The Official Apolyton Bug List

[korn469]

When you post a bug please try to describe the bug with as much detail as you can, so others can try to reproduce the bug. Describe what it effected, if there was a single cause to the bug, and if it happened over and over again or if it was a one time event. Also please include a save game if you can. Additionally you should make a short list of your hardware.


Startup Issues
*The game installs correctly and plays the intro movie but it scrambles the screen at the main menu, acting like the refresh rate is too high
P2 350, 256mb, Win2k, SB awe 64, 30gb HD, gf2 mx 32mb
D 900, gf2 MX400 64mb, Win XP (10.80 and 21.85), Win2k (21.83), SB Live! Value
Possible Workaround available here

*The game correctly installs and allows the player to select all of the map options etc, however the map loading bar gets to 100% and gives an Invalid page fault error. If tried in the Tutorial or Quick Start, it did the same thing, getting to 100% and then the crashes
A 1Ghz, 128mb, TNT2 M64 (32 MB), 20GB, 12X DVD-ROM, 32X CD-RW, Sylvania F90 19

*When loading a scenaio, civ3.exe encounted a "divide by zero" error that crashes the game
A 750, 128mb, Radeon PCI 32mb, 40x cd rom

*Consistantly gets an "Illegal Operation" error before the game even makes it to the intro movie
ThinkPad 600x P3 500, 192mb, NeoMagic MagicMedia 256ZX, Crystal SoundFusion, Win98SE

*Clicking the circle to advance from the map setup parameters screen causes the game to shut down giving the following message "this program has preformed an illegal opperation and will be shut down." The tutorial game will start up but it shows the same message within a few seconds.
k6 400, 64mb, win95


Gameplay Issues
*Hitting the Build key causes an "unable to allocate draw buffer" message and Civ3 dies
A 750, 128mb, Radeon PCI 32mb, 40x cd rom

*Capturing an enemy city and selected the "Raze City" option, to which Civ3 responded by exiting to the desktop with an Illegal Operation error message

*Problem with changing the state of units: A city just produced a spearman and it is active. There is also a fortified warrior in the same city. By going to the city screen and right-clicking warrior and choose activate, then right-clicking the spearman and choose fortify locks the game
Addendum (11/10/01): Activate one unit and fortify another while in the city screen. The unit being fortified was the 'active' unit (ready to move) at the time. The game doesn't completely lock up, instead it stops responding to input. The animations and sounds keep playing, the mouse cursor moves, etc., but clicking the mouse or pressing keys has no effect on the game. Have to use C/A/D to exit this
P2 450, 512Mb, gf2 32mb, DX8.0a
WinXP, AXP 1600, 512mb, GF3 Ti200 (21.85)

*Built a worker in a captured Roman city that still had a resistor, it gave the worker's nationality as "(barbarian)" in the right-click menu and put a jumble of ASCII characters in the unit display box
Screenshot

*Problem with lighthouse: Galley should be safe on 'sea' squares, but not ocean. However, in 1000 years, five galleys never sank once, out in the depths for a 100 turns or so

*Players fighters do not seem to be able to ever intercept an enemy bomber even when they have selected the Air Superiority Mission
Savegame verification

*100 million dollar bug: The player is able to ask the AI civs for upwards of 1,000,000 gold per turn and they will happily pay it every turn, even if they don't have the money.
Addendum: The AI refused to trade 1 Luxury + 50 Gold (lump sum) in exchange for 1 Luxury + Printing Press, but agreed to the trade when the lump sum was changed to 15 Gold (per turn). That's a minimum of 300 Gold. The AI had 235 Gold in the Treasury at the time these issues could possibly have a link, such as the AI never loses money when paying gold on a per turn basis)

*Precision bombing/Infinite Range Bomber range bugs: Precision bombing will only work against friendly cities if the player either presses "P" or uses the mouse to select Precision bombing, except if the player holds down on the "P" or "B" keys. By selecting anywhere on the map and holding down on the "P" or "B" keys the player can then initiate a strike of umlimited range.

*Multiple Civs can build Magellan's Voyage even though it is a Great Wonder.

