vs of DirectX is partially the culprit.

In any case if CTD's is your only issue changing these .ini settings for some unknown reason seems to work! Thanks for the ref Spa! Good job.

PS. I have always played on max settings and large maps my system is a Sony Vaio Desktop P4 2.4ghz CPU - 1gig DDRAM - GForce 5500 256mg PCI card.

Sony's built in sound card (Yamaha I believe) didn't sit well would play all sounds initially with no problem but would intermittently stop at random junctures and the only way to get the sound back was a reboot. Added a Sound Blaster Live 24bit card and sound is fine all the time now.

-Ken

[CivNonFreak]

Mine was very slow after the patch on a huge map with 8 players. VERY slow. Then I made the INI chanegs and it was playable. Not great, but playable. It crashed twice between 1992 and 2015 (tho pre-patch the save game was 2002... after it was 1992... no idea why). So I pretty happy again. Still need tweaks that (ok, I will say it) probably should have been done before release. OTOH, short of releasing a full game demo, a lot of these errors would not have shown in a small ish beta test.