new problem

[Poruser]

I have a problem and a really apreciate some kind of help. I install the game and when i go to the game it apears all black and i can see only the setlers and the warriors. nothing else as you can see in the image attached. Is this normal? i dont think so... My graphic have 64 Mb and i have all the recent drivers. My operating system its XP and i have 1023 of memory.
Thanks

[Cookie Monster]

This is exactly the problem I and many others have. Supposedly they're coming out with a patch this week to address this problem.

[frugal]

Originally posted by Cookie Monster
This is exactly the problem I and many others have. Supposedly they're coming out with a patch this week to address this problem.

They are ?

Can you provide a link to the thread where that was announced ? I have a HP Pavillion laptop that has this bug. I have been using the World Editor work around but I would really like to be able to play without cheating I know that this laptop has T&L because other games that need it work fine.

[seebs]

No one from Firaxis has described specific bugs to be fixed, and there is little reason to believe they are expecting to do much about some of the video things...

Of course, we can always hope. I have gotten sorta frustrated with the number of different crashes I have. I have a saved game where I can do other things, but I can't have settlers build a cottage, or rather, if I do, the game immediately crashes to desktop. !?

[Cookie Monster]

I don't have the link but this was announced on Civfanatics.

[Poruser]

But whats really the problem?

[seebs]

Almost certainly, the problem is either that your video card does not actually have T&L support, or your drivers aren't handling it correctly.

If you had at any time said exactly which video card you had, we could maybe tell you more about it. Most often, this happens on laptop or "integrated" (on the motherboard) video, which often does not have full T&L support.

[frugal]

Originally posted by seebs
Almost certainly, the problem is either that your video card does not actually have T&L support, or your drivers aren't handling it correctly.

If you had at any time said exactly which video card you had, we could maybe tell you more about it. Most often, this happens on laptop or "integrated" (on the motherboard) video, which often does not have full T&L support.

The laptop is a HP Pavilion 5570US with a "Radeon IGP 345" graphics card.

I know that it has T&L because:

a) There is a setting on the video card control panel for disabling it

b) The Tron games requires T&L and it works fine.

However from what I can gather on the boards it looks like Civ4 uses a T&L function that is very rarely used and as such it may not be fully supported on this card even though it does support T&L.

Having said all that: pretty much every RPG, RTS, top down scrolling exploration game since the dawn of teh VIC-20 has used fog of war to hide parts of the map and they all seem to be able to do it without using this wierd unused T&L function. From what I can see the fog of war is the only thing in the game that needs T&L, so I am hoping that the patch will provide a different way of doing FoW for those cards that do not support T&L completely.

At the moment it is very much a hit and miss afair as to wether any particular card fully supports the game. I would hope that the developers can find a way of implementing this functionality using the common T&L functionality.

--
regards,
Frugal

[Poruser]

My graphic card is a ATI RADEON 7000. Its old i know but i have never had any problems to put a game rooling.. recently a played Age of empires anda others without any problemas. And a really don't tinhk that the problem its on drivers becouse i have downloaded the most recent drivers in ATI support site. I Don't know what is T&L i have never heard of it.

[Lost1]

I have an ATI Radeon Mobility 7000 in my laptop too. However my card has only 16MB video mem, but it works anyway except the black tiles & the eyeball/teeth leaders.

I read about installing the omegadrivers solved the problem for some (http://www.omegadrivers.net).

There are a few workarounds to make the black terrain visible:[*]Goto Worldbuilder and use the reveal all tiles button[*]SHIFT-ALT-D and check debug, CTRL-D and uncheck "Fog of War"[*]add a line to a configfile, but I forgot the line and the file you need to add :P

good luck
L1

[seebs]

The Radeon 7000 does not have T&L, and is unlikely to work, even with patches.

I don't know much about the Mobility "IGP 345", so I can't really comment on where it is in the ATI product range. Not every card with T&L support has complete T&L support, though, and a lot of built-in hardware has significant omissions.

I do think the excessive hardware requirements are clearly a flaw in the game, though.