*Obsolete Units are in the build que throughout the game: The following units do not upgrade.
Swordsman, Longbowman, Cavalry, Frigate, Ironclad, Bomber, Privateer. Thus they, or less advanced units if the special resources needed to construct these obsolete units are not available will always be in the build que. So swordsmen and cavalry will clutter up the build que even in the late game

*When using the goto command on a naval unit if it runs into a submarine with a friendly civ it will attack it without giving the usual warning automatically starting a war. This does not occur using the keypad.
Path of the naval unit
Savegame

*Air Recon sometimes removes fog-of-war permanently after a mission, until the player moves another unit into the general area

*The fortress and coastal fortress Zone of Control features are broken too, they do not give two free shots like they are supposed to

*Nuclear Plants cannot be built with only Ocean tiles. Rivers and lakes works fine

*Hoover Dam does not replace already built older powerplants, player has to manually sell them to reduce pollution

*AI can irrigate from sea tiles


Interface Issues
*In the tutorial game the Domestic Advisor appears, however there is no text in the pop up
Screenshot
P3 500, 256MB, Riva TNT 16MB, Detonator Drivers 2183, DX8, Win98SE

*Playing a game as the Russians, established diplomatic contact with several Civs, however when trying to make contact with the Babylonians an error box pops up speaking of CivIII causing an invalid page fault
Addendum: Restored game from a manual save, didn't contact the babylonians, however when they attempted to contact the player civ3 experienced the same error
A 1Ghz, 128mb, TNT2 M64 (32 MB), 20GB, 12X DVD-ROM, 32X CD-RW, Sylvania F90 19

*The white text on the map for many messages (culture has improved, barbarians defeated, swordsman built) flashes by too fast to read

*Right click menu display error: Bring up a right click menu for a unit, then use one of the function keys to display an advisor screen, the right click menu will stay on screen. It blocks the info on the advisor screen

*After a successful battle with barbarians (no battles with other Civs have occurred yet where promotion has occurred), a unit being promoted makes the game think the Warrior unit has a second move. Attempting to move it has no effect, attempting to skip the unit's phantom turn causes the game to get stuck on a "Please wait..." prompt (seen in the lower right box). It can be fixed by clicking on an unmoved unit and instructing that unit to hold/wait/fortify etc. Then the game gets back on track.

*Typo on upgrade menu: Space missing between to and infantry
Screenshot

*In the foreign advisor screen each leader has a circles their picture, however after destroying one of the civs the circle with that civ's leader is deleted from the screen. When starting a new game the circle that was deleted in the previous game is still deleted. No sillouette, nothing. Even after contacting all of the civs it does not reappear. Uninstalled and reinstalled the game. Same thing. The only way to get the circle for the eliminated civ to come back is to delete all saved games (including the ones in the auto save file) and start a new game.

*In the Domestic Advisor screen, clicking at the top of the columns for 'food eaten/food stored', 'big smileys/little smileys', etc, makes the order of the list of cities change to the appropriate category, but only for a second before it automatically reverts back to the default order when the advisor's hint changes.
Suggested Fix: Only the tip box should refresh.

*According to the manual on page 185, cities in civil disorder should be marked as such on the domestic advisor screen, however cities aren't marked in a such a way. From the domestic advisor screen the only way to tell if a city is in civil disorder is to look at production (if it says 9999 turns till the current project is completed) or count heads.

*Grid mode togging bug: After turning grid mode on, it can't be toggled off in tutorial mode.

*Unit goto city bug: After selecting a unit and pressing ctrl+shift+g a goto city menu appears, however there is no way to cancel or close the menu

*The Governor that will not stay off when set off

*The Governor will not stop building privateers, when the player turns off naval units for this city and all cities

*Nuclear meltdown of a city due to disorder, the dialog asks to a) zoom to city or b) cancle; zoom to city ends up canceling, and cancle ends up zooming

*Clicked on a friendly city, and a message from Ghandi came up with ASCII characters stating "Take me to your Leader

*After selecting Upgrade All, all fortified/garrisoned units change states from fortifed to active (to the great frustration of the player on a huge map)


Graphic Issues
*Borders appear on the map where they shouldn't
Screenshot

*From time to time playing as the Egyptians the borders turn black and all the player's units start changing colors rapidly in other civ colors.
Screenshot
Savegame
A 700, 640mb, WinXP & Win98SE, Nvidia Detonator 21.88, gf2 MX

