Leader videos sometimes not displaying

[Zakharov]

Hey all, I've been fortunate so far as to not have suffered as badly as some other ATi Graphics card owners although I'm still getting my share of graphical glitches.

1) About 50-75% of the time when conducting diplomacy with other leaders the leader video doesn't display and just shows a black background. I was wondering what could be the possible cause for this?

2) Also on a sidenote (not sure if this is a bug or a feature of the game) when I zoom out to Global view, the whole world is covered by cloud making it impossible to see anything (which makes the global view quite redundant). Is it meant to be like this or is there some setting I have to change?

I've got the Catalyst 5.10 drivers and I've tried the fix to the "Failed to initialise renderer" problem, in the hope that this would be related (it actually made the problem worse).

Anyway, any constructive feedback is much appreciated.

[Zakharov]

just bumping this up. So nobody else has experienced this problem?

[elfiero]

close -

on my older laptop (N800C w/ ATI 7500 64MB) I get close to the same thing. I only get the eyes, ears, glasses, lips anytime I talk to another civ. Interesting, but playable. At home on my nvidia (256MB) I don't have the same problem.

[JELEINEN]

I have the same problem with the leader videos as well as with the wonder videos.

[pacificwing]

I have the same problem.

About half the time whenever I’m in communications with a world leader, the leader portrait is completely black. Furthermore, when I zoom all of the way out of the game interface, I only see clouds. Additionally, wonder videos skip and are garbled.

The problems seem to happen more frequently the longer I play. Usually it goes from 50% of the time to nearly all of the time.

I wonder if this is a problem related to the similar problem of only displaying teath/eyes/lips. Even though the effects are similar, I suspect these might be two completely different problems. Given the fact that the completely blacked out leader problem is intermittent, and from what I understand, the eyes/lips/teeh problem happens all of the time.

I think the problem I’m having might be a rendering issue, or a cache problem.

I’ve tried increasing my aperture in the bios, but this did not appear to have an effect. Rolling back drivers had no effect. Neither did clearing my game cache, reinstalling the game, unpacking the artifacts (as explained on the civ4 tech site), or changing the screen resolution, anti-aliasing, or refresh rates.

This looks like it’s a game problem plain and simple. Unfortunately I don’t see many people complaining about completely blacked out leader screens, so this leads me to believe it might get overlooked in the next patch.

With the exception of the problems detailed above, my game works fine.

Cheers,
-PW

[Daedalus]

I'm having the same problem. Leader video displays only every now and then, and wonder videos are completely garbled.

I'm running:

Athlon AMD 2500+ XP
ASUS A7-8VX Motherboard
Powercolor Radeon 9800 Pro 128Mb (Omega Drivers 2.6.75a)
Hercules Gamesurround Muse XL
1024Mb RAM (440 Mhz)
Windows XP SP2

[pacificwing]

Zakharov, what motherboard are you using?

Daedalus is having the same problem as us, and he is using the same motherboard as me (A7V8X). On another interesting note, this problem goes away when I turn off AGP acceleration. Although when I do that, the game becomes unbearably slow.

I wonder if it is a conflict with the VIA chipset. I'm going to experiment with that a bit.

Cheers,
-PW

[Zakharov]

Hmmm that's a good point! Damn those VIA chipsets... yeah I have a VIA motherboard too, my motherboard is an ASUS K8V-SE Deluxe and it uses those VIA 4-in-1 drivers....

My total specs:

AMD Athlon64 3000+
1 GB DDR RAM
Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB (Catalyst 5.10)
ASUS K8V-SE Deluxe motherboard
Soundblaster Live!
Windows XP SP2

As you say pacificwing, I can sort of live with it for now since it doesn't really affect gameplay TOO much, although it better get fixed in a patch in the near future :P.

Interesting comment about changing the aperture disabling AGP. I tried that with some other games on my old Radeon 9800 Pro - and it helped fix an artifacts problem - but the previous one was a faulty one that I got replaced by the one I'm currently using.

[pacificwing]

I started playing around with the VIA drivers a bit last night.

An interesting note: VIA and ATI have never played nice together. They always cause problems. I’ve always had to have my AGP port set at 4x rather than 8x to keep it from intermittently freezing.

Anyway, there was a new set of VIA 4-in-1’s that I tried to install last night. Everything went fine with the driver install, except now I’m getting that stupid render error everyone is talking about.

I followed the Civ4 tech sites instructions, and managed to get rid of the error long enough to play one game (in which my old disappearing leader screen problem was still there), but the error came back after reboot.

I refuse to install directX and ATI drivers EACH time I want to play the game. I’ve uninstalled it and decided to wait for the patch.

Frankly though, I’m getting a bit disheartened at the industry as a whole right now. Publishers seem to have graduated from thinking they can get away with premature releases, to knowing that they can get away with it. They know that most places won’t return non-functional software, and they can always release a patch.

Unfortunately consumers are not as discriminating as they used to be, so I guess broken games will continue to sell.

Cheers,
-PW

[Zakharov]

Hey guys, I've managed to fix the problem on my computer! Don't know if it'll work for you all, and it's not ideal if you have other games that require the most up-to-date drivers, but when I revereted back to old Catalyst drivers (5.6) it seems to play the leader videos now AND zooming out to global view doesn't have 100% cloud cover!

The wonder videos play too, but unfortunately not optimally (sometimes the sound stutters) but hey at least it plays :P. Hopefully either Firaxis or ATi will look into this problem soon.

[Daedalus]

Can't say I'm keen on reverting, as I'm still playing BF2 a fair bit, but at least it gives hope that it'll be fixed

[Boogieknight]

I've had exactly the same problems with the game - black screens for leaders 70% of the time, white out cloud on max zoom, problems with the map display, garbled wonder movies etc. I had followed most of the advice I've seen here to no avail, so started looking on other forums, and I found something that seems to have corrected it for me.

I'm on the latest ATI Catalyst, running a 9800PRO 128meg. I did a fresh install of Civ IV (just in case) and then I went into the Catalyst control panel, changed the 'view' option to 'advanced', selected VIDEO then SMARTGART, and changed the settings from 8xAGP to 4XAGP (required a reboot) and since doing that the game has run perfectly. Haven't checked how this impacts on other games, but for Civ IV it's the dogs bollocks. Can always swap back with a reboot if it slows other games down.

Hope this helps someone.

Al

[Daedalus]

Well, switching from 8x to 4x AGP has always made negligible difference in terms of performance, but usually does tend to give better stability... In fact, I really should have thought of that :S

Good one! Will give it a try.

[Daedalus]

Just tested it... and it did the trick. Leader videos worked fine, and I'll report back on cloud cover and wonder videos.

[orange]

Just wanted to echo your comments about leaderheads. I'd say about 25% of the time, they are either black or garbled (like snow on a TV set)

:shrug: