OK, after attempting to play on my underspec G4 powerbook (I got through a few slow turns so I know what the game's supposed to look like) I brought the game over to our powerhouse g5 with the 30" cinema display.

As I selected my nation, I noticed that the leader, instead of a slowly-moving animatronic parody of a human being, was instead a red outline of a human being with teeth floating in the middle. Weird. I went on though, and as soon as the game began I was confronted with a swirling chaos of brown polygon shards, with no discernible images. The text around the edges of the screen was fine, but the middle of the screen was indescribable. The commands and the sound all seemed to work. I tried changing the graphics settings, but fiddling with them and restarting the game had the same effect.

Known issue?

Hi Creed,

Welcome to the forum!

I'm guessing this is a kernal panic, and this has been described by others- particularly with some of the ATI Radeon graphics cards.

Three things to try:

Install the new beta version of the patch (see sticky in this forum). This should give you a performance boost as well as hopefully solving the graphics problem.

Set Anti-Aliasing to 0 (in the graphics option menu)

Play in Window mode rather than Full Screen (hold down option button while double-clicking Civ)

Hopefully this will help

I'm playing on a powerbook- and the patch helped out quite a bit. A large map was actually pretty fast through the ancient age, although getting pretty slow into industrial age...

I don't think it's a kernel panic. That simply draws a translucent grey veil over your screen and tells you to restart the computer in multiple languages.

What's your system spec? CPU speed, memory, video card and video memory?

OK, after attempting to play on my underspec G4 powerbook (I got through a few slow turns so I know what the game's supposed to look like) I brought the game over to our powerhouse g5 with the 30" cinema display.

What version of OSX are you using? If it's 10.4.6 or 10.4.7, try turning down the graphical settings so that you're running at a smaller resolution, like 1024x768 and see if that helps. If so, increase from there.

I don't think it's a kernel panic. That simply draws a translucent grey veil over your screen and tells you to restart the computer in multiple languages.

What's your system spec? CPU speed, memory, video card and video memory?

twin CPUs, 2.5 ghz
4.5 gigs ram
GeForce 6800 GT

I don't actually know what visual memory is/how to find it. VRAM 256 MB maybe?

p.s. i've seen screen shots of a kernel panic, this looks nothing like those.

twin CPUs, 2.5 ghz
4.5 gigs ram
GeForce 6800 GT

I don't actually know what visual memory is/how to find it. VRAM 256 MB maybe?

p.s. i've seen screen shots of a kernel panic, this looks nothing like those.

well, some combination of rebooting, the patch, and updating to 10.4.7 fixed the problem.

So what do you call that if it isn't a kernal panic? I had those symptoms on my PC with about 50-75% of my crashes. I don't know enough about how the graphics are rendered, but it seemed like either the computer was drawing random vectors, or somehow lost references for the beginning or end of a vector and they ended up scattered. The effect was kind of like Han Solo finally fixed the hyperdrive and my screen was accelerating to light speed.

A kernel panic is a very specific event that occurs when the kernel code detects an fatal error and shuts the computer down. It may be caused by a video driver getting very confused, but once it a kernel panic has occurred there is no operating system or user interface left operational.

The equivalent event on a PC is a Blue Screen of Death. Anything less is not a kernel panic, it's some hardware or software misbehaving in its own sandbox.