*Full screen toggling bug: If the player has selected "Always wait at end of turn - on" in preferences and all units have moved, then presses delete (which gives fullscreen) and presses backspace (which toggles icon button layout) the following bug occurs
Screenshot1
Screenshot2

*If Civ3 is left running and the screensaver activates, upon resumption of the game all the diplomatic lines in the foreign minister screen are erased. Reselecting the portraits doesn't help, nor does reloading the game. The only way to get them back is to restart.
Screenshot

*Screen warped inwards at all four corners, unplayable at 32 bit 1200x1000, playable barely at 16 bit 1024x768.
A 1.33ghz, gf2 64mb, win2k

*Sometimes when ships sink from combat, there is a small black line that appears just left and next to the sinking animation, but quickly goes away after the animation is complete

*When launching a bombing mission the game animates the bombs dropping but doesn't animate the bomber flying by.
Savegame

*Advancing from the ancient age to the middle ages causes the foreign advisor to change to the middle age portrait, however advancing to the industrial era caused the foreign advisor to revert back to the ancient portrait.

*When launching a naval bombardment of a civ that the player has a peace treaty with, it will enact the bombing and THEN the foreign advisor will ask if the player want to do this

*The paratrooper overlaps the paratrooper text in the build screen
Screenshot


Sound Issues
*Sound .dll crashes: For no apparent reason Civ3 causes a gpf in sound.dll and the game shuts down.
P3 700, 192mb, 16mb ATI card, TBS Soundblaster

*when reloading saved games, there is intermittent static in the music. This only happens when reloading saved games.
A 1.2ghz, 256mb, SB Live! 5.1, MSI K7T-Turbo, Via 4-in-1 4.29, Win98SE


Text Issues
*Selection items on the preferences menu is out of alignment with the corresponding check boxes; it makes determining which box is selected very difficult
Screenshot
P3 500, 256mb, Riva TNT 16mb, Detonator Drivers 2183, DX8, Win98SE
P2 450, 512mb, gf2 32mb, DX8.0a

*Multiple lines of text are being displayed on the same line; it prevents reading the lower right information which tells about the unit, its location, what year it is, etc.
Screenshot
P3 500, 256mb, Riva TNT 16mb, Detonator Drivers 2183, DX8, Win98SE


Variable Swaps
*Variable Swap in Diplomacy: In the diplomacy.txt file search for:
$PLAYER0, we can provide you with a connection to $GET6. Are you interested?
Replace $GET6 with $CIVNAME5 and it should work (according to the help file)

*Variable Swap in research: Playing as the Greeks, upon entering the Middle Ages, earned Monotheism ( scientific bonus ). Then the Science Advisor reports "we learned the secrets of writing from the Americans."
P3 1Ghz, 512mb


Civilopedia Issues
*When click on SPACE RACE in civilopedia it shows an INVALID ENTRY
Screenshot


Performance Issues
*There are inordinantly long periods between turns on huge maps where the game says "Please wait..." between at least 30 seconds per turn on a A 1.1ghz to nearly 2 minutes on a P2 400


Automation Issues
*Automate workers near a city that has some irrigated tiles and some clear tiles, the workers always mine the irrigated sector instead of working on unimproved tiles (not a true bug, instead it is a design decision)
Workaround: Hit Shift-A, instead of just A to get workers to only work on unimproved tiles

*Can't use keyboard 'R' for railroad (not a true bug, instead it is a design decision)
Workaround: Hit Shift-R, instead of just R to get workers to build railroads note: you must have an available source of coal and iron before your workers can build railroads


Update
List as of November 16, 2001

Startup Issues
*Civ3 does not run on a system with an S3 Savage 2000 video card

*Upon loading a save game Civ3 gives the following error "Datal0 operation System Error: CITY" at first the games continued but all of the player's cities are gone. Now the save game gives the error and won't load. Most likely cause was the player destroyed an enemy civ
A 1.33ghz, 128mb, gf2 MX, sound blasters 128

*Simulating a P3 Win98 box with VPC on a Mac the game gives the following error "~DF394B.TMP at 167:10025231" with an invalid page fault. Possibly releated to the copy protection on the CD
Mac OS X/ PowerBook G4 500

