Fix for saved game crashes?

[JohnUghrin]

Have we discovered a fix for crashes that happen on saved games?

For some odd reason, whenever I load a saved game, I can only play for a short time before the game crashes the computer into a coma requiring a hard reboot. Last time it "cross-linked" my pagefile.sys with memory.dmp and almost scragged my XP installation.

I suspect, but don't really know, that the problem has to do with great person "radiant" animations.

I find this particularly odd, because it happens only on games which have been saved and loaded again.

[seebs]

Haven't seen anything at all like that, and the "cross-linked" thing is absolutely and unequivocally an OS or driver problem. Even if Civ4 is triggering it, if a program can do that to the disk, the OS is busted.

[JohnUghrin]

Originally posted by seebs
Haven't seen anything at all like that, and the "cross-linked" thing is absolutely and unequivocally an OS or driver problem. Even if Civ4 is triggering it, if a program can do that to the disk, the OS is busted.

OS or driver problem?

No.

Civ4 (or any other program) could easily (absolutely and unequivocally, even ) cause such a problem through memory management issues "leaks" that overwrite important sections of the OS in memory. Other posters have already ranted at length about apparent memory leaks in Civ4.

There are indeed other ways that Civ4 might be causing the problem. Some might be attributable to hardware or drivers being pushed, but I have reasons for believing this to not be the case.

Keep in mind that Civ (and only Civ, and only when I try to play a previously saved game at that) is busting my machine down to a forced hard reboot. When that happens, virtually anything can result errorwise, because the OS can be interrupted in the middle of File Table operations or another disk management task. Almost any file could be corrupted during the reboot, too. (depending on where the drive heads are positioned at power-off/up.)

So let's recap...I have Civ4 and only Civ4, that under a repeatable, specific circumstance crashes my machine. Other programs of similar graphic intensity do not evoke similar issues. All the drivers are the latest and greatest, and my OS (in spite of being M$) is just about rock-solid except in this one specific repeatable circumstance involving Civ4.

Civ4 or OS....yup, its a poser alright.

That said...If you want to say that XPSP2 is busted because unlike Linux it actually allows user processes like a game wreck the entire setup...then yeah, I agree, it is an OS problem.

Look, I want to say Civ4 is great and doesn't have problems as much as anyone else, but I can't realistically say that. The copy-protection scheme is jittery and over-sensitive, its got all sorts of graphics issues (even with cards and drivers it claims to support, ATI and NV both), it crashes on all sorts of machines without any easily evident reasons. The tech support phone people are audibly exhausted and frustrated with the level of complaints and problems they've been handling...heck just read the threads around here...

[seebs]

If a program can overwrite part of the OS, it is a bug in the OS. Even Windows has protections against that. They may suck, but there is some protection.

Video card drivers, by contrast, can smash other parts of the OS, as can sound card drivers.

I'm not saying Civ4 doesn't have problems. I'm saying that crashing the machine is not one of them for many people, and since we all have the same Civ4, the crashes must be coming from something else. I have a game where I can't build cottages because any "build cottage" order crashes the game, but ONLY the game. The OS is fine.

Check for BIOS updates, motherboard chipset drivers, and stuff like that. Especially chipset drivers can contribute to really weird bugs that only show up occasionally.

[evro]

BSOD

Have a similar problem. While playing the blue screen of death appears on the screen, i know this s a serious
windows error but never happens running any other
appls. could be 15 min or even an hour of play and BSOD
any solutions ?!

XP SP2, 1 GB MEM, gyg 9550 ?!

[JohnUghrin]

Originally posted by seebs
If a program can overwrite part of the OS, it is a bug in the OS. Even Windows has protections against that. They may suck, but there is some protection.

Said protections only working when a program plays nice with the API for windows. Said protections can also be easily bypassed by programs that ask Windows "really nicely"...or else you couldn't get a commercial disk defragmentation program, or memory manager, or....

Originally posted by seebs
Video card drivers, by contrast, can smash other parts of the OS, as can sound card drivers.

I'm not saying Civ4 doesn't have problems. I'm saying that crashing the machine is not one of them for many people, and since we all have the same Civ4, the crashes must be coming from something else. I have a game where I can't build cottages because any "build cottage" order crashes the game, but ONLY the game. The OS is fine.

