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I have a Athlon 2000+ XP processor, a Nvidia Geforce FX 5200 Graphics Card (81.95 drivers), Nforce(1) motherboard (by Asus), 768 megs of ram, and I use the onboard sound. I also have 3 gigs set aside for pagefile usage. I have gotten the latest Python .dll, the latest .dll for the audio system the game uses, and the latest blink and zlib files. These files have not helped my problems to any noticeable degree.
I have two oddities that occur in my current games, and one that I am not currently dealing with. The one I am not dealing with is minor audio glitches, and I have turned the sound for the game off for the time being. This didn't help my other two problems.
The first is the wretched CTD (Crash to Desktop for those that don't know). As is common with most this happens on a large map mid-way through a game. I can load the game, play a few turns, but it will inevitably crash (usually before 5 turns have passed). I have the logging enabled, but the problems it is reported seem non-crashing problems as some xml editing greatly reduced the complaints but not the crashes. I think my virus scanner may be partly to blame (Mcafee). Alas when I was testing this theory I had an entirely new problem occur. There was an error with Python (first time the python error log had anything). The game crashed. As I have spent most of the day working on this, I figured I'd make a post about my findings (such as they are) and work on it more tomorrow--that will start with more testing with the on-access virus scan disabled.
The second problem is that the game freezes temporarily at odd moments. When it freezes nothing on the screen moves, though all graphics are rendered (including the circle indicated what unit I have selected if applicable). The mouse will also still move and I can go to the windows Task Manager. It remains in this frozen state for 10 seconds up to perhaps a minute, then returns to normal (sometimes it crashes when it is like this, sometimes it crashes when it hasn't frozen). The odd thing is that there is nothing that should be freezing it up, as far as I can see. For instance, I will have just finished moving a unit and the game goes to a new unit. AFTER it gets to the new unit and has the unit selected and all the graphics rendered it freezes (if it is going to freeze). It often does this when moving from one city to another at the beginning of a turn when I have to decide what they should produce (but all the windows renderd when it freezes). Furthermore, my system goes from the normal 3-40% CPU usage of Civ IV to 100% usage, and it stays at 100% until it is no longer frozen. Memory usage changes little, though sometimes RAM is *freed*, whilst I have never notice the pagefiling change. I can think of no good reason for this behavior (and it is Civ using up all the processing power as the task manager shows).
Hmm, that all sounds rather gloomy, but I have found some good things too. First, I got rid of the sluggish response my system initially had in this large map. Units now respond to orders immediately and my commands are similarly listened to immediately. All of the following played a role in this fix:
1. In the INI I changed "Set max frame rate clamp (0 means none)" from 0 to a fixed number (20 in my case, though when I used 30 tonight it seemed to work fine).
2. In the INI I changed "Set to 1 for dynamic animation paging" from 1 to 0. (Note that the last two changes produce small effects by themselves, but a quite large difference together....I do not know why, animation paging should help the game go faster, one would think).
3. I unpacked all of the art files into the custom directory. Then I deleted the Interface folder (keeping it inexplicably made the game crash on any load or new game--I also deleted the camera folder, though I am not sure if it was causing a problem).
4. In the INI I changed "Disable PAK memory mapping (May affect performance)" from 0 to 1. Please note that this must be done with 3 otherwise there is a large performance degredation (at least with me).
All four of these steps together improved my system performance substantially. Animations are smooth even on large maps...I just have these odd freezing errors and still CTDs.
Tomorrow I will look at some more ini settings in detail. "Tree Region Cutting" looks like it might have problems based on the log files (though I am not exactly sure what this is). I am also messing around with turning off Trilinear Filtering on the minimap--I don't see why it needs something so fancy. I will also look at "Sync Input to Smooth Interface". Beyond that I don't have a lot of other ideas, beyond studying up on python and then profiling all the scripts to see where time is getting chewed up (assuming it IS a python problem, of course). I suppose I could always try older drivers for my graphics card...I shall probably do that as a last resort.
Anyhow, perhaps this will be helpful for some.
