ATI is not the problem, Firaxis is

[Kc7mxo]

I have a BRAND NEW 256mb x800 XL i bought less than a month ago that is having this issue. its not just old ati cards.

And I took one look at the "fix" firaxis offered and forget that. i'd much rather take the game back and buy age of empires 3 or some other game than go through that much hassle to play something i paid for already.

oh wait, i forgot. stores don't take software back! @$@%$.


Fortunatly for me, I have two computers, and it works acceptable for me on that one. Even if i have to run it in NT compatibility mode just so it'll recognize that the CD's in the drive. Fricking copy protection.

[Gramphos]

Originally posted by Kc7mxo
And I took one look at the "fix" firaxis offered and forget that.

It's more a workaround than a true fix. Hopefully they will find/have found the reason for the need of that workaround and can make a real fix in a patch. But why won't you try the workaround?

[Kc7mxo]

because i spent ten hours at work today and i dont feel like doing any at home?

and i'd really rather not mess with my drivers as every other game on my machine is running fabulously now.

hopefully firaxis will provide an actual fix like you said. but i'm not holding my breath. /shrug

[Gramphos]

Try the PAK thing and possible deleting the cache. That affects only Civ4, and might well solve the problems.

[Kc7mxo]

thanks gramphos, i hadn't heard of the pak thing. It seems to work, for me so far.

[Imran Siddiqui]

As for the post attacking the user for being �pissy�, if you go back and read the full thread it seems clear that everyone thinks Apolyton is doing a great job, and does not �blame� them for having pop ups in what is clearly a fan site.

I believe the point is that Civ 4 has no �official� forum, which is a pretty common and useful feature for a game, especially an �A+� title to have.

Firaxis hasn't had official forums since SMAC. CivIII, Pirates, etc. haven't had official forums. Frankly I find it hard to believe that having an official forum is somehow expected of game devlopers. At least not having a dedicated forum, but having staff frequent other boards to answer questions is better than EA's method of having an official forum, but you won't see anyone from EA on them!

And I'm sorry, he consistently attacked Apolyton for having pop ups. Like it greviously offended him (or it was beneath him to come to a fan site with pop ups)! Perish the thought!

[asleepathewheel]

good god. I remember when I first got into PC gaming into the early 90's when it was "a wing and a prayer" to get a game to work on my pcs, using boot disks, manipulating various things to try to get games to work. Things are much easier these days, especially with internet forum support.

Though it is annoying to deal with these issues, they just don't seem as insurmountable as they were to me back then.

[alva]

I can't even begin to sum up how many games I bought (before the internet) but never played because something didn't work.

[mountainlion2]

I have shelves of old games and boxes of 3.5 and 5.25 floppies with different DOS configurations to get them to work.

The only nice thing about those days was that they would at least have a troubleshooting section in the back with things to try. Better than today where its just a list of websites and email addresses.

This trip down memory lane does date some of though

[Comte]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
Firaxis hasn't had official forums since SMAC. CivIII, Pirates, etc. haven't had official forums. Frankly I find it hard to believe that having an official forum is somehow expected of game devlopers. At least not having a dedicated forum, but having staff frequent other boards to answer questions is better than EA's method of having an official forum, but you won't see anyone from EA on them!

And I'm sorry, he consistently attacked Apolyton for having pop ups. Like it greviously offended him (or it was beneath him to come to a fan site with pop ups)! Perish the thought!

It's extremely common for publishers/developers to have forums of their own. I'm trying to think of one that doesn't...

The company I work at: http://forums.obsidianent.com/
The company that people confuse us with: http://forums.bioware.com/forums/index.html
More:http://forums.eidosgames.com/

http://forums.ea.com/mboards/category.jspa?sls=2&categoryID=15

http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp

Wait, no I found one! There is no forums for Black Isle. Probably because they are out of bussiness.

That's not entirely fair, I did find one other company that doesn't host their own forums.

http://forums.relicnews.com/

But as you can see, the site is run with an active parternship with the company, they are the *official* forums for Relic.

Now, as was pointed out before and I thought I had made clear-

One, the pop-ups don't bother me because I'm using Firefox, thanks for the tips though.

Two, I think Apolyton does a great job and I understand that sometimes comprimises have to be made on a budget.

Three, the reason I bring up the pop-ups and such is because it is entirely unprofessional for Firaxis/2k to dump community management onto fansites like they have done. It's unfair to the fansites and unfair to the consumers.

A lot of mischaracterizations have been made about my arguments in this thread, which isn't suprising. I was accused of being predictable and a lot of generalizations and assumptions were made about my character, motivation, education, profession, etc. Ironically, many of these mischaracterizations were made in a post accusing me of being predictable and not thinking things through.

I don't know who dropped the ball with this ATI issue, among many many others. But someone did drop it. And yes, I recognize that games ship with bugs, hell, when NWN2 ships I personally invite every single one of you to mail me and complain about them, I take responsibility for quality of my product.

For the record, I HAVE been playing and I have been enjoying myself, but I'm willing to put up with a lot more than most people are. Like, for example, the fact that my minimap appears as a white box, that my animations stutter or play in slow motion, my camera has inconsistant auto-movement for combats, the diplomacy window 9 times out of ten is nothing but a blank box, zooming the map out to the globe interface gives me nothing but static, movies are static, text will fail to display in certain windows, tooltips flicker and are unreadable... there is more, I'm sure, but I've reached the point where I'm having to think about it, so we're past the realm of major bugs.

