complete terrain "blackout" any suggestions?

[soggy9]

ok. recently my computer hard drive broke and took everything with it. meaning i had to install civy 4 AGAIN. when i did so, having no installation problems watsoever, i started a "terra" game with some 6 or 7 computers. when i actually begin playing, i notice a very odd problem that simply came out of the blue, and I MEAN IT. I can see my units, i can see certain details within my unit's range of site. however anything else with any connection to being the "ground" is simply blank, or in this case black, as if my unit hasn't seen it. this goes for ALL the terrain, i cannot distinguish forest from desert, hills from flat planes, or even ocean from coastline: as both simply show up as "unexplored territory" or "black". even the terrain under my own units feet is black. i can still see various details such as rivers, tribal villages, and most resources. when i go from that into "world builder" mode, everything is fine, i can view all that i couldn't see before. but then i shift back into game mode and its like it was before: BLACK. wat the HECK is up with this? ive never had ne problems like this with a game b4 and this one REALLY ticks me off bad.
i found this site searching the problem on google and nothing has come up except problems with graphics cards that arn't even related too my subject as the problem MUST be in the game itself.
ANY sugestions, websites, advice, or even humorous remarks of my predicament would be MOST apriciated since nobody but i have responded to deadly_Silences similar problem.
help??????anyone?????

[soggy9]

hopefully i can get a screenshot of my problem if my freakin laptop would allow it. (its a toshiba satellite btw)
ill post it as soon as i figure out how to get past this OTHER problem-.-

[soggy9]

i have the same problem this kid has:

but not the montezuma one :s and i can see the rivers and resouces and such how do i fix this?

[Sabre2th]

Generally, this means that your video card does not support T&L, but if you previously ran the game without problems, that won't be it. Out of curiosity, what kind of video card do you have?

Make sure you have the latest drivers installed for you video card and install the version of DirectX that came on the Civ4 CD.

If those don't help, try this thread:

http://www.apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=140859

[Solver]

Is it the same computer that you played on before? I gather that you're playing on a laptop - most of which have the most basic integrated graphics cards that do not support Civ4. So, just to be sure, what's your graphcs card?

[soggy9]

i looked at my display properties and its says that its an "ATI MOBILITY RADEON 7000 IGP"

[Kloreep]

ATI is certainly better than your standard integrated video. I wonder if it is an advanced enough card, though. I don't know the specifics of that one in terms of power, but I do know Civ4 has a minimum VRAM requirement of 64 Megabytes. Select "Run" from the start menu, type "dxdiag" and click on the "display" tab in the window that pops up. In the top left box it should list Approx. Total Memory; what does it say?

[Targonis]

This problem shows up from time to time. You have two possible solutions that may help:

First, try the official ATI Catalyst drivers from www.ati.com(which changes to www.ati.amd.com these days). Since you have a laptop, these may or may not install on your machine.

Second, if the official ati driver pack doesn't work, try getting the omegadrivers version since they are based on the official ATI drivers, but have been hacked to install on laptop chipsets and have been tweaked a bit.

The problem you are having is caused by the GPU(Graphics Processing Unit) running out of texture memory. If the driver update doesn't help, then go into the BIOS settings and boost the amount of memory you allocate to graphics. Keep in mind that this memory will NOT be available for applications once you do this, so a 512 meg memory laptop after losing 128 megs to video may slow down a bit due to virtual memory use.

[Solver]

According to our video card database, the 7000 IGP is a tricky card which can run Civ4, but has a likelihood of running into such problems as well... maybe Omega drivers are the way to go.

[soggy9]

tyvm ill try that and see if it works and make a new topic or something if it doesn't

[super_hazard]

i also encounter the same problem. all~black~. i'm using via/s3g unichrome pro igp.

[Solver]

VIA S3G Unichrome series cards don't have T&L support. Sorry, but that means your PC doesn't meet the game's video requirements.