Civilization III Fixes (PLEASE READ)

sk0tie

Chieftain
Joined
Oct 31, 2001
Messages
25
Hello,

I've been reading up on the forums for Civilization III and see quite a few of you are having trouble with the game. I work for Infogrames Tech Support, and belive you me, the phones are off the hook on this one! :confused:

Before you go and blame Firaxis or Infogrames for the problems some of you are having with the game, please make sure you try this stuff first.

First off, make sure you are running the latest drivers for your sound card and video card that support DirectX 8.0 and DISABLE 3RD PARTY APPLICATIONS! In Win98/ME you click on start, goto run, and type in MSCONFIG, make sure SELECTIVE STARTUP is enabled, and LOAD STARTUP GROUP ITEMS is UNCHECKED, and reboot your computer. :D

If you encounter the "Out of Range" or "Out of Sync" message from your monitor, find out what type of monitor you have, and install the CORRECT .INF for your monitor. DO NOT use "Default" or "Plug and Play" driver from Microsoft, this is what is causing the problem. GO MICROSOFT! :goodjob:

Do a Windows Update! You have no idea how many problems this fixes! :lol:

If you continue to have problems with the game, go ahead and post them to this thread, I'll do my best to work it out with you.

sk0tie
Infogrames, Inc
Tech Support North America
 
Thanks for posting here!

BTW, I need some advice: would CivIII work with WinXP and a Geforce MX2 64mb card? I plan buying these two products soon...
 
Yes they will bud! :) Those are the two things I run on my home system, works great! Just make sure you are running 21.83 drivers or newer if you buy that card. The game has problems with the 12.41 and lower.

Have Fun!

sk0tie
Infogrames, Inc
Tech Support North America
 
Originally posted by sk0tie
Yes they will bud! :) Those are the two things I run on my home system, works great! Just make sure you are running 21.83 drivers or newer if you buy that card. The game has problems with the 12.41 and lower.

Have Fun!

sk0tie
Infogrames, Inc
Tech Support North America

Thanks a lot! I'll have fun for sure :D :D ;)
 
I have had no problems with DetonatorXP drivers, there may be some other issue behind them not working correctly. The only thing I can tell is most people that have GeForce cards also have Athlons, and with Athlons come Via Chipsets.

Update Via 4in1 drivers from www.viatech.com

Happy Civ'ing :)

sk0tie
Infogrames, Inc
Tech Support North America
 
Hi-

Game won't run on Win2000 Dell Latitude with plenty of everything and latest drivers. Get Civ III splash screen then exit back to Windows.

Any idea what's up?
 
If you have already updated all the drivers and tried the above information, please state everything you know about your computer, and I'll see if there is something I can do for you. :D

This goes for anyone that needs some help, Goto Start Menu, Run, and type DXDIAG and get this information:

Under System Tab:

Processor and Speed
Total System Memory
DirectX Version

Under Display Tab:

Video Card Name
Manufacturer
Approx. Total Memory

Under Sound Tab:

Sound Card Name
Manufacturer

I will also need the driver version numbers of the sound and video cards, which can be found in the Device Manager. (Right-click on properties of My Computer)

sk0tie
Infogrames, Inc
Tech Support North America
 
I am experiencing and I've heard others are experiencing very slow (multi-second) lag on scolling on the map. I've heard varying reports on how to fix this (one suggestion is to go to older Detonator drivers). Any word on this?

System:
Dual Celeron 500
Windows XP
256MB RAM
GeForce2 MX400 Video

-Bacon.
 
Here's the specs you asked for on the issue of the game not starting on my laptop:

Dell Latitude running Win2000

Processor and Speed P3 500mhz
Total System Memory 128mb
DirectX Version 8.0

Under Display Tab:

Video Card Name ATI Rage Mobility M-1 AGP 2X
Manufacturer ATI
Approx. Total Memory 8mb

Under Sound Tab:

Sound Card Name ESS Maestro 3
Manufacturer ESS

I will also need the driver version numbers of the sound and video cards, which can be found in the Device Manager. (Right-click on properties of My Computer)

Sound driver v5.12.1.1146
Video driver v5.0.2195.4027

Thanks for any help you can provide.
 
