Fatal Error (Bad Memory Allocation)--Wonder Movies

[The Drunkard]

I'm facing a serious problem that's ruining the Civ experience for me...

Before I d/l patch 1.52 the game would play choppy on my 2.0 Gigahertz computer, but the wonder movies were active (and I could actually play the game aquiring Wonders)...

Now it seems the game runs MUCH smoother, but when I develop a wonder the movies choke up, it refuses to play (except the Music), and when I click done the entire game slows down...

Then when I end the sub-sequent turn after developing the wonder, the game experiences a fatal error, saying Bad Allocation memory, Allocation error...An the game shuts down...

If I save after having developed a Wonder, and proceed to load the game before ending the turn, it says it can't uncompress game data...

Please if anyone can help me with this issue, I'd very much appreciate it.......I'm a huge Civ fan.

[DrDan]

wonder video memory allocation failure

I've got the same (very similar?) problem; thought more info might help triangulate...

Have had problems viewing wonder movies after patching to 1.52, but for past couple of days, major crashes - it's pretty far into the game post-patch, i.e. the Broadway wonder.

The same error occurs as The Drunkard describes, but I also get a weird audio hang -- like 50x slowed down music. After a couple of minutes of that, the audio stops, the wonder movie pop-up window bluescreens, and an OK button appears. Can go thru that turn (at about 1/10th game-response speed), and then ye olde Fatal_Error upon trying to save or end-turn.

I've tried all the (simple) usual fixes, including the driver updates to my GeForce MX440 card (yeah, I know it's minimal...), decreasing the hardware accelleration in my WinXP display properties, turning all my in-game Graphics Options settings to bare-bones, etc.

Besides getting Firaxis to add a &@$#% 'turn off video movies' button for their inevitable next patch, anybody got any ideas?!

P4 2.0GHz, 512Mb, WinXPsp2, GeForce MX440@64Mb

[The Drunkard]

^^ That's exactly my problem.................I've fixed it by stopping all movies all togeather..

It sucks though that some of the cinematic experience is now lost, but atleast I can play the game completely...

If anyone has info on how to fix the situation without removing all the movies that'd be great..

Edit--DrDan you can turn off all the movies, just check out the stuttering movie fix on the Civ4 quick fix thread...

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=141473

[DrDan]

For any lurkers, thought I'd save you a step and paste the workaround here. Thanks much, Drunkard - I owe you one beer!

[Stuttering Movies and particularly movie-related crashes. If the movies are hurting your gameplay to the point you would like them to be turned off, try going to the civilization4.ini file (located in \%username%\My Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4\) and editing the entry "nomovies=0" to read "nomovies=1". ]

... now why couldn'tthey've put that into one of the Options boxes...!?!

[Destroyer]

I get this message when I try to reload a game. I need to quit the game if I want to load.

I have modded the map to a larger size, but I have no other performance problems.