-Drachasor
PS. Note that I have both background music and the audio turned off via the ini (redundant, I know), and I have windowed mode turned on via the ini. Lastly I have also disabled the wonder movies. I was getting some odd audio errors and wonder movies were sometimes messed up, but I now think these were merely red herrings as far as crashing is concerned. Oh, I of course have basically all the logging enabled.
I have two oddities that occur in my current games, and one that I am not currently dealing with. The one I am not dealing with is minor audio glitches, and I have turned the sound for the game off for the time being. This didn't help my other two problems.
The first is the wretched CTD (Crash to Desktop for those that don't know). As is common with most this happens on a large map mid-way through a game. I can load the game, play a few turns, but it will inevitably crash (usually before 5 turns have passed). I have the logging enabled, but the problems it is reported seem non-crashing problems as some xml editing greatly reduced the complaints but not the crashes. I think my virus scanner may be partly to blame (Mcafee). Alas when I was testing this theory I had an entirely new problem occur. There was an error with Python (first time the python error log had anything). The game crashed. As I have spent most of the day working on this, I figured I'd make a post about my findings (such as they are) and work on it more tomorrow--that will start with more testing with the on-access virus scan disabled.
The second problem is that the game freezes temporarily at odd moments. When it freezes nothing on the screen moves, though all graphics are rendered (including the circle indicated what unit I have selected if applicable). The mouse will also still move and I can go to the windows Task Manager. It remains in this frozen state for 10 seconds up to perhaps a minute, then returns to normal (sometimes it crashes when it is like this, sometimes it crashes when it hasn't frozen). The odd thing is that there is nothing that should be freezing it up, as far as I can see. For instance, I will have just finished moving a unit and the game goes to a new unit. AFTER it gets to the new unit and has the unit selected and all the graphics rendered it freezes (if it is going to freeze). It often does this when moving from one city to another at the beginning of a turn when I have to decide what they should produce (but all the windows renderd when it freezes). Furthermore, my system goes from the normal 3-40% CPU usage of Civ IV to 100% usage, and it stays at 100% until it is no longer frozen. Memory usage changes little, though sometimes RAM is *freed*, whilst I have never notice the pagefiling change. I can think of no good reason for this behavior (and it is Civ using up all the processing power as the task manager shows).
Hmm, that all sounds rather gloomy, but I have found some good things too. First, I got rid of the sluggish response my system initially had in this large map. Units now respond to orders immediately and my commands are similarly listened to immediately. All of the following played a role in this fix:
1. In the INI I changed "Set max frame rate clamp (0 means none)" from 0 to a fixed number (20 in my case, though when I used 30 tonight it seemed to work fine).
2. In the INI I changed "Set to 1 for dynamic animation paging" from 1 to 0. (Note that the last two changes produce small effects by themselves, but a quite large difference together....I do not know why, animation paging should help the game go faster, one would think).
3. I unpacked all of the art files into the custom directory. Then I deleted the Interface folder (keeping it inexplicably made the game crash on any load or new game--I also deleted the camera folder, though I am not sure if it was causing a problem).
4. In the INI I changed "Disable PAK memory mapping (May affect performance)" from 0 to 1. Please note that this must be done with 3 otherwise there is a large performance degredation (at least with me).
All four of these steps together improved my system performance substantially. Animations are smooth even on large maps...I just have these odd freezing errors and still CTDs.
Tomorrow I will look at some more ini settings in detail. "Tree Region Cutting" looks like it might have problems based on the log files (though I am not exactly sure what this is). I am also messing around with turning off Trilinear Filtering on the minimap--I don't see why it needs something so fancy. I will also look at "Sync Input to Smooth Interface". Beyond that I don't have a lot of other ideas, beyond studying up on python and then profiling all the scripts to see where time is getting chewed up (assuming it IS a python problem, of course). I suppose I could always try older drivers for my graphics card...I shall probably do that as a last resort.
Anyhow, perhaps this will be helpful for some.
-Drachasor
PS. Note that I have both background music and the audio turned off via the ini (redundant, I know), and I have windowed mode turned on via the ini. Lastly I have also disabled the wonder movies. I was getting some odd audio errors and wonder movies were sometimes messed up, but I now think these were merely red herrings as far as crashing is concerned. Oh, I of course have basically all the logging enabled.
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