*Quick start does not remember number of computer civs a player has selected in a game, it appears to default to the map standard

Gameplay Issues
*Even after losing a resource a player can continue to build units that require the resource from the build queue as long as they don't switch production to a unit or building that doesn't require the resource

*After acquiring the tech that reveals a resource, if the player has that resource inside of their territory but doesn't have a road to the resource then trades the AI for it while the deal is in effect the resource will not be available when the deal ends. The player has to destroy the road and rebuild it to get the benefits

*If a player is at peace and accidentally switch "mobilization" to "war-time", they cannot switch back. The only way to return to normalcy is to declare war on another and convince them to make peace. Switching mobilization states needs a confirmation box

*When all tiles are being worked, and pollution appears the worker on that tile becomes a specialist, but the food production remains the same. This allows the city to grow larger than it should, because by removing the pollution and placing the worker back on the tile food production for that tile gets effectively doubled. When any tile improvements are destroyed/built/changed or the population actually grows, the food production is then correctly counted

*When acquiring a new luxury through diplomacy the game does not automatically take this into effect. Player has to manually readjust workers for this to update

Interface Issues
*Aircraft carrier unloading: Trying to move a loaded aircraft carrier onto a land square brings up the unload dialogue box, if the player selects ok to the unload prompt the game freezes

*Occasionally when offering a luxury as a gift the game crashes to a illegal operation error in the executable

*Specialist Effects Not Shown in City Display: If the player changes a worker or entertainer to a scientist or a tax collector, the specialist's contribution to research or commerce is not reflected in the city view. However, it is correctly calculated in the Domestic Advisor screen

*The icon for building a railroad incorrectly lists the hotkey as "R" instead of "Shift-R" much to the confusion of many at Apolyton

*When selecting a unit in a stack (such as to attack a nearby enemy unit), once the battle is over, the game usually takes the player to an active unit at the other end of the map. A better implementation would be to active all of the units in the stack first

Graphic Issues
*i82810 chipsets/cards. The player can adjust font sizes in the INI file, but the line spacing is the real culprit and causes much of the Civilopedia and Diplomacy screen to be unreadable or inaccessible
Screenshot

*Advisors faces do not match the message they give the player, for example the Domestic Advisor frowns when she tells the player that their citizens are happy
Screen Shot

Performance Issues
*When saving a game to a full HD partition,
Civ3 does not check disk space and it will not give a warning but instead it saves an empty file

Text Issues
*Misspellings: Barbarian tribe Phoenicians is misspelled Pheonicians
The science advisor talking about electricity says "Our scientists want to harness the power of lightening," when it should be lightning
On wonder screen, for wonders being constructed, it says "Being constructed by the German" and Roman, etc. Should be "by the Germans" or "by Germany"

Variable Swaps
*On the Era advance screen the game addresses the player "Mr.!"
Screen Shot

[Darkknight]

! [B]My pet bugs !

1: Machine stats:
PC Viglen Contender 2 - PII333 - Win95 - 48XCD - 1.38GB free HD - 8mbS3 Savage4 GT/8mb.

I put Cd in drive run the autorun and while trying to start the Setup program it comes up with the error: There is not enough storage to process this command.
I try to run the setup.exe program with the same result.
I copy the entire Cd onto Harddisk and try it with the same result.
I succeeded in loading the game onto another older Win95 PC - P166.
I also succeeded in loading the game onto my laptop - PIII 633.
Gondhi_dm@hotmail.com


Graphics

1: i82810 chipsets/cards ,The font sizes I can adjust in the INI file, but the line spacing is the real culprit and causes much of the Civilopedia and Diplomacy screen to be unreadable or inaccessible.


2: A large human nation can demand an unlimited amount of money per turn from a small AI nation. They will most likely get the money even if the AI doesn't have sufficient money. there are multiple case of people getting £1,000,000 per turn from a 1 city civ.


Sound


In-game

1:Well at least I know this applies to the French. Their unique unit is the musketeer which is an offense-upgraded musketman, and thus fits in the defensive lineage after pikemen but before riflemen. Now when gunpowder becomes available, I would like to be able to upgrade all my pikemen or spearmen kicking around to musketeers. But it does not allow me to upgrade to musketmen, meaning that to upgrade any of these units, I either have to disband and rebuild or wait for rifleman and directly upgrade

2:Well, everything was going well in my game of Civ3. Large world, 12 Civs, I was the Japanese. (I've got an 866 PIII, with Gforce3 and 128 meg `o ram) Round about 1450 A.D. I went to reload one of the autosaves from the recent past. The game cranked away, hesitated around 57% for a long time then said something about unable to load some sort of city file.

