GalCiv2/Dark Avatar on Vista

Published on February 1, 2007 By CariElf In Bug Reports

Update August 2007: If you are having memory issues on Vista, please read this Microsoft knowledgebase article:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=938194

Update: June 2007: Version 1.6 of Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar should have no problems at all on Vista at this point as long as your NVidia video card drivers are version 158.24 or higher.

If you have a laptop card, check the support section of your laptop manufacturer's website (Dell, hp, etc) for updated drivers. If the driver version is not 158.24 or higher, you should contact your laptop manufacturer and ask them when updated drivers will be available. The more of you who contact them, the more incentive they have to update their drivers. Otherwise, your only other option is to use the modified drivers from a third party site like LaptopVideo2Go, but this may void your laptop warranty so check the terms and conditions of your warranty first.

Update Mar 3 07: The 101.41 beta drivers appear to contain the fix for the issues discussed in this thread. If you are using an nVidia card with Vista, check nVidia's site for these drivers (or newer).

If you have a laptop and the manufacturer does not provide new enough drivers, try the ones here.

Update May 7 07: Version 1.6 beta 2 for Dark Avatar resolves the scrolling slowdown issue.

There is a known issue with GalCiv2 and Dark Avatar on Windows Vista and an NVidia video card. With the older version of the drivers, this could manifest as a crash or hang, or sometimes a hard lock. With the latest drivers for Vista, the game just stops repainting but can be shut down by hitting ALT+F4. It is typical of this error to see the message "Error flipping back buffer" in your debug.err file.

We are working with NVidia to resolve this issue. It may help if we send in the system information for additional systems, so if you encounter this error, please send your debug.err file to gc2bugs@stardock.com with the subject line "Vista NVidia error" or something along those lines so that I can quickly identify them and send them to my contact at NVidia. Dark Avatar and GalCiv2 have their own debug.err files, so make sure that you send the one where you got the error. Please only send in the report once.

You may also want to save your last autosave before the error so that you can test to make sure that new drivers have fixed the problem once NVidia has releases a new version, but you don't need to send in the save games at this time.

Currently, there are no known issues with ATI cards on Vista, but you may want to make sure that you have the lastest drivers anyway.

Please make sure that your debug.err file is included with any reports you send in, as SmartException is not currently attaching the debug.err file in its reports for Dark Avatar.

Update: NVidia has identified a problem in their drivers, which will be fixed in their next release.

Comments (Page 7)

CariElf

on May 21, 2007

Well, for the 158.18 drivers, the file version is:

7.15.0011.5818

VonVolks

on May 22, 2007

I have a Nvidea 7300 LE driver showing is 7.15.10.9746 Will it work?I just bought and I am downloading the game now....If it doesnt can I get money back? Or do new drivers work now?

kryo

on May 22, 2007

I have a Nvidea 7300 LE driver showing is 7.15.10.9746 Will it work?I just bought and I am downloading the game now....If it doesnt can I get money back? Or do new drivers work now?

Just update your drivers. If your machine is a laptop, you can get them at laptopvideo2go.com, otherwise, you can use the standard ones at nvidia.com.

VonVolks

on May 22, 2007

its a dell desktop with Vista Home premium 32bit.Also my Downlaod of Dark Avatar failed.I will update drivers for Nvidea when game is downloaded.....

DrakeWurrum

on May 22, 2007

I've been having issues where the game locks up for no reason at all, like described in this thread. I run Vista with an Intel Core Duo, and have an NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GS. I've got the right drivers for everything to work...I can even run Supreme Commander just fine, no errors. It may get choppy on max settings, but it's a game that demands much power from a machine.

There are only two games that my computer has issues with. One is GalCiv 2, and the other is City of Heroes. This computer won't even run CoH. At all.
I went to laptopvideo2go.com and none of the drivers they had would work for this laptop, not any later than the one I have right now anyways. I remember using some other site to get my driver, but I just Googled for it. I believe I am using 101.41, as no other Vista driver for NVIDIA cards has been able to find compatible hardware for the driver I'm trying to install.

