Pi-Ramesse CTD at specific map point

[Caledorn]

Hello everyone

I recently bought CotN @ Steam, and have been enjoying the game immensely - but I'm having some issues at the Pi-Ramesse map. The city is one big entity really, with the nobles in the Northern part of town, and the government workers and the temples in the Southern part of the town.

My problem though, is that almost everytime I scroll over the worker/temple area in the south, the game just CTD's without any error message or anything.

I'm wondering if this is map related, or if it's computer related, so I have included the savegame here for others to test. The problem is located around the Cult Temple, and the blank spaces just behind the Temple of Osiris in front of the Cult Temple. You will see there is a lot of brickworkers in this area too. If I try to scroll around - or into - this area, I will experience a CTD at least 75% of the time. Hopefully, this is something that can be figured out somehow, because it's annoying the heck out of me :p

Here is the link to download the savegame : http://home.fein.no/dl/Pi-Ramesse.ank

And thanks in advance for anyone who bothers to try to help me with this! :)

[Kiya]

Hi, I spent some time in your city, btw it looks great.
No problems, no crashes, and I even had another game going on in the background.

Perhaps its your PC, don't know.

[Tinkerbell]

Howdy, Caledorn!

I am on an old minimum computer that doesn't crash on COTN. However, I loaded your save, immediately put it on pause & started to scroll around.

I crashed shortly afterwards. ;)

[Caledorn]

Thank you to both of you! :) (And an extra thank you for the praise of my city there, Kiya! Such is always welcome :p )

That's surely some conflicting feedback ... *puzzled*

I haven't had the game crash once for me up until this point, and as the veterans of the game should know (and I suspect you both are, based on your forum post amounts), this is in the fifth section of the Grand Campaign.. But suddenly, on this last mission, after I had built up the city to a sizable place, this started happening.

Perhaps someone at TM has an idea what I can do to find out what this might be?

[Caledorn]

Here's a copy of my dxdiag.txt in case it helps any technician.

I thought about the nVidia driver issue - but it doesn't really make sense that the game has run without any issues at all up until about midgame in one of the last campaign missions. Also, the city size of what I've built in Pi-Ramesse isn't very much bigger than any other city I built - in fact I seem to recall one of the campaign missions required me to build an even bigger settlement with over 100 farms. No problems at all there!

[Tinkerbell]

Well, I really don't like my computer crashing, Caledorn, so I'm not sure I want to try it again. However, what I saw didn't look like a really big city & I have had no problems loading HUGE cities. I just get terrible lag.

And yes, I have played everything out there having to do with COTN.

I wouldn't begin to guess what the problem might be. Steam version? Possibly. Enhanced v1.3? Perhaps.

I have seen some really weird stuff & building types by players, but never caused a crash, or better, rarely caused a crash cuz I have been here since the game was released. ;)

Wanna try replaying the scenario from the start? Perhaps it was just a fluke?

[Caledorn]

That is perfectly understandable, Tinkerbell :) Needless to say, I'm no big fan of crashing myself. Hehe ;)

I guess I'm going to have to replay the scenario - but what Phil Walker says has me a bit worried. Sadly, it's only confusing when someone tells me there's at least 4 or 5 things that make the scenario don't work, without mentioning what these things are... I'm not even certain if these things are related to how I've built up the city, or if it's the scenario itself which is at fault.

[Will Jennings]

Hi, Caledorn,

Thanks for the save -- I'm seeing the crash here, too. I haven't narrowed down what's causing it, yet, but it seems to go away when I lower the graphics settings. If that works for you, it might enable you to continue playing through this city while we work on a fix.

[Caledorn]

Phil Walker was kind enough to tell me about the issues he saw with my computer in a private message - but the issues he mentioned are either impossible for me to do anything with (aka. I can't disconnect my mouse, keyboard and monitor from the USB ports), or things I'd not like to change (like moving my swap file again, when I've created a separate disk for it specifically to make Windows XP run faster).

Either way, I'm glad the crash is reproducable for a TM representative! That means it's not just my machine that's having issues, and that it might be possible to "treat" :) Thank you for testing it out, Will!

I have some theories, based on my other thread about Steam and CTD's here. In the scenario I downloaded and played there, I discovered that the game started crashing when I had built a wall around my entire city. I then proceeded to delete all the walls again, and the game ran more stable for a little while. But after a while it started crashing again - but ONLY when I scrolled using the edges. If I clicked directly on the minimap the game didn't crash. However, after a while - I left the game running for an hour or so on a standstill screenview of the city, while I did other things - the game just suddenly CTD'ed without any reason or explanation at all (When I came inside after being outside in the sun, my monitor was showing the desktop, and the game was gone).

My theory is that when a city gets a certain number of objects and people... Well - you get the drift. :)

[Caledorn]

Hi, Caledorn,

Thanks for the save -- I'm seeing the crash here, too. I haven't narrowed down what's causing it, yet, but it seems to go away when I lower the graphics settings. If that works for you, it might enable you to continue playing through this city while we work on a fix.

Oh, and I forgot - this is the first thing I tested - and it only temporarily helped. As soon as the game had been running for 10-15 minutes, it started CTD'ing again :(

[Will Jennings]

Thanks. We're looking into it.

[Caledorn]

Any progress on this issue, Will?

[mouse]

Well I was able to reproduce your CTD on an old computer that was built during beta testing of the orginial CotN;) Rebooting my computer made all the difference the CTD didn't happen.

This is at least a possible workaround if you've been playing for a period of time rebooting should release the ram and page file. That should get rid of the CTD. Pretty city but there is alot going on at same time with farming and alot of building.

[Caledorn]

Thank you mouse :)

I think we can safely say that this thread (http://www.tiltedmill.com/forums/showthread.php?t=17469) is getting close to the core of the issue - so I will post any further replies to my issue in the other thread linked above.

Again, thanks to everyone for trying to help!