I will look into it when I get a chance, remember, my first job is Infogrames Phone Tech Support, I do this in my free time :)
 
Originally posted by sk0tie
I will look into it when I get a chance, remember, my first job is Infogrames Phone Tech Support, I do this in my free time :)

I hear ya, I used to work in Tech Support a long time ago and I am certain that it shaved years off my life :). Thanks for coming to the forums, it would be nice if Infogrames had some forums of their own, but oh well. thanks for the help!

-Bacon.
 
King Rude I had the same problem as you are describing. I normally run my screen resolution at 1024x768 and use True Color (24 bit) for number of colors. I found that I had to reset my resolution to 640x480 and lower my number of colors used to High Color (16 bit) or 256 colors. Once I made these changes the game ran fine after the splash screen.

Am looking forward to sk0tie's reply.
 
Hi-

Game won't run on Win2000 Dell Latitude with plenty of everything and latest drivers. Get Civ III splash screen then exit back to Windows.

Any idea what's up?

I had the same problem on a similar system, until I changed my res to 1024 X 768.

good luck.
----sumociv
 
OCRAWARE does not disable when turning off 3rd party applications. After you disable 3rd party applications and reboot, CTRL-ALT-DEL and manually END-TASK Ocraware.

Ocraware directly uses the Fonts in windows, and from previous experience, too many fonts cause the registry to corrupt. I have fixed two calls now reguarding this problem.

One user had 700 fonts. I instructed him to remove atlease 350 of those fonts, and to my suprise, this fixed the problem with broken text.

The game needs to access the Lucidia Sans font within the first 256 Font Entries.

Hope this helps, I am still working on the issues from the previous posts, please bare with me! :D
 
One thing I have noticed with some other postings on other sites as well as my own experiences with Civ3 is that there seems to be a problem with the way the game polls to see which settings to use with the graphics cards.

The intro blink movie worked fine. The small portion before the blink intro and the menu screens after the blink video would display as if the refresh rate was incompatible with the monitor.

By experimenting with my display settings I was able to reproduce the the graphical "mess" by setting my refresh rates to 120hz.

From reading on the net I discovered that I would be able to fix this problem. The way to do this was to find the settings in the regestry dealing with the graphics card. I then removed the settings corrisponding to the higher refresh rates. (I removed the 100,120,80,85 hz options)

It appears from looking through the regestry that when the graphics card is installed it places entrys in the regestry for all resolutions and all refresh rates that the graphics CARD itself is capable of. (even if the system is not capable of running them)

The listing in the regestry seems to display them ordered not numerically, but ordered alphabetically, meaning instead of putting them in numeric order of 65,70,75,80,85,100,120 the regestry would display them as 100,120,65,70,75,80,85.

If the game were to pull the first settings it came across, it would pull the refresh rates that were physically to high for my monitor, and hence the "mess" that was displayed on the screen.

Please dont missunderstand, I am just posting information to hopefully help with this problem, not as an attack.

I have it running on my ststem now, and enjoy the game very much (just wish I had more time to devote to it lol).

Cheers,

Trash
 
Thank you trash! I will IMMEDIATELY forward this to the development team!! :D

Thank you all for the help, we are working around the clock for answers to these critical problems, please keep it up! :D
 
Hey, WOW skOtie- way to do good PR for Inforgrames. Thanks a lot for posting in here and (I assume) reading posts in other threads regarding tech probs as well. Probably a good place for you guys to get ideas as to solutions, huh?

Now make sure you take some time out to play the game that's paying your keep! :king:
 
Well nobody else in the department really does this, I just use it because it seems to me if you are on the internet looking up information, you seem to know your computer pretty well, and it makes it really easy for me to gather information about peoples computers.

In response to Trash, could you tell me where in the registry you found these refresh rates?

Thank you all again! :)
 
I had the refreshrate problem as well, and edited my registry because I was unable to find or create a proper .inf file for my screen.

For me the refreshrates were in the normal order: 60,70,72,75,85,100,120. I just removed the highest ones that don't work with my screen.

They were at HKLM/System/CurrentControlSet/Services/NV4/Device0
The key was NVVANTA_Modes and keytype was REG_MULTI_SZ

This is for an NVidia Vanta card.

Btw, for those that have the same problem and don't know enough about the registry or fixing your pc when you don't have a screen: Don't mess with the registry (or make a backup before changing, and remember very well how to get into vga mode at bootup (F8))
 
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