Fixing Civ4 Problems: START HERE!

[Brad Mayer]

Yeah, I hear you, epic and large is my preferred scale too.

I'll just say that the fact that people with well above the recommended req, as well as people like myself (I have all the recommended reqs except the Video, where there is 32Mb - nvidia TL, etc - which is supposedly "sub-minimal" according to the box, although the online system checker says it is "minimal"), all are experiencing very similiar symptoms, tells me this is a performance bug, not a hardware issue, primarily.

[gadnium]

I've had soem serious issues running this game also and just want to tell how I got it somewhat playable. I've been plagued with BSOD's, lockups, and CTD's. My PC isn't the most stable thing first off... Every once in a while I get SATA Hard Drive corruption. But that's related to either my motherboard or power supply. This has been stopping me from playing Civ IV.

So I took my pc apart cleaned up everything from dust, downclocked my processor. So I was at about 42C with no load.

I'd get BSOD and then SATA corruption. But last night I changed my pagefile to min/max 1.5 gb. this stopped the SATA corruption. But I was still getting BSOD causing restarts. Then a couple hard crashes locking up my PC. Then I tried loading the game from the saves in "C:\Documents and Settings\gad\My Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4\Saves\single\auto".

I was still getting CTD's but that's alot better than BSOD or hard locks. I finally finished a game, very proud The last game went for about an hour until I exited it. No crash, but I know I was just lucky. So I figure I can just auto-save every turn and tolerate the CTD's which isn't bad for single player games.

System Specs:
Windows XP SP2
Forceware 78.01
CIV IV: Max Settings
1280x1024

Athlon XP Mobile @ 2GHz
1 GB Ram
Leadtech Nvidia 6800NU
-Pipelines/Vertex shader unclocked
-Not Overclocked
Abit NF-7S Rev. 2 (Junk)
Seagate 120mb SATA
PowMax 500W PS (junk)

[nathanebht]

The "Civ IV Movies" thread has fixes I didn't see in this thread.

An attachment that will turn off the intro movies. Works good.

Updating the Bink dll version. Did good things for me and other people reported it helped.

Updating the Miles Sound Driver Files. Didn't try this myself.

Updating Python from V2.4 to 2.4.2. Didn't try.

Civ IV Movies thread

[angel13]

Originally posted by Brad Mayer
I'll just say that the fact that people with well above the recommended req ... all are experiencing very similiar symptoms, tells me this is a performance bug, not a hardware issue, primarily.

or a requirment specification problem

[Leepants]

Apparantly increasing the page (swap) file to about 2Gb helps a lot too.

And trying to roll back drivers to a version thats over a year old, though???

NOT GOOD ENOUGH!

Again, my main issue is that NO-ONE from the development / sales / support team have shouted up ANYTHING!

They've got our money, so what do they care? Perhaps a bit cynical, but what else am I suppose to think?

[prosen]

I havent seen anyone mention this problem yet, the end result is that I start civ, and then it crashes with a generic "Civilization 4 has encountered a problem and needs to close" before it even gets past the loading screen.

First, let me state that I had the game running fairly stably originally and that I was only encountering crashes at end game.

(1) Installed game, it was running decently; crashed in end game so I tried to fix (oops)
(2) Installed latest catylist drivers for ati mobility cards
(3) Error starts occuring
(4) Uninstalled civ4 and all video drivers. Ran regclean,
(5) Reinstalled, error persists
(6) Rolled back drivers to current stable HP FireGL drivers (original ones that worked well enough)
(7) Problem persists
(8) Went to turn on loging in the config. I notice that half of the directories within the civ4 folder in program files are short cuts; THE TARGET file/folders are missing.
(7) No amount of uninstalling and reinstalling has resulted in civilization4.ini or any of the my_games/ subfolders reappearing.

I am fairly certain that the problem is a result of the missing Civilization4.ini file and other directories within the user folder trees. I cant manually restore them as they seem to be packed in Firraxis's non standard cab format. Any suggestions or usefull experiences with this or a similair problem would be much appreciated.

My computer is a HP nw8240. It is a "workstation replacement" laptop that contains the ISV certified FireGL 5000 video card. This is essentially a Mobility x700 with drivers certified for OpenGL and DirectX software/3D development. 1gig of ram; 2ghz Sonoma Core p5;

Considering that this laptop is ISV certified for OpenGL and DirectX, I wonder what the hell Firraxis is doing. This is an unheard of level of incompetence on their parts reminescent of the problems with CCTP's release.

Ignoring the fact that this laptop is ISV certified for opengl and directx, the mobility x700 chipset is EXACTLY the same as the desktop core; the only difference are (1) 128mb instead of 256 (2) PowerPlay featyures (disabled in performance modes). If anyone at firraxis ever tells you that Laptops with ATI x700s, x800s based cores arent supported, then they are lying dogs that are just trying to shut you up. The hardware is the same stuff as in desktops. (the x200s on the other hand are kinda sucky and I think are mobile only; they may in fact not be supported).

This sort of behavior is just so insulting. I understand the pressures to release software early and can even accept that some known bugs will make it into 1.0; but what they have done is just over the top. How do you release a game when any amount of runtime testing will reveal SEVERE problems on what constitutes 50% of target hardware. They dont deserve our money.

I am going to return the game for store credit and download the warez version when the 1.1 patch is out. If the game is PERFECT I MIGHT buy it again.

[entemedor]

Where are gone the programmers that twenty years ago were able to do EUROPE ABLAZE on a Commodore 64 (48K RAM!!!)?