Another error message popped up saying something was wrong with the save game, and my game then loaded up. The world was fine, all my units and improvements were there, but EVERY CITY IN THE WORLD WAS MISSING! I'm not entirely certain why this didn't result in instant death for everyone who didn't have a settler on the map, but I didn't go to the next turn to see what happened.

I tried to load all my other auto-saves from that game, and they all had the same problem. I finally found one of my manual save games from the early 1300's that worked ok. It looked like that one wasn't corrupted. Everything went well until about 1700 when I needed to reload because I accidently gave the most powerfull civilization a tech I was hoarding to keep a wonder (misclicked). With a certain amount of worry I loaded an auto-save.

No cities.

I'd saved manually more frequently, but all of THOSE had the same irritating error. Now, obviously I'm a little leary of spending six hours on another game only to get half way though and have my game get corrupted. Has anyone else encountered this, or know what might be causing it?



Misc.

1:Game crashes after load-up.

2:I can't get it to work. im at the screen where you chouse how many barbarians and whethere you want continents islands ect. when i click ok to move on i get that this program has preformed an illegal opperation and will be shut down

3:Repro:
-1. Declare war on neighbor
-2. Wait for enemy troops to approach
-3. Do not give fortress garrison orders

-Result:
Enemy units pass by unmolested toward cities or attack fortress.

4:Apparantly computer game companies are so scared of piracy that they have included the SAFE DISK V2 copy protection program in CIV 3 . Because of this my Dirve wont read the CD. It installs it perfectly though !!! But when I run it it "tries" and then nothing happen . Just Nothing. My drive isnt that old either - It is a Pioneer DVD 104S. And it runs other CD's perfectly well except for ones protected by Safe Disk V2.

5:I tried to install the game but the installation froze at 54%. I waited for 10 minutes, but nothing. All the while, my HardDisk was in a frenzy activity, judging from the small red light always on.

6: I have a pentium 2 400 256 ram, nvidia mx 32megs, The game can play smoothly for quite a while and suddenly I get locked up and have to reboot. I've shut off everything else that runs, played with the accelerator settings,

[Huntred]

System:
P3-500
256MB
Riva TNT - 16MB RAM, Detonator Drivers 2183
DirectX 8
Win98SE

Install went fine (excepting the registration wants a great deal of information).

Issue 1:
There is something funky with the text being displayed both on the main menu screen and in the game screen. The best way I could describe it is that multiple lines of text are being displayed on the same line, making quite a jumble. The main menu I don't care so much about, however this problem carrys over into the actual game. to where I cannot read the lower right information which tells me about the unit, it's location, what year it is, etc.

Issue 2: Preferneces menu is screwed up a bit where the selection items are out of alignment with their corresponding check boxes - this isn't just aesthetic, it's to the point to where I cannot tell for certain what I'm checking off.

Anyone else going through something like this? I'd post a screenshot but my server is down right now.

[Gramphos]

List admin:

Unverified bugs:
Automation:
Giving away a city with see units when not having a capital with see access will cause the units to be unusable as they can't get to the capital. - Reported by Avahz_D

*UPDATE 01-12-15* - I might have missied something. I also ignored somethings that I know were fixed in the patch.
Gameplay Issues
*Air Recon sometimes turn on fog of war that has been removed the same turn when doing missions.

*Science advisor always wants more money.

*Airlift/Precision bombing/Infinite Range Bomber range bugs: Precision bombing will only work against friendly cities if the player either presses "P" or uses the mouse to select Precision bombing, except if the player holds down on the "P" or "B" keys. By selecting anywhere on the map and holding down on the "P" or "B" keys the player can then initiate a strike of umlimited range. *ADDED* The same is for Airlift while holding "T"

*Possible to build a city at the same turn as the Settler is moved by opening a right-click menu. If the Settler is moved before the right-click menu has closed a city can be built.

