New fix for the renderer error

[warlordship]

Really now? I was just posting what I had done wrong, and how to fix it. Wow, I feel all gushy inside.

[roboczar]

yup. if you follow his process exactly, the game works.

pretty lame that we have to do it this way, but i'm glad everything's running now.

[roboczar]

You should get one of those silly little hero badges all the regulars around here have, just for figuring it out.

[Gramphos]

I belive that following warlordship's steps changes ennough in the Civ file tree to force the cache to be regenerated, without deletion, and that cache deletion should be equivalent of his steps.

[warlordship]

Maybe I should make a topic with that explanation separately, maybe I can get it stickied at the top of the page the same as with that guy who got his Laptop fixed, before this fix came out.

EDIT: Just saw Gramphos' post, now I'm getting deflated...

[roboczar]

Do it warlordship! You're the hero today! Heroes do anything they want!

[myros]

LOL finaly!!

Got it to work by the method posted above ...

1. rename the "Art" folder to old_Art
2. Run the official unpacker as detailed in 1st post
3. You'll notice the new art folder it creates automaticly is called "art" with a lower case "a" ..no idea if that was the problem.
4. Copy the "Movies" folder from 'old_Art' and paste it into 'art'

Game runs fine now

Oh btw this is to fix the problem with after you unpack the error vanishes but it just quits to desktop instead.

Thanks to all who worked on this ...saved my weekend

Myros

[IBMT42]

Mine dosent seem to work.

Radeon Mobile 7500

[warlordship]

Sweet! I'm going to experiment a bit more when I get back from work and see if just renaming the "Art" folder to "art", lowercase a. Additionally, I will compare the two directories, Art and art, to see if the files in them are different sizes or dates. Also, I am going to consider re-installing and seeing what I really did to fix it.

[dondada30]

finally! i created a new user account and the game works for me. I followed the steps on the support site and got rid of the render error only to have the game exit out of the load screen when it got to 'initengine'. I created a new user login in windows, logged in and the game works.

good luck to everyone still trying to get this game to work. i wish i had the energy to play a game but all i really want to do right now is fall asleep on my couch. Hopefully a patch will be released that works for everyone b/c i'm sure i messed up something else on my damn computer with all the changes i made..

[azcoder]

I could not get it working for a long time.

After much trouble I got it working:
Dell Inspiron XPS
Radeon Mobility 9800.

I had to get the latest Omega Drivers.
I renamed the art file to ARTOLD.
I deleted the cache files in C:\Documents and Settings\rgc\Application Data\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4\cache
I used the fpk_tool.exe extractor for the PAK and created a new art directory.
I copied the movies subfolder from artOLD to art.

Finally.

BTW, my nvidia desktop worked just fine.

My opinion: Instead of developing using proprietary MS Direct3d, they should use OpenGL. That would make a Linux and Mac port easy. Designing for portability would also minimize some of these compatiblity issues, becasue they would be doing builds on other machines and hardware throughout the dev process.

Time to go play.....

[BigBear]

Anyone else notice that "Disc1/ Install" is needed to play and "Disc2 / Play" isn't? Shouldn't guessed something wasn't right about this, right out of the box.

[warlordship]

My thoughts too. Yeah, I think it's generally accepted that this game's messed up

[mitko_best]

Okay, I finally fixed my desktop crashing problem and I even played for a couple of hours
I had the very same problem which Roboczar and others reported. So this is what I did. After 5-6 times of driver uninstal/reinstall, directX updates and downgrades, Civ 4 installs/uninstall, art0 unpacks I was still nowhere(okay Firaxis' mother got a few nasty remarks on how smart her boys were but that's another story)!

So I uninstalled the game, then I went to my documents and cleared all remaining folders from "My Games" which had something to do with Civ4. Then I rebooted, reinstalled the game but didn't start the .exe at all. Instead I went straight for the fix and then removed the art0.fpk file from it's location. Then I started the game and wow I got an intro, which by the way sucks a little bit cause Civ 3 intro was awesome and this isn't but that is also another case.

So give it a try!

P.S. By the way ATI Radeon 9550 256 MB and it finally really worked well.

[BaysideLogHomes]

any luck yet for win2k users??