Check for BIOS updates, motherboard chipset drivers, and stuff like that. Especially chipset drivers can contribute to really weird bugs that only show up occasionally.

Been there, done that, didn't even get a lousy T-shirt.

Listen....the game only crashes my machine after loading a saved game to play. It plays (depending on the saved game) for a turn, part of a turn, or a few turns. In any case, it always crashes at the same point for the same saved game. Otherwise, It can happily play a large map in 1280x1024 all the way to the end.

Now, granted I haven't had time to play much in saved games, but I haven't noticed the graphics, sound or processing requirements being that different. So I have difficulty believing that it has to do with my drivers for any of those, because then it should also crash during a normal game.

It seems far more likely to me that, somewhere in the "load a saved game" routine, some file access, memory access or other permission is not being properly closed. On some machines, this would cause an immediate problem, on others it wouldn't (depending on a whole host of things...registry entries, pagefile setup, fragmentation of harddrive, disk monitoring software, physical memory, etc.).

Another possibility is that its mucking up its save or load process and putting in data that it later can't deal with. I tend to consider this a less likely scenario due to the reasons you mention above.

A third possibility is that somewhere in the interface graphics for loading a game there is some kind of memory leakage or problem. This would only evidence itself on systems where that graphics memory is later encountered. I doubt this is the issue, because I would expect that to become readily apparent upon starting the saved game.

In any case the problems all come down to an issue that resides only in the save or load game routines of Civ4. Unless, of course, you believe that there are two entirely seperate games programs...one for running saved games and one for running other games.

[JohnUghrin]

Re: BSOD

Originally posted by evro
Have a similar problem. While playing the blue screen of death appears on the screen, i know this s a serious
windows error but never happens running any other
appls. could be 15 min or even an hour of play and BSOD
any solutions ?!

XP SP2, 1 GB MEM, gyg 9550 ?!

Sorry, I've never been lucky enough to get a BSOD from CIV, just a comatose machine.

One trick to try...assuming you've done all the driver updates that don't seem to fix anything.

Go to your start menu...find the "Run" item in the bottom right column. Click on it and type "msconfig" in the box. In the very last tab "Startup" you will see a list of items that your machine runs, or starts to run when it starts up. You can disable all of the them and then test each one to see if it works or doesn't work.
WARNING! You probably will be disabling normally good software like anti-virus and firewalls. Be sure to pay attention to what ends up causing the problem, don't just leave them all turned off.

I don't know if that will help or not...

[JohnUghrin]

Possible Solution

Well I don't know if this will help anyone else, but apparently my problem was yet another aspect of the Autosave bugs in Civ4. Turned off autosave and then it worked.


For now...anyway.

[tac2]

John: I had the exact same problem as you described in your first post. Hard reboot and everything. For me it happend as soon as I clicked on a unit. I think it *might* be a sound thing as when you click a unit it's supposed to say something like "At your service". I found a fix for it though. Read about my workaround here: http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...hreadid=143320

Maybe we should compare our hardware?

I've got a MSI KT6 Delta motherboard (VIA-chipset) with a built-in Cmedia audio chipset. ATI Radeon 9800 gfx-card, 1gb RAM, AMD2800XP CPU and a Maxtor 40gb IDE harddisk.

[JohnUghrin]

Originally posted by tac2
Maybe we should compare our hardware?

I've got a MSI KT6 Delta motherboard (VIA-chipset) with a built-in Cmedia audio chipset. ATI Radeon 9800 gfx-card, 1gb RAM, AMD2800XP CPU and a Maxtor 40gb IDE harddisk.

That's very interesting....I've got and MSI KM400 motherboard with a VIA chipset as well. Including onboard VIA1617a codec soundcard. ATI Radeon 9550, 1Gb RAM, AMD2600 cpu and an 80gb disk.

Makes me wonder if there isn't something there.

With the autosave feature disabled, mine runs fine, so I find it hard to conceive of how sound could be involved in mine. Is there a sound alert for autosaves? I'm sure as evolution not checking.

Your solution on you thread seems to indicate that game is having some trouble reconstructing its cache after loading a saved game, this makes lot of sense