Poll: Crashing During Mid/Late Game

[Sirian]

Originally posted by Soren Johnson Firaxis
That's a pity... I was going to ask you to e-mail them to me, but that's probably a bit bigger than our system can handle!

He could choose the Normal Dump option instead of Full Dump. This will produce a dump that is about 16 megs and will compress to about 1meg, which is well email-able.

This can only work for future crashes not past ones, but it is something.

Same for anybody who is able to get a Dump from a crash instance. Maybe Soren can set up an email account at Firaxis (or invite you to send to his email) for those who are willing to help out on this front by sending in their Dumps.

Soren?


- Sirian

[Sootbeard]

I've been getting the dump files, but I don't know where they are going or what they're named. Where do I find them?

[markreyes]

This Fixed my Crashes

I was getting Crashes all the time late in the game on large maps with about 40% of the map revealed, until I could no longer even play the game. Loading from my saved game would take about 5 minutes but it would never get into the game and crash the system right away.

well, it was driving me nuts, I tried everything I could find in all the forums.

Until I installed a Hardware Monitor for the Video Card.

The Video Card Monitor had an option that showed how much Free Texture Memory was available. Well I loaded up my save game that Always Crashed during loading. The Game crashed and put me back to Desktop. The Hardware Monitor said 0 Free Texture memory available.

I rebooted, went into the BIOS, increased my AGP Appature to from 64 to 512 Megs and than booted into windows.

Loaded up the Hardware Monitor, Loaded Civ4, loaded my Saved game and BAM! it worked, loaded up in about 1 minute.

I exited Civ4 and looked at the hardware Monitor. turns out that I was using 275 Megs of Texture Memory while I was in CIV4

I tested this by putting my AGP Appature back to 64 Megs and it crashed, tested it at 256 and 512 and it worked fine. I now leave it at 512. (I Now plan in crushing Egypt)

My system is a 2.4 Ghz Athlon XP with 2 Gigs of Ram and a Radeon 9800 Pro with 128 Megs of VRAM.

I registered here in hopes that this information will help.

[Dr,ape]

Thank you.

This may be the best hope of a fix now. I will try it tonight.

It made sense. I had the same suspicion, too.

[Dr,ape]

Nope - forgot I am using GeForce 6600 now... no AGP settings. craaap...

[thamer]

Setting the texture quality to low should also help.
Video and system memory usage is going to be reduced in the next patch.

[Datajack Franit]

today had my first crash, tried to resume game but still occurs everytime I reload the save file. I guess I have to wait until I get a new pc, it was getting sluggish anyway..

[markreyes]

I tried lowering textures to low during my testing. It would still crash. However I never recorded how much texture memory was being used with low textures.

I've also lowered all the graphics settings to low and tried all the AA settings inside Civ4. I also tried all the settings for Graphics inside the ATI control panel.

If I may ask, how do you plan to lower system resource usage without affecting performance?

What, if any, Texture compression does CIV4 support?
and does Civ4 contain an internal FPS counter?

thanks
-Mark

[Alashar]

I'm still crashing mid to late game on Large/Huge maps with every graphics option either on low or turned off.

AMD 3000+
PC3200 1GB RAM
GeForce FX 5600

Is there another patch to be released soon?

[PGM]

Originally posted by thamer
Video and system memory usage is going to be reduced in the next patch.

Could this solve the black terrain issue?

[Harrier UK]

Originally posted by Soren Johnson Firaxis


have you been able to send the error reports to MS?

I have already sent three reports in the last month to MS. At least one related to a device driver error can not remember what the other two were now.

My problems are late game slowdowns (standard map)/ the game freezing for 20 minutes or more then restarting/ and complete lockups requiring a re-boot of the system (unplugging from the mains).

I have also had about 6 occaisions when my system ran out of memory resources after I have finished playing civ4 and kept the system running. My memory manager program goes into meltdown flooding the screen with alarms until it runs out of memeory. This has only happened after playing Civ4.

System:

ASUS k8v Athlon 64 Motherboard
AMD 64 3200 processor
512Mb RAM
128Mb Radeon 9800SE AIW.

[Drachasor]

Originally posted by Harrier UK
I have also had about 6 occaisions when my system ran out of memory resources after I have finished playing civ4 and kept the system running. My memory manager program goes into meltdown flooding the screen with alarms until it runs out of memeory. This has only happened after playing Civ4.

Civ sometimes seems to take a long time to actually close the program. I've noticed it running in the background even after I've exited the game. Sometimes it has stayed there so long that I manually told Windows to kill the process. I think it always eventually exits, but sometimes this can take many minutes.

-Drachasor

[Ramble]

Originally posted by thamer
Setting the texture quality to low should also help.
Video and system memory usage is going to be reduced in the next patch.

I just want the Firaxis team to know that there is at least one gamer who really appreciates members of the Firaxis team interacting with us on the status of the problems many of us are having. I have noticed the tone of has changed on these threads in the past few days. Thank you for giving us a status update.

[Russian_King]

i crash regardless of map size it just freezes sometimes... but not often!

[FinnishGuy]

I've had one crash on standard map. I have played only two full games. End game with lots of stuff on map gets sluggish and jerky, but it's still playable. Except the globe map which looks something like 3 fps... Civ4 graphics settings are on medium.

P4 3.2GHz
1 GB
Nvidia 6800GT
latest official drivers on everything