Automation Issues
*Shift + A automated workers ignores far away pollution on the same continent, connected with railroad. And only one worker will work at the same square.

*Automated workers never work together so speed things up.

Interface Issues
*The science slider tends to hop to a setting one off of where you want it to stop

*The filebox doesn't handle Windows 2000 profile paths (localuser.computername)

*When you select to save any game, and the file not already exists the ".." directory is marked, but the suggested filename is in the box. This isn't anything wrong, as long as you don't want to go to the parent directory. If you double click on the selected ".." the game saves the file to the suggested name.

Text Issues
*When an AI seeks you to end a deal and you select "Yes, I understand" and after that selects that you want to make a new deal the labels still say gave instead of we want / offer
Screenshot

Graphical Issues
*All buildings after Wealth have the bottomline of the small icon cut off due to an error in buildings-small.pcx (Wealth has an empty line above itself)

*Foreign Advisor shows science arrows after negotiations in which the player has gone to the science advisor by double clicking on the foreign advisor's head.
Screenshot

*Scrolling in the building menu with a wheel mouse makes the upper lines look goofy.
P4 1.3GHZ 128MB Hercules 2 GTS 64MB

*Loading a map that doesn't fill the full screen with sight when zoomed out at another map that doesn't fill the screen either the area of the OLD file is shown outside the black area of the size of the zoomed in game. Everything restores when you make a move.
Screenshot

Misc
*The game crashes if a mapsize/scenario is made to play with only one civ, or if all civs are set to NONE. This is most likely a divide by 0 error.

*If you build hoover dam, you get a hydro plat in your cities, but other power plants still show up as options to be built

*When leaving mobilization the culturesum per turn still is half the original sum, even thou each improvement show the right number of notes after them

[korn469]

Gramphos

it's not too late, from the first couple of previews it sounds like we might need quite a few people working on this

skanky that goes for you too

[Gramphos]

What I meant was that there already was a report before I signed in as an admin.

[Huntred]

Issue 3:
I have the sneaking suspicion that my Domestic Advisor is trying to tell me things however the text is not coming across and I just see a blank window. In the tutorial game, I see her face and her text box but it's empty. After toying around with the units for a few years, she pops up again - again blank.

I haven't actually gone through the tutorial yet - it's a bit rough when I can't see so good. I have another graphics card that I will try to plunk in the box to see if that makes a difference.

Oh - and I've grabbed a screenshot for issues 1 and 3 in case my description is a little light.

[Sorry if my initial letter sounded a little odd - I wrote it for the General forum and then at the last minute, saw this one and this thread. So I just c/ped the letter to here. I may still go back there for the raw brainpower and userbase though.]

[Huntred]

Screenshot of Preferences Menu:

[Eli]

Oh boy... This sure doesnt look promising.

[Huntred]

On the General site, Dan Magaha of FIRAXIS has responded quickly to my post and is researching what may be wrong. He's saying that the font in the shots does not match the one used in the actual game.

[aiin]

are the starting location on the Earth map always suppose to be random? i mean what's the point if russia is in south american and germany's in africa.

[Asesino_Virtual]

Huntred: try changing the font size.

[Torment]

the game scrambles my screen when it reaches the main menu

install went fine, movie plays fine

i am 99.99 percent positive that it is a refresh problem but my monitor can handle up to 75 hz at 1024 x 748

specs:

pentium 2 350
256mb ram
windows 2000
SB awe 64
30 gig HD
geforce 2 mx (hercules 3d prophet 2 MX 32 mb)


any help would be appreciated

[Taliseian]

I am having the same problem as Torment

Opening Video is fine, but the game acts like the refresh rate is way too high.

System:
Duron 900
Geforce2 MX400 64mg AGP
Windows XP (10.80 and 21.85 both caused this)
Windows 2000 (21.83)
Sound Blaster Live! Value


NOTE: Once I went back to my ghosted image of Windows ME, the problem disappeared. Is this is a nVidia problem then??


T

[Skanky Burns]

Originally posted by Huntred
Issue 3:
I have the sneaking suspicion that my Domestic Advisor is trying to tell me things however the text is not coming across and I just see a blank window. In the tutorial game, I see her face and her text box but it's empty. After toying around with the units for a few years, she pops up again - again blank...

