Don't know if this is a bug...

from Stardock Forums
This has been happening to me since the first Beta, but it only happened once in a while, but today 5 times in a row when I tried to start GalCiv the intro freezes up and my keyboard and mouse don't respond and I have to reboot my computer... it really sucks and now I'm leary about playing GalCiv because I don't want to have to reboot my computer everytime I try to play... now I know that it probably doesn't have anything to do with it being a bug, but does anyone have any idea what could be wrong and causing this?
163 views 9 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
Wyrenn,

I have had something similar a few times as well, but I lucked out one time and got called away from my PC. When I returned several minutes later it finally had gotten past what ever it ran into. My guess is that it is "bit twirling" somewhere. But I was always able to use Alt-TAB to switch to the desk top when I got it. If it is indead bit twirling it may take some special code to discover what the problem is. I have already suggested how it could be found, so maybe Cari will build it into a future build and let us know about it.
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
Alt-TAB doesn't work for me! My keyboard freezes as well.. Ctrl-Alt-Delete also doesn't do anything... pretty soon my harddraive starts beeping at me whenever I press a key or move the mouse. Not fun. :VOMIT:
Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
Ouch. In the early Alpha I had a similar problem. It is almost as if GC throws the OS into a bit-twirl. And I am on Win/ME, the worst OS to try to debug on. Even OS/2 had a way of getting a dump from such a thing, the old Cntl-Alt-Numlock-Numlock always worked. Maybe another OS, like XP would provide such a thing, but I am not going to change just for that, especially since I don't know whether it has it or not.
Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top
Master Lame,

Have you ever had an OS lockup and been able to take a dump of it on 2000 or XP?
Reply #7 from Stardock Forums Top
Lucky Jack-

With Win 2k, Ctrl-Alt-Del almost always works and will allow you to selectively kill a non-responding process. I haven't actually used XP, but I assume that it also works similarly. OS lockups are incredibly rare because you can always kill a non-responsive app. Doesn't always mean things are good... but better than the machine needing an immediate reboot.

The Windows 9x (including ME) series doesn't have this sort of functionality. Ctrl-Alt-Del will usually allow you to kill the current app, but if it can't it requires a reboot of the system.

The only downside to win 2k for me is that some games don't work, though I haven't seen a game that fails to work on my win 2k machine in the last 2 years.
Reply #8 from Stardock Forums Top
Sounds like you are describing one of the side affects of the difference between cooperative multitasking and preemptive multitasking. One of the big advantages OS/2 had from when it first came out (1985?) was that it was preemptive and was very good at giving you the ability to terminate a stuck application.
Reply #9 from Stardock Forums Top
Wyrenn, does taking out the Intro.bik have any effect? The bink files use threads, and there are files loading in a thread at that time, so maybe your CPU is just getting maxed out by all the threads.