v1.16f: Issues? Bugs? This is the thread

[Desert Dog]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Unavoidable Crash

Originally posted by Martina



Soren,

We have identified the driver behind the bug: By using trial and error and disbanding units of the same type, we learned that:

In the above attached game, workers crash the game - as soon as we take out ALL workers (from the human player ie Greece), the game runs smoothly into the next turns. However at the very moment we build a new worker from scratch in one of our cities to compensate the disbanded ones, the game crashes once more (assumably at the time when the game activates the worker for orders).

This is definitely a bug as I can promise you the above attached savegame is definitely a new game from a fresh re-install of Civ3 1.16f without any modifications.

Please help, as we can not play any further until we know how to fix this.


Thanks,
Martina

Remove the patch to solve issues. We will need to wait once more for another patch hopefully they get the cotton out of their brains and make a good patch this time.

Desert Dog

[Martina]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Unavoidable Crash

Originally posted by Obi Wan


Martina, did you put the worker in automated mode? Did you try to let it work manually on certain tiles only?

Obi Wan,

Yes I tried that as well with no success unfortunately. It's really crazy, as long as I do not have workers in my civilization, everything is perfect. However any workers (be it my "old buggy" ones not doing anything or be it new ones I create after I disband the "old buggy" ones) in my civilization will crash the game in the next turn.

This is very frustrating indeed as you might imagine.

Thanks,
Martina


P.S. I believe the whole thing is more an overall savegame corruption bug as in justin_sayn's case, removing units does not change the picture for his savegame. It seems that at some point in time during random occasions, a savegame gets corrupt. We have known this from CTP as well, however at that time, you immediately noticed when your game got corrupt. It seems that in Civ3 the corruption occurs but you see the results of that potentially much much later. I might be completely wrong, but this is my current conclusion.

[Obi Wan]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Unavoidable Crash

Originally posted by Martina
This is very frustrating indeed as you might imagine.

Indeed, I'm frustrated, too. On the weekend I'll load my saved game in an hex editor an see if I can find any obvious odds in the file... I'm still hoping that Soren or Jeffrey care about this problem and offer a solution.

[Martina]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Unavoidable Crash

Originally posted by Obi Wan

Indeed, I'm frustrated, too. On the weekend I'll load my saved game in an hex editor an see if I can find any obvious odds in the file... I'm still hoping that Soren or Jeffrey care about this problem and offer a solution.

Yes let's hope our best. I would be already happy if they could confirm that this is a bug. That would at least tell me that sooner or later I can play Civ3 again.

Martina

[Redstar]

to Martina

* A save corruption problem was fixed. (this from a list of the patch fixes)


I would say this means all save games that were corrupted will stay corrupted. So you must either revert back to a clean save of your game. Or, you must forget it and start another game.


---
In general..i am running civ3 under win2k pro with a 1.3 ghz AMD system.

In all the days (playtime) i have played now, i have only had 1 crash (and curiously that happened as i was exiting the game.)

[herwin]

Re: Re: Copy protection problems

Originally posted by Jeffrey Morris FIRAXIS


Contact Infogrames tech support. They have a non-safedisc exe they can send to you after verifying your copy of the game.

Jeff

Thanks, Jeff, for the suggestion. I just tried this (in the UK), and they were totally clueless. Should I contact tech support in the US instead?

[Asmodeus]

These are some bugs/issues I've noticed - they were in the original version and the patched version.

I've noticed a problem related to the 'Monitor Goes Into Standby Mode' bug.

I have an old Gateway P3 500MHz, NVidea TNT, 256MB running Windows 98 (1st edition i think).

First-off, the game does run nicely on my machine (despite it's age!) with few of the problems that others have reported.

However....

When the game first loads the screen goes black just prior to the excellent intro movie - this forces my monitor into standby mode. God knows why.

So I hit the 'on' button on my monitor and it wakes back up again for the movie. Then when the movie ends the screen goes black again for a moment prior to showing the main menu - this again forces my monitor into standby mode. Once again I can hit the 'on' button to resume playing but why is this happening?

I dont recall this ever happening with my monitor before installing Civ3 but last night (after I was a bit narked with Civ3) I played Sudden Strike and exactly the same thing happened with the intro movie on that game too!!! Yikes. What's happening here? Has it changed some system settings? Is my monitor broken? Is it a DirectX thing?