I think the solution to this problem might be the one posted by Steve Clark in his Technical Advice Thread.

REBOOT after install. It appears that it installs some custom fonts and in order for them to load correctly, a reboot is in order.

Let us know if the next time you load Civ, you still have this problem.

[Huntred]

Originally posted by Skanky Burns


I think the solution to this problem might be the one posted by Steve Clark in his Technical Advice Thread.



Let us know if the next time you load Civ, you still have this problem.

I rebooted several times in the process of trying things out.

A longer discussion of this issue is continuing here. It appears it's a known issue as tech support is getting a lot of traffic on this. Here's the direct info:

Originally posted by dv8ed
Don't bother calling tech support.

I just did. They said that mostly nVidia users (I was the first ATI he'd talk to) with high end video cards (A TNT2? But anyway) have been reporting this problem. It's only fixable with a yet-to-be-created patch from Firaxis or MS (Yeah, right) and it is a DX problem. Apparently they've been flooded, because he knew exactly what I was talking about as soon as I started describing the problem.

It is known that at least one user with a 3DFX Voodoo 3, a Nvidia TNT (me) and a person with an ATI card are affected.

Also, this problem appears to be beyond just fonts - the game crashes when one tries to Build City (makes the game a lot harder!) or when selecting custom world features and then starting a new game.

I have since installed the game onto another machine and it runs fine (not a bad batch of media w/ corrupted files).

[Adm.Naismith]

Originally posted by Huntred
Also, this problem appears to be beyond just fonts - the game crashes when one tries to Build City (makes the game a lot harder!)

Best understatement of the "Civ 3 newborn" trouble ever You have all my support (sorry it's not very effective).

[TechWins]

I'll tell you one big problem, I CAN'T SEE THE GOD DAMN GAME AFTER THE PREVIEW!!!

[Nemo]

1st - i have the font thing too

2nd - i have a city that just produced a spearman, it is active. i have a warrior fortified in the same city. if i go to the city screen and right-click warrior and choose active, then right-click spearman and choose fortify...everything locks up. happened 3 times aready while trying this.

my sys specs:
PII 450
512Mb PC100 RAM
32Mb GTS Geforce 2
DirectX8.0a
latest drivers as of 9/01

in order to fix this i have to ctrl+del+alt to end task and restart the game

[Ardrikk]

Okay, I experienced the problem with the text overlaying on top of other text and the blank advisor boxes, etc. Finally, trying to build a city caused a crash as described by someone else....the draw buffer deal.

At any rate, all of this was fixed when I shut down as many background programs as I could.

On my wife's computer, I couldn't get the game to start up. Let me clarify, it played the intro movie fine and went to the main screen. I could go through all of the options involved in setting up a game, but when it tried to actually take me into the game/map, it would show the loading progress bar, get to 100%, and then give an Invalid page fault error.
If I tried Tutorial or Quick Start, it did the same thing, getting to 100% and then the crash.

To fix this, I uninstalled and reinstalled Civ III and then shut down all background programs. I don't know if any of this contributed, but things I did prior to the above that didn't work were reinstalling DX 8.0a and using the DX applet to turn sound debugging all the way down.

Okay, last irritating thing. On both computers, we are running our desktop at 800X600 32bit resolution. When CivIII starts, it flashes to the desktop and resizes it to 1024X768 16bit resolution, moving the Start bar about a third of the way up the screen. Then it goes on into the Intro Movie and the game. However, when you exit the game, your desktop is still set that way with the Start bar still out of whack and forcing itself on top of anything. A reboot does restore the desktop, but this is rather irritating. Now, when I play FPS games on my computer, I generally play them at 1024X768 and I see the desktop being resized when I start them up. However, when I exit the game the desktop is restored to 800X600. It would be nice if CivIII would have the same courtesy.

Well, that's what I've seen. After about 3 hours of trial and error and reading these forums for help (thanks for all the tips!), I finally got it working on both computers. Still that desktop size issue irritates me, so if anyone knows a fix for that, I'd love to hear it.