Now my PC has one million times that RAM, with millions of hard-disk space, and games like CivIV still make me feel my computer has little memory, little speed, little power...

Perhaps to play Civ V (if it's ever released) I will need to borrow NASA's computers...

(Yes, I too get random, annoying CTDs...)

[Repairman_Jack]

Hah hah. Having worked with NASA, I can promise you that the last thing you want is their computers.

[entemedor]

And bet your first computer was a (space) Odissey...
(I just read one of your posts!)

Seriously, it's difficult to understand how NASA managed to put a man in the Moon in the 60s, with computers occupying a whole room to resolve the maths my PC does now with a hand tied behind its back. Or perhaps some revisionists are right and man has never stepped over the Moon...

[Repairman_Jack]

IRT entemedor:
I'm sure that, at the time, their computers were very advanced. The thing is, I don't think they've updated since they first GOT those computers. In my space job, we still used punch cards to enter information. Even keyboards are high tech to me.

[SpencerH]

Maybe that explains why the mars rovers had so little RAM onboard. Hundreds of millions of dollars and the thing has the computing capability of a calculator.

[terje439]

as so many others I too have some issues with Civ4.

1. On large+ maps the game will eventually be too slow to play, this seems to be due to the AI's actions. To check I ran a big game with continents, and did not explore anything, nor did I accept any world map trades, and as long as the AI nations were in the "black" portion of the world map, no problem, so I saved played another 50 or so turns, still no slow down. Then I reloaded, and traded all maps, and immediately I started to have a slow down on everything.

2. From time to time, if I move the cursor around, the game will freeze, remove all graphics except the very earth, showing only mountains/deserts/sea/lakes/grassland/forest etc, but no roads/resources/cities/units

3. Random CTD


My system is more than capable to cope (well it is supposed to), with 1 gig RAM, some 150Gig free HD space, 256Mb graphics card, no internal sound or such. And I had no problems running games like BF2/swg (on high detail)/wow etc. I have tried new drivers for everything, older drivers nothing helps, the problems are the same with CIV4 v1.00, v1.08 and v1.09

[Brad Mayer]

Gee, there's a 1.09 out too? I'm using 1.08 and it has made a difference in that now there is the prospect of finishing my first Large Epic game!

Basically, I am able to generally complete ~10 turns in the mid-late game before a CTD, and it CTDs in a more "orderly" manner, allowing the Win OS to put ip a Fatal Exception dialog. Your display is hosed and then reboot.

But I think that this persistent error is likely the reason they pulled the patch. What else could it possibly be?

I expect it to run slow on my "subminimal" 32Mb nvidia T&L card (but actually I am quite happy with the speed nevertheless, although I have to wait a bit the first time it needs to load a "tech discovery" or "build completed" dialog - swapping from HD? But it is only really noticable the first time the dialog is called in any given Civ4 session. Afterwards not really a problem. Maybe these dialogs get rendered the 1st time and then are cached?

Oh well, programming speculations are a professional habit of mine...I'm definitely happier with this intermediate patch.

[Donatelllo]

Originally posted by DocMWood
Let me see if I have this straight....

I have a computer that meets all the requirements on the box....

There's a list of 12 known problems.....

And now I'm going to have to go back to college to get a degree in computer technology so I can get the game to work? I'm a smart guy, and I'll grant that half the things listed are easy to do, but some of those seem a bit excessive to play a game I paid the company good money so I could, well, play it.

You've got to be kidding.

Why not patch the game?

I could not have said it better myself! $90 bucks I paid to become a guinea pig tester for Civ 4. Keep releasing great games in a rush and this is what you get. I hope all the marketing guys and the managers at 2K Games are enjoying their new cars and other luxuries paid for with money that we have thrown away on a game that should not have been released till it was 100% fixed.

No wonder so many people are going over to console gaming. *Checks out the price of a new XBox...

[WilliamEllis]

Originally posted by terje439
as so many others I too have some issues with Civ4.

1. On large+ maps the game will eventually be too slow to play, this seems to be due to the AI's actions. To check I ran a big game with continents, and did not explore anything, nor did I accept any world map trades, and as long as the AI nations were in the "black" portion of the world map, no problem, so I saved played another 50 or so turns, still no slow down. Then I reloaded, and traded all maps, and immediately I started to have a slow down on everything.

2. From time to time, if I move the cursor around, the game will freeze, remove all graphics except the very earth, showing only mountains/deserts/sea/lakes/grassland/forest etc, but no roads/resources/cities/units

3. Random CTD


My system is more than capable to cope (well it is supposed to), with 1 gig RAM, some 150Gig free HD space, 256Mb graphics card, no internal sound or such. And I had no problems running games like BF2/swg (on high detail)/wow etc. I have tried new drivers for everything, older drivers nothing helps, the problems are the same with CIV4 v1.00, v1.08 and v1.09

I have pretty much the same set up but with a 128 vid card and I play BF2 and SWG also-no issues.

I see a lot of people talking about clearing the cache but my game doesn't have one. WHen I foloowed the directionw posted, I find the Civ 4 folder but no directory folder.
Also, I have a Compaq 6310us and I went through the Compaq site for drivers. There hasn't been an update since '02 I'm not sure what drivers I need.
It has options for video issues for NVidia cards but model numbers a lot lower than what I have.
Then it has a ROM flash driver but I ahve no idea what that is.
If anyone could help because 10-25 minute load times, CTDs and Blue screens of death are getting annoying.