Can't submit final score to Metaverse

Well, my old friend the black screen of death is back. When I start the screen the Stardock and Gal Civ screens come and go then I get hung on a black screen. I can move the mouse around but cannot ctr-alt-del to restart the computer. I have to do a manual shut down. Previously I just used old fashioned persistence to finally get into the game and didn't have this problem for several days.

I'll try to uninstall and reinstall the game later.

"String not found" is when there's an error reading from the string tables. I'll look into anything funky that's happening on the code side. Drop a post if a fresh install does the trick.

Ok, more story to add.

I uninstalled and reinstalled Galciv. Got into the game fine, loaded my saved game, captured the last world and went to the screen to submit my score. I typed in my bona fides and hit the submit button. The button turned green and I waited, and waited, and waited. Could not tab out, could not ctr-alt-del, nothing. Had to do a hard reboot.

It appears that once I get a single crash such as the restore game, load game crash or get hung up such as trying to submit my score to the metaverse then I can no longer get into the game. My only option appears to be uninstalling and reinstalling the game.

Otherwise if I don't generate an error or hang up then I have no problem playing, saving the game and exiting and then returning to the game.

None of the hang ups have generated any exception reboots. The only exception report I get is from the restore game/load game crash that I submitted previously.

I'm stuck. I've uninstalled and reinstalled the game twice now and haven't been able to get back into the game. No idea what is happening and no exception reports are being generated.

Have you looked in the debug.err file? It should be in the drengin.net\galciv directory. Notepad or Wordpad should be able to open it. I doubt there is much info in there but it just might and give the developers more of an insight.

When you de-install, do you go back and delete and directories that are left over, before doing the reinstall? Just a thought.

I don't know if this will help you people at Stardock with this problem but I got the same failure when I finished the game with my PC logged onto the internet. When I rebooted and restarted the game without my PC logged on I got the following in my Debug.err:

----------------------------
Debug Message: ******* Starting Game Shell *******
Debug Message: Going Fullscreen
Debug Message: RGB in format 5:6:5, Masks reported as f800:7e0:1f
Debug Message: Now Fullscreen
Debug Message: Shell initialization complete
Debug Message: ***** Initializing Game *****
Debug Message: Timer Frequency is 0 1234dc
Debug Message: Added fonts: VerdanaWhite11 VerdanaWhite12B VerdanaYellow11 VerdanaLtBlue11 VerdanaGreen11
Debug Message: Added fonts: VerdanaRed11 VerdanaRed12 VerdanaYellow12 VerdanaOrange12 VerdanaLtBlue12
Debug Message: Added fonts: VerdanaDkBlue12 VerdanaLtBlue12B VerdanaOrange12B Verdana00Race11 Verdana01Race11
Debug Message: Added fonts: Verdana02Race11 Verdana03Race11 Verdana04Race11 Verdana05Race11 Verdana00Race12B
Debug Message: Added fonts: Verdana01Race12B Verdana02Race12B Verdana03Race12B Verdana04Race12B Verdana05Race12B
Debug Message: Added fonts: font2 font1 Comic10 Comic12 Comic12B
Debug Message: Added fonts: Comic14 Comic14B Comic16 Comic16B Comic18
Debug Message: Added fonts: Comic18B Celtic14 Celtic12 Celtic10 Basker14
Debug Message: Added fonts: Basker16 BabylonBlue11B BabylonBlue11 BabylonBlue10B ArialGreenB10
Debug Message: Added fonts: ArialYellowB12 ArialLtBlueB12 ArialDkBlueB12 ArialGreenB12 ArialRedB12
Debug Message: Added fonts: ArialWhite12B ArialWhite14 ArialWhite16 ArialOrange12B ArialLtBlue12B
Debug Message: Added fonts: ArialLtBlue14 ArialGreen14 ArialRed14 ArialYellow14 ArialGreen16
Debug Message: Added fonts: ArialYellow16 Arial13B Arial16B2 Arial10 Arial12
Debug Message: Added fonts: Arial12B Arial14 Arial14B Arial16 Arial16B
Debug Message: Added fonts: Arial18 Arial18B GaraWGold11B GaraBW14B GaraW11B
Debug Message: Initializing sound card.
Debug Message: Game Initialization completed.
Debug Message: Destroying ship USS Transport 2461. Orbiting: 0
Debug Message: Posting WM_CLOSE message.
Debug Message: GameUninitialize start
Debug Message: GameUninitialize end
Debug Message: Main Shell terminating normally
Debug Message: Unallocated Mem: 3072 bytes of memory from line 5735 of g:\projects\pear\source\canvas.cpp
Debug Message: Not all memory has been freed from memory system Canvas.
Debug Message: 3072 bytes of memory still allocated.
Debug Message: MemMan: Unable to find pointer in GetBlockInfo. Memory system: Palette
ASSERT ERROR in file g:\projects\pear\source\memman.cpp at line 579.
Debug Message: MemMan: Trying to free memory that has not been allocated. Memory System Palette
ASSERT ERROR in file g:\projects\pear\source\memman.cpp at line 361.
Debug Message: MemMan: Unable to find pointer in GetBlockInfo. Memory system: Palette
ASSERT ERROR in file g:\projects\pear\source\memman.cpp at line 579.
Debug Message: MemMan: Trying to free memory that has not been allocated. Memory System Palette
ASSERT ERROR in file g:\projects\pear\source\memman.cpp at line 361.
------------------------------------
I had checked the debug.err file right after rebooting and it had the same contents up to the line:
------
Debug Message: Destroying ship USS Transport 2461. Orbiting: 0
---------------------------------------
Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Jack

One further test I did just to try to narrow it down further, I restarted my game with my PC logged onto the net and clicked the "no thanks" button to the metaverse questions. The game closed and went back to the main menu, which I exited. When I checked the Debug.err file its contents were a good match for the above.

BTW, my score on a huge galaxy was 33,864.

Cheers,
Jack