Fixing Civ4 Problems: START HERE!

[Moonbars]

i am still waiting for somebody to post a graph of their "memory leak" the game doesnt have a memory leak.

[Civfreak1970]

Huh?

If its not a MEMORY LEAK then the game sure sucks at end game for speed and Huge maps 99% of the people I see posting are crashing! Anything above a Large map = CRASH!!!

[Moonbars]

that's not a memory leak, that the program using more memory when there is more going on in the game. More cities & units = more memory & processing required.

[netraM]

Hopefully this is a mem leak , while progressing through the game the mem usage increased and peaked at 680 mb when Id shut down the game.

A mem leak you can fix with a patch , if its just because there more cities and movements on the map they have lied in their specs for the system and it cant be fixed by a patch which would make me rather upset.

[tsbicca]

Just wanted to let y'all know how I fixed my machine. I was getting CTD and sometimes system crashes after only 10 seconds in the main menu. I eventually had to gimp my videocard in order to fix it. I have an ATI 9600se and what I did was in the ATI control panel there are options for opengl and directx. I slide both controllers all the way to the performance side. Then in another tab (can't remember which one) I reduced my agp speed from 8x to 4x. Suddently I was able to play the game, and it still looks halfway decent.

[elrosco44]

Im not sure if anyone answered Agalla's issue with speed or not but I have exceed every recommended item on the box, to include 1.5BG of memory and I can watch a scout move for 12 seconds - initial game move - every thing helse hidden by fog, setting at medium - this is an unplayable game at this point, pretty expensive even if the box is pretty - any help out there email me at laneross2002@yahoo.com please - i really want to try this game!!!!
Thank you

[Sam Stoat]

I only got this game yesterday, and its crashed to desktop about 6 times so far. Unlike a lot of posts so far, I don't have an ATI card. My system is a GeForce 6600 GT, Athlon 64 3000+, and 1GB of RAM.

The game runs fine, with all graphics set to high (no AA), huge map, and 10 civs. At seemingly random points (opening an advisor screen, building a wonder, zooming in during battle, etc), the game will freeze, although the music continues, and my hard drive is constantly reading/writing for up to five minutes (or until I lose patience). Occasionaly, the game will recover and continue, but most times it just dumps itself back to the desktop.

I run CachemanXP, displaying free RAM, and when the desktop first appears it reads 0. After the drive stops reading it shoots up to ~700MB, so I like the memory leak theory, myself.

[Enigma_TL]

Originally posted by Enigma_TL
Is there a fix for the sputtering Wonder movies other than turing them off? Game runs fine for me its just the wondermovies sputter and slide show when they run. I have the newest Dirx, Newest NVIDA Drivers, SB Audigy 2 Drivrs, and way above the specs. Nomatter what res I play in (Down to 800X600) the game is fine but the movies are messed up.

I fixed my problem. I unialled NVDVD player and the problem cleared up. Not sure WHY but it did.

[Brad Mayer]

Threading issue?

Speculation, but it's more likely a (multi)threading issue rather and a memory leak. For a pure mem leak to crash an app, it usually has to eat up you last bit of virtual mem (RAM + Swap). You'll know in advance as your whole system (and not just the Civ4 app) grinds to a halt.

It crashes 5x per hour on my WinXP SP2 sys with all the reqs. One telltale sign is that, post app crash, various parts of the Win subsystem are left in various stages of hose-edness, so that half the time the OS will need a reboot.

This would also explain why certain parts of Civ4 functionality - like the infamous function (F#) keys - perform much more poorly, and why the program brings up certain things very slowly, liked the selection lists after you discover a tech, build something, etc. These could be running in threads seperate from the game map, and the program is running into problems context-switching, and in certain "contexts", crashing.

[RandyMcCoy]

I didn't see any problems with a mem leak
The game can be a bit slow at times
My guess is that the game just uses alot of mem (too much in fact).

is anyone else having to wait 10 min to load a saved game?

I like to remind ppl that this game is done in pthyon. That means it uses an interpreter which automatically makes it slower and use more resources that a traditional language like C++.

[RandyMcCoy]

I also make a guess that the XML parseing is tree basied instead of stream basied.

That would make it necessary to load all the prevalent XML data in a XML file in order to access the contents.

Tree basied XML is easier to deal with when programming,but can be unwieldily when handling large data files, because the need for expanding computer resources.

[Repairman_Jack]

I'm not sure if this matters to anyone, or even if it's already been noted, but I've been playing this game since the day it came out with ZERO problems. But then I updated my video drivers (for my GeForce 6800) and now my map is garbage.

Maybe that information'll help someone.

[El Stormo]

Completely unrelated to the other problems, but still a common occurence: if your DVD-drive is from LG, it may not recognize the disk. The fix is found in this thread:

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=142633

[Nikolai]

I'm having problems with crashing saves, and thought I'd try the tips here. But it all stops with the motherboard/BIOS part. My Pentium M is not listed...

[nemesisos]

This is just sad...
So here I am yesterday when I finally got my Civ4 in the mail, installed it, read the manual and started playing. First I noticed that the game is a bit sluggish, which I could get rid off by setting my graphics to medium (not something I expected to have to do on a GeForce FX 5700).
Then the game goes into crashing my entire system, crashing to desktop, showing me just the map for a while and seeming to hang (all while continuing to play all music)... Again, not something you'd expect on a computer that plays HF2 without a problem. Essentially I can play it for about 15-20 minutes without problems, after that...forget it (a CTD btw requires me to reboot the system before I can play civ4 again).
Send me a patch, and send all the people named in the back of the manual as beta testers and QA to hell.