I assumed it was some fault with Windows/Monitor until I heard others have suffered similar problems.

I've also noticed the 'stuck music' problem. I have a 52X CD rom rather than a clunky DVD rom so this must be a software or sound card issue ( i have a soundblaster varient). Music seems to get stuck and repeat over and over in between tracks (also that drum beat sound whenever an event happens) - plus as someone else mentioned, only one or two bits of music ever seem to play in each era which is rather repetitive.

I've had occasional 'The program performed an illegal operation' errors that boot me back to Windows, but I cant identify what causes it. It seems to happen after I've clicked one of the 'hyperlink-style' Diplomacy options or maybe the Research Complete pop-up window. This has only happened 2 or 3 times in as many weeks.

A few design gripes....

These new blue 'hyperlink style' options (e.g. on the Diplomacy/trade screens and all dialog windows) are too close together so some of us who enjoy a beer or two whilst running our empires frequently accidently declare war or accept ridiculous trades!!!! Please space them apart a little, or allow the cursor keys to move up/down through the options ala Civ2.

When workers on autopilot are improving land near a rival border and that border expands so that the worker is now provoking war by being in rival territory - please make them Get The Hell Out and not continue building that mine for another 4 turns whilst the increasingly angry Zulus plot my complete destruction!!!

When land & ship units are stacked together in a port, please make the land units active before the ship-units. It's anoying to waste turns waiting for a settler to reach the port only to discover he is there and waiting but you've just told the ship to skip a turn. Likewise with stacked land units, please dont vanish to the other side of the globe to that active explorer when there is a raging battle to be fort.

Armies - I've only ever had one, but could the units in the Army please be upgradable? As soon as I got my first and only Army, world peace broke out and it didn't see war for another 3 or 4 hundred years. By which time Knights had kind of lost their edge! If not, could there at least be a way to disband that army which is less wastefull, maybe they could help build a wonder for 30% of the shields instead of 100%? I love the idea about having naval 'armies' - aka Fleets, are these possible do you think?

Do Coastal Fortresses really work? I've never seen one fire a shot in anger.

Hoover Dam - please replace the Coal plants rather than just Add Hydro plants, the polution is a nightmare!

Can we have a couple of Civ2 bits back please?

Namely:

*can we have Farms back as there is a massive difference between a few muddy streams (irrigation) and 21st Century chemically enhanced intensive farming. Also the Farms look a lot nicer than those irrigated messes.

*Alpine troops - or at least something that can fight with an advantage in the mountains (but they dont have to have fast movement).

*Partisans/modern day barbarians. Our world is full of militant groups and religous cults causeing trouble can we have something like this in Civ3? I dont mean goody-huts, i mean maybe cities in a state of unrest could have a % chance that 1 population will leave and become a partisan/barbarian. These will maybe provoke trouble with rival nations or destroy improvements if not 'dealt with' quickly. Oh yeah, and give them Kalashnikovs rather than wooden clubs.


Anyway, Love the game, thanks for the patch and I hope some of the above is useful.

[Martina]

Re: to Martina

Originally posted by Redstar

I would say this means all save games that were corrupted will stay corrupted. So you must either revert back to a clean save of your game. Or, you must forget it and start another game.

Redstar,

Thanks for this proposal, however the whole game (ie starting from turn 0) was freshly started AFTER applying the patch. In other words my savegame corruption is not driven by the old 1.07f version but based on the new (revised patch) 1.16f version.

A clueless Martina

[phix]

Post Patch Issues

Shift-I doesn't seem to work as well as it used to. Now when I tell a worker to automate for just one city. sometimes they'll just sit in the city and not do anything, even if there are undeveloped squares near by.



Civ 3 hangs on exit about 7 out of 10 times. It didn't do this pre-patch. Fortunately under windows 2k I can just open the task manager and end it's process.



Now... Why can't I go into hibernate mode while Civ 3 is running? My event log has a message that says:
Event Type: Warning
Event Source: Win32k
Event Category: None
Event ID: 240
Date: 12/12/2001
Time: 10:47:56 AM
User: N/A
Computer: ZOINKS
Description:
A request to suspend power was denied by Civilization3.e.
Data:
0000: 00 00 00 00 02 00 4e 00 ......N.
0008: 00 00 00 00 f0 00 00 80 ....ð..€
0010: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0018: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0020: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........