I've so far found I can at least play through a Medium-sized galaxy with only minimal problems, (I can usually alt+tab out and back in and it'll be back to normal) but if I try anything larger it will lock up when too much is going on at once. I also can't play through the Campaign without the game locking up.

I suggest the coders of GalCiv 2 look into fixing their memory leaks, at the very least, though I doubt that is the problem.

CariElf

on May 22, 2007

The bug is in the drivers. This has been verified both by NVidia and several users here. Currently, those of you with laptop cards are at the mercy of your laptop manufacturer to get you the new drivers (and thus far none of them seem to have the correct drivers) or laptopvideo2go, who doesn't have the new drivers modified yet.

You have been lucky that only 2 of your games don't work on Vista. I can't tell you what the bug was because that would violate our NDA with NVidia, but it was in their drivers.

VonVolks

on May 22, 2007

New drivers installed (which was carnage!) and we will see what happens...After driver reboot i looked to reget the Dark Avatar expansion but when it is runinng the gc2_DarkAvatar.sdc it just sticks on 100% complete and then doesnt do anything else.....

dannyfoh

on May 22, 2007

Well, for the 158.18 drivers, the file version is:

7.15.0011.5818

Thanks.. I can find this driver on the nVidia website.. However, it doesn't say that it supports GeForce Go 7300 .. ONLY GeForce 7300 GS,GT,LE and SE .. Laptopvideo2go doesn't have this driver at all .. The latest driver that I could find that 'supports' GeForce Go 7300 is 98.02 ..

kryo

on May 22, 2007

The drivers on laptopvideo2go are modified to work with all common nvidia laptop chipsets, so you shouldn't need to look for one that explicitly says it supports it. The 158.18 driver on this page does include support for the 7300 Go.

100

kryo

on May 22, 2007

when it is runinng the gc2_DarkAvatar.sdc it just sticks on 100% complete and then doesnt do anything else

If you are running an antivirus or firewall program it may interfere with SDC, so you could try temporarily disabling them. If that doesn't let it finish, please contact support@stardock.com.

101

DrakeWurrum

on May 22, 2007

If that were the case, then I should've been able to install their drivers on my laptop, but they wouldn't work.

102

kryo

on May 23, 2007

In that case, if you post about it on laptopvideo2go's forums, someone there can probably help you get them properly modified so they will. The INF *does* list the 7300 Go in it, so it's probably some relatively minor thing, like a lack of or extra trailing space in the name, but I don't have any experience with that myself so I really couldn't say for sure.

103

Aalaar

on May 23, 2007

I have this problem, or something very similar (it is a Error flipping back buffer to primary buffer. after all), but I do not have Vista! I have XP x64, that is, 64 bit Windows. I can't try the beta 100.x drivers, since for XP x64 there is only 93.81, from Nov 06! I have emailed the debug.err and some saves with other bugs as well. Please tell NVidia to release new Windows x64 drivers as well. Sounds like the game isn't playable for people with Vista, it is however very playable for me, the bug only happens when alt tabbing a ton, details in the email.

104

DrakeWurrum

on May 24, 2007

I have the GeForce Go 7900 GS, actually.

Edit (8:15 AM): This happened to me no less than 5 minutes ago and it's the first time I've ever seen an error message. It doesn't seem to be the same error that everybody else is getting.

It also seems to be the case that there is no debug.err file.
Man...I can't believe you guys use Visual C++ to code this game...

105

kryo

on May 24, 2007

It also seems to be the case that there is no debug.err file.

Some people have reported this, apparently the installer does not always set the game's folder as writeable on Vista as it should. If you update to the 1.6 beta patch on SDC though, it will write it in My Documents\My Games\GC2DarkAvatar instead, which should work fine.

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