Some tips for dealing with CTD issues

Hi all, I thought I'd share my experiences fixing CTD issues with the latest update. In my case I experienced CTD by just clicking on a ship after launching into a quick-start game. I had to debug a lot of this myself as I've just updated to Windows 10 TP Build 9926.

First, it looks like the OS update breaks VC runtime, which seems to happen often with OS updates. Locate the VC redistributions under (\SteamApps\common\Galactic Civilizations III\_CommonRedist\vcredist\2012\). I am running x64 but note that 32-bit games may need you to run both the x86 and x64 installers. Select "Repair" if you are asked and always reboot even if you are not asked.

Next, looking through the Debug logs I see a ton of logs have been generated, and it looks like some game-state files are being generated under the ProgramData root. Go to C:\ProgramData\Stardock, and you should see a Galactic Civilizations III folder if you've ran the app at least once. Rather than DELETE the directory outright, I just re-named it. A new folder was created on the next run.

Just to eliminate my video card from being an issue, I updated to the latest NVidia drivers (released 22 Jan 2015 in my case), and I also turned off any advanced graphics usage in the app. Go to Options, Graphics, and Disable Gel-UI, Bloom, and Anti-aliasing. In my case I also have some issues with mouse drivers under full-screen DX games on Windows 10, so I'm running with "Fullscreen" disabled.

Finally, I was still crashing so I dug into the debug.err logs written into the ZIP files and found some warnings indicating that ship designs I'd build in prior games where not loading. If you're really technical, note that these are standard Debug Diag logs you can read using the Windows SDK tools. After some digging around with a filewatcher, I found that in-game designs are being written out to a folder under My Documents. So, go to "My Documents"/my games/ and locate the folder GalCiv3. Once again, rename this folder and a new one will be created for you. You will get to watch the opening video again and will need to set all of your preferences back up. but renaming this folder will clear you of at least some of your history with prior versions.

Running on Win10 betas is certainly not supported through the product team, and I wouldn't recommend it unless you're looking for mayhem, like me. I'll let them comment on my suggestions here. But, hopefully this will help some people also experiencing issues. HTH!

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for7676

I followed steps 1,2, and 4. Now I can actually play the game!

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This also cleaned up my issues, thank you for the information!

I am guessing BETA 4 is having issues with my previous BETA 3 ship builds.

Started with a clean slate and it seems like we are back on track.

Cheers!

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Thanks for posting your steps!

If anyone has ship files that they know didn't work we would greatly appreciate them. If so, would you kindly, submit a ticket via our support system so that I can get the files. After following the link, run the support tool, include your steam name, describe the issue you are having and then send us the zip file to greatly speed up the process!

Link to forums for explanation:

https://forums.galciv3.com/452855/page/1/

Link to support tool:

http://sd.stardock.com/Support/supportToolTest/SDSupportTool.exe

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