FINALLY! Official word on the patch!

[seebs]

Well, huh. That was a very short window of opportunity. *sigh*

I do hope they figure out the random CTDs. I sent in what could have been a fairly good bug report with detailed information about a reproducible bug, but I think Take 2 support ate it with their form response and didn't actually read the contents.

[ikajaste]

Damn. It certainly would have been nice to try out if even the buggy patch would fix problems for me. Since I'm currently not able to play, I'd want to try a patch even if it might have bugs in it. If it doesn't work, I could always reinstall.

[CIVGreekGod]

I was one of the lucky ones (depending on your perspective) that was able to download the patch. The only way to get the patch was to update it through the game so if you can't launch the game to begin with, you are SOL. I would assume that they would post the file on the site for a manual download. It has a windows installer program so it would only make sense that you can download it outside the game.

Performance seemed to be better and definately tweaked sound portions of the game. Bink video worked better. I still have to run it in a windowed environment versus full screen, disappointing. Definitely better diplomacy code!!

I hope I don't have to re-install the game for the next patch!!

[player1]

I also tried pulled off 1.08.
It run fine for me.

The only bug I noced was that clicking on WoldBuilder icon won't activate it (but using Ctrl-W still works).

Exempt that I had no single bad thing to say about it.
Of course, game runed fine without it for me too.

[uglyduck]

Patch is till here:-

http://files.filefront.com/Civ4Patch108exe/;4384947;;/fileinfo.html

[CivManiac1]

Originally posted by Gnasche


Civ4 is 2000 times larger than any game you had on a 386. More code = more bugs. It will get worse as games get bigger.

2000 time bigger! LOL ... in memory use certainly, but not in code. Having been a game developer/producer for most of the 90's I know all too well what the issues are... The developers are pushed by the publishers to deliver product for the Christmas rush which means September. As a result games which should not be released until months later end up being shipped full of bugs... Good publishers such as the console manufacturers (Sony, Nintendo, etc.) will rarely release product that has not passed extensive QA testing. Unfortunately, PC publishers have always been notorious for releasing products with bugs, since it is quite easy to send out a patch later.

BTW, some of those games we wrote for the 386 approached 1 million lines of code... I would expect Civ4 to have a similar number of lines of code, perhaps less with the advent of object oriented code and multi-media support libraries such as directx. In the 'old' days we had to create our own multi-media support libraries and deal with hardware issues directly. Many of todays 'bugs' result from quirks in the software development tools and support libraries. Bugs used to be easy to fix (i.e. buffer overflows, null pointers, logic errors). Today I spend more time trying to find out what a cryptic Microsoft .NET error message actually means than I do debugging code.