Ship vanish after a few hours.

from Stardock Forums
I know should be in bug thread and it is but I never seen any details on this bug.

Everytime I mention the bug the standard reply is that a game save restore brings the graphics back.

This is true but this is very time consuming.

My questions are has this bug been deemed unimportant and not worth the resources to repair the bug ?

I can play for several hours before graphics go away.Maybe 99.99 percent of the people do not play that long and never see the bug.

Thus it was deemed not worth fixing.

What do the programers think is happening the graphics table
is not getting updated ?


227 views 12 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
Carielf says:

We do know about the invisible ship bug. We think that it's caused by a bug in the data manager, which is in the very core of our code library. Fixing the bug would affect all of the major systems in the game, and I'd have to write code to convert all of our graphics because they'd crash the game under the fix otherwise. And then, to see if this did fix the problem, I'd have to play for 3-4 hours to wait for it to happen. This could take a week at best to fix. That's a week that I could be spending working on other bugs that cause crashes, or things that you can't work around by reloading Gal Civ, or on Gal Civ 2 where this won't even be an issue because we won't be using 2D graphics for the starmap. Even setting aside the fact that it's a pain, that it's taking time away from other things, that's a week that Stardock is paying me to do something that isn't going to return anything for us. If it was something that would be an issue in Gal Civ 2, I would work on it.
End of quote


Post #26 in the 1.11 bug report thread.

Personally I don't mind the bug at all. If I've played that long its probably time for a break anyway.
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
Well said
Offworld Trading Company
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
Well for me it is a problem. Within an hour of the vanishing ships starting to (dis)appear I get a CTD! So for me it is a condition that causes a loss of playing/data and a crash and much more frequent with 1.11 than prior versions, so I would prefer it is fixed. More significantly, it appears to be directly to memory leaks because if I have other (memory demanding) applications running it occurs within 10-15 minutes. :(
Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top
work around by reloading Gal Civ
End of quote


Does Carielf work for Microsoft in her spare time?
Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top

Hurley,

If you're getting crashes, I suspect that there are other issues involved. Does the crash happen again if you load the autosave? Have you tried updating your sound and video drivers, and DirectX? You also may want to try running scandisk and disk defrag if you haven't done that recently. 

Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top
Does the crash happen again if you load the autosave?
End of quote


No, not immediately. It occurs after next occurence of vanishing ships. Ships vanishing happens much sooner after closedown/restart of galciv unless I reboot windoze.
My drivers are up to date, directX is up to date, scandisk and defrag run on periodic (weekly) basis.

It has certainly got worse for 1.11, and, as I commented, it is also certainly worse if other memory hungry applications are running or if I switch between galciv & other applications.


[Message Edited]
Reply #7 from Stardock Forums Top

Do you get the error message about Windows not having enough virtual memory after you've been playing Gal Civ long enough for the invisible ships bug to show up?  I used to get those all the time when I was playing Warcraft III, Halo and EQ until I increased my virtual memory size.

 

Reply #8 from Stardock Forums Top
G'day CariElf,
Thanks for the response. Happenned again last night. No I don't get a virtual memory message. I used to get that with Morrowind when I first started playing it, but increased the amount at that stage and problem was solved.
I don't want to suppose or pretend to know more than I do, but it seems to behave like a memory leak, either directly in Galciv or in something it is using. However, the problem does not ocur with the other games I play or applications I use.
[Message Edited]
Reply #9 from Stardock Forums Top

I wanted to know about the virtual memory because I thought that might be related to your crashes.

If it was as simple as a memory leak, it would show up in BoundsChecker and I would have fixed it months ago. 

It's possible that GalCiv's mp3 player is using bad audio codecs.  What media player programs do you have installed on your machine? WinDVD and Winamp3 are both known to cause problems.

 

Reply #10 from Stardock Forums Top
If it was as simple as a memory leak
End of quote


Fair enough, excuse my ignorance.

I use Windows MediaPlayer 9.
Reply #11 from Stardock Forums Top
So this bug is never gonna be fixed? Sad to hear... How about a relaunch option, that speeds reloading up by doing all the steps (save game, close game, start game, load game) automatically? And what would be nice is if the game remembered the sort order for technolgies... I either sort them by cost or by category, sorting them by ID is quite pointless...
However, I can live with that but still it's kinda weird that this bug is so unfixable...
Reply #12 from Stardock Forums Top

AIL.ST: It's not high priority. If I end up having to clean up the data manager code for Gal Civ 2, then the update will go into Gal Civ 1 also. 

I'm not sure about the relaunch option.  Since it would be terminating itself, it wouldn't have any way (that I know of) to know to restart itself.

The code where the bug is located WAS written in 1995.  The reason that the bug never showed up in any of our products prior to Gal Civ was because we wouldn't have been able to do a lot of the stuff we do in Gal Civ because people had smaller hard drives, less RAM, and slower video cards.  For example, we wouldn't have been able to do unique ships for all the major races.  They would have to have all been the same design with different colors changed by palette swapping.