I don't think it's at all unfair, all things considered to be frustrated and even angry at the publisher and developer over this. Of the PC games that I've bought over the course of the past two years, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, Rome: Total War, Dawn of War + Expansion, Black & White 2, Half Life 2, Nexus: The Jupiter Incident, Knights of the Old Republic 2, and, I'm sure others that I can't remember, none of these, even the B-List title, werereleased with this many severe bugs for this many users. To be fair, KotOR2, released by my company, comes close- and you know what? The blame lies with the developer and the publisher, Obsidian for not having production QA, the publisher for insisting on an unrealistic dev cycle and having poor contract testers. These are both mistakes that Obsidian, and hopefully Lucas Arts, recognize and are not going to repeat.

It's partially an artifact of observation in that users with problems self-select, and with a number of those titles above I never had a single problem at all and never visited the website and forums (all of them, by the way, do have official forums) to actually see if anyone else was having any problems. But the general games forum I do visit is usually a pretty good indication and I don't recall any major technical problems reported with any of the above games that affected more than one or two posters out of over 60,000 total users.


There is clearly a problem, and even if Firaxis isn't to blame, someone else is. A few groups that have had the finger pointed at them in this thread and others are ATI and the end-user, both of whom are clearly not responsible for the problems that are happening.

In conclusion, I'm rational, I'm not angry, I'm only barely frustrated. I'm being reasonable and voicing my complaints about the fact that I paid money for a product that is very clearly broken for a great many people. I do not deserve to be insulted because I bought a game that breaks for me and not for you. I do not deserve to be dismissed with a wave of the hand by fans that insist there is, in fact, no problem at all simply because it works for them. I do not believe that voicing my opinion and disatisfaction with a product that I paid for makes me a troll or a malcontent, it makes me a user who did not get what they paid for and is stuck with a shoddy product until an official fix is found for my problems. A fix that may or may not ever come, I can't know if there is one on its way or not, since there is no official community relations to keep me informed.

[Comte]

And for those of you remembering the 'good ole days' you are absoutely right. Things used to be much much worse. But just because things sucked in the past doesn't mean we have to suck it up and deal with it now. If that were the case we'd still be writing our own autoexec.bat and loving it. But we complained and it got better because publishers knew that they had to stay competative by removing crap like that and lowering barrier to entry.

Frankly, the fix for the ATI render bug is only the barest fraction of a step above having to rewrite your boot sequence. The only thing that makes this better is screenshots and easy accessability to the fix page, the credit for this lies with the Internet, not Firaxis or 2k.

[Nailfoot]

One thought, even though not on topic: You thought BnW2 was not bugged? I post by Nailfoot there as well...search out some of the threads I posted in.

/OFF Not On Topic

EDIT: Oops I forgot this:

I am not excusing Firaxis or whoever dropped the ball, sorry if it came across that way.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Comte

Three, the reason I bring up the pop-ups and such is because it is entirely unprofessional for Firaxis/2k to dump community management onto fansites like they have done. It's unfair to the fansites and unfair to the consumers.

They didn't dump community management onto Apolyton, it's just evolved that way. This site has been around for a long, long time. I believe I was coming here when I was still playing Civ 2: Test of Time. In terms of my internet experience, I can't remember a time when there wasn't an Apolyton. It's grown into a symbiotic relationship which over all I think is to the benefit af all parties concerned.

It's good for the fans since they get a place to go that's unbiased and impartial in order to discuss their views and ideas about the game. And it's good for Firaxis since they don't have to bother with the day to day management of running a forum. That leaves their time free to concentrate on game development. It's also good for them since Apolyton has been around for so long. Everyone who's been playing the game for awhile knows to come here for news, patches etc.

I don't think you're seeing the whole picture when you say it's unprofessional. It's become something of a tradition with long term civ players like myself. I suspect that none of those companies you listed have anything similar.

And rest assured that any problems that people are experiencing will be fixed. Firaxis has a good reputation for taking care of their products IMO. More so than any other game developer that I've ever bought games for at least.

[alva]

One, the pop-ups don't bother me because I'm using Firefox, thanks for the tips though.

You do realise if everyone blocks them, there would be no Apolyton.
You only one or two a day here(normally), letting those through and thereby helping this site really isn't going to kill you.

[Comte]

Originally posted by Willem
I don't think you're seeing the whole picture when you say it's unprofessional. It's become something of a tradition with long term civ players like myself. I suspect that none of those companies you listed have anything similar.

Relic News, as I clearly pointed out, is a fan site that runs in a n official partnership with Relic.

The Obsidian boards are not run day to day by people in the employ of Obsidian Entertainment. We let fans run the boards on off-site servers that we pay for. Has Firaxis ever offered money to Apolyton so that they don't have to rely on ineffective and obnoxious banner ads? If not, you might want to ask for some, since you are doing their job.

And rest assured that any problems that people are experiencing will be fixed. Firaxis has a good reputation for taking care of their products IMO. More so than any other game developer that I've ever bought games for at least.

My SMAC still has the same sound stuttering problem it had the day I bought it.