Doh, I realized I didn't post any system specs when I first posted this. My computer:

Athlon 650Mhz
Hercules Geforce 3 (64 MB)
Sounblaster Live! Value
384 MB RAM
60 GB 7200RPM HD
Creative 52X CD-ROM drive
CompUSA 17" monitor

My wife's computer:
AMD 1Ghz proc.
Pixelview TNT2 M64 (32 MB)
Avance '97 sound card (I really don't know much about this card)
128 MB RAM
20GB HD (5400 RPM, I think)
12X DVD-ROM and 32X (read) CD-RW
Sylvania F90 19" monitor

Thanks,

Ardrikk

[Drefsab]

I've had this happen twice in about 5 hours of playtime. For no apparent reason I get a gpf in sound.dll and the game shuts down. Other than that, the game runs perfectly (no graphic trouble).

I'm running:
PIII 700
192 MB
16 meg ATI card
TBS Soundblaster.

[Grunthex]

*sigh* Ok, so I broke my screenshots, trying to make them small enough to post here. I'll try to describe everything accurately.

Both of these are basically textual errors, nothing major, easy patch stuff.

1st: The Aztecs contact me, and offer me contact with the Iroquois for 30 gold. (As seen on the bargaining table). The dialogue text however, shows:

"Lincoln, we can provide you with a connection to 30 Gold. Are you interested?"

This occured one other time, where they wanted Monarchy instead of money and offered me a connection to Monarchy... hey, a royal marriage!

Anyway, it just looks like they're pulling the wrong text string.

2nd: I capture a rudely placed Chinese city. Size 2 by the time I get around to it. I finally figure out how to disband the city, and the settler, instead of showing as an American Settler, or maybe a Chinese Settler shows as a (bunch of ASCII junk here, 10 characters) Settler.

It worked fine, founded a city just fine. Oh, and when I right-clicked the square with the settler in it, it showed as a (Barbarian) Settler... including the brackets. Funny, I don't remember now if the city it founded had good healthy Americans in it like it should of. My bad.

No idea what could be causing this one.

[Adm.Naismith]

Originally posted by Grunthex
No idea what could be causing this one.

Oh, I have some, but if I try to explain it, everyone on this forum but some very peaceful people would jump on me with baseball cub...

Ok, I hope this share of errors will be the easy pray for the first patch. Give them a month, and they'll make the game quite playable for Xmas. We understand that the dawn of a new Civilization can't be walk in the park... (Pun intended)

[ChrisShaffer]

Lake squares are incorrectly identified as Coast squares on the map, though the correct production (2/0/2) appears in the Terrain Info popup. This is repeatable.

[elrond1999]

Scrolling is ubearably slow with WinXP and nVidia 21.xx drivers.



Some report delays of 5sec+, I am lucky with just under a sec for a simple scroll. I'll try the 12.41 drivers now, they are supposed to fix this problem, but they add a lot of other problems to WinXP..

Just thought I'd post this problem in this thread too.


btw WTF is this: "The server is too busy at the moment. Please try again later." when submitting posts! Very annoying.

[Gramphos]

Originally posted by Grunthex
No idea what could be causing this one.

I believe that they have swapped the variables.
This should be editable in the textfiles.

[Gramphos]

Originally posted by Gramphos
This should be editable in the textfiles.

Found it!
In the file diplomacy.txt:
Search for
"[color={qcolor}]$PLAYER0, we can provide you with a connection to $GET6. Are you interested?[/color]"
replace $GET6 with $CIVNAME5 and it should work (accordning to the help in that file.)

[Master Marcus]

P III I Gh, 512 RAM, the game runs perfectly without a crash. No major bugs so far, only this minor one - switched text error on the Science Advisor window: playing as the Greeks, somewhere around 270-300 AD when I go to Middle Ages, I earned Monotheism ( scientific bonus ). Then the Science Advisor tells me we learned the secrets of writing from the Americans. !!!

[Adm.Naismith]

Originally posted by elrond1999
btw WTF is this: "The server is too busy at the moment. Please try again later." when submitting posts! Very annoying.

Ehr, it's what it said: a warning that, because of the very high traffic generated from a flood of enthusiast coming to this Forum, the server can't manage the spike of traffic and you are out to the cold in a waiting queue.


Gramphos, don't do all the job by yourself, let something to do to poor Firaxian, or Sid could consider to cut their paycheck

Great analysis

[ChrisShaffer]

The white text on the map for many messages (culture has improved, barbarians defeated, swordsman built) flashes by too fast to read.