Also... How come sometimes granaries work, and sometimes they don't? I've noticed that cities pre-pyramids with granaries seem to work, while post-pyramids, they don't work at all. And then on cities on other continents, sometimes when I build them, they work, and sometimes they don't... oddd

Overall it's a great game!!!

[Jeannette]

MOVEMENT BONUS LOST

Maybe this has already been logged, but:

With the patch installed my units have lost their road movement bonus! This has so seriously undermined my Industrious nation's advantage that I've abandoned the game for now...

Anyone else?

[Harm]

This is amazing seeing how many problems others have encountered. Everything works fine in my games, no odd tech trading with the AI, no worker bugs, no crashes, no loss of road bonus', nothing.

I'll list my system in hopes it means something to some dev's.

Windows ME (Fully Updated running IE 6.0)
DirectX 8.1
Athlon 1.2GHz
MSI K7 Master DDR (Latest Mboard Drivers)
256Mb PC2100
SB Live! XGamer (Latest Drivers)
Hercules 3DProphet 4500 (Latest Drivers)

My system is clean as I keep the registry nice and tweaked clearing up about 94% of system resources by eliminating needless services from starting at startup. I only have two services that run exluding the main three required for Windows to function; my firewall and virus protection.

[Seth]

Re: There isn't any tech bug

Originally posted by ChrisShaffer
There isn't any tech bug

I hope I can disagree without being disagreeable, but I'm fairly certain that you're mistaken.

I started a new game after the patch and saw this for the first time.

I have noticed that if a civ is close to discovering a new tech, he'll only offer you a pittance for it. Interestingly, rival civs know when you are close to discovering a tech and have muted expectations for trades.
Example: I was 19 turns from discovering mysticism and the Iroquois wanted 250 gold for it. Later, when I was 1 turn from discovering it, I offered them 1 gold and they took it.

In my game, there were 4 civs on my continent, 4 on another continent. No contact between continents yet. I was the first on my landmass to discover iron working. I know this because it took me 40 turns to discover it. It never lopped several turns off my research, which would indicate that another civ had discovered the tech. After I discovered iron working, I had the opportunity to trade it to the Iroquois, Egyptians, or French. Note that the French didn't have contact with the other two civs (I know this because I later traded contact to both for writing). I don't believe any of the others were close to discovering IW, because they all offered me handsome trades for it.

Note the word or above. As soon as I traded IW to any of the civs, they all would get it. I never had a opportunity to trade it to a second civ. Also note that it should have been impossible for the French to have received IW from anyone but me.

So I do think there is a bug, and yes, it does reduce my enjoyment of the experience.

BTW, I have seen a few posts on a draft bug. In fact, I posted a couple of paragraphs on this in another thread. It would be great to have some feedback from Firaxis on this. I think I speak for quite a few when I say that our frustration would be greatly mitigated if we could see a list of know bugs/issues that Firaxis is investigating/aware of.

Peace

[Gramphos]

Set, what you describe is a trade bug, not a tech bug. (And it is a known one.)

[Deornwulf]

Soren or Dan,

I would like to know if I am creating my own Frankenstein's monster or is this evidence of a bug.

I made some changes in the editor to create a unique civ, changed city names, leader names, changed stats of a unit and began playing. A leader appeared so I created an army. With that army, I attacked the last city of the Germans and took it. At that point, things got really screwey. German units remained on the board even without a city (I continued the game, exploring the entire continent) - 2 units in my Army bailed out while the third kept the attributes of being in an army but would have the total movement of all of the units in the army added up. The army icon would jump around the screen, sometimes catching up with the unit.

My question is - is there a really good chance of a crash from using the editor? Are these the "unpredictable results?"

[HomeAir]

I too have a wierd experience with added units

I added a modern carrier to differentiate between a WW2 carrier and a modern one, they are not close to being the same. Everything went well until I reached the industrial era and the graphic for my workers in the unit build menu and the city screen where it shows all the units. The settler graphic in the build unit menu is replaced by the worker. All works fine but it is just a little screwy. Anyone else come up with this problem. BTW, I haven't gotten to the point where I could actually build the new modern carrier unit or even the old carrier. But very soon. Maybe it will go away in the modern era. Ya right!