New member with help!

Hey all im new here, but i have been scoping the site out for a few days.
i had the black terrain issue, and i thought i would join to post my success fixing it and though im not entirely sure what specifically fixed my problem, im about to do my best to put it all here.
1st. My system is far above spec for Civ 4.
P4 2.53 @ 3.06Ghz 1.5 GB of DDR 400. GForce 440MX (i know that sux)
so...
1st, i updated to the 81.5 drivers from Nvidia (this wont work for lappies tho) that really fixed most of it. the shiny heads and black terrain were fixed. but the rivers still showed up in the fog.
2nd, i set my card settings to high performance, and manually rset anti aliasing to off (not app. controlled) and did the same with anisotropic filtering.

now everything looked great, no problems visually, but in modern era with large globe it got kinda laggy (still playable) but i felt there was room for more

3rd I opened the civ**.ini file in ***\mydoc's\mygames\civ..... and changed some settings, now here i changed one setting at a time and reloaded to the modern era save to see the most end result. here are some of my changes....

Enable Trilinear Filtering for the Minimap
MinimapTrilinearFilter = 0


; Allow Screenshots. May affect performance on some video cards
AllowScreenShots = 0

Specify whether to play in fullscreen mode 0/1/ask
FullScreen = ask (preferance)

; Set to 1 for dynamic animation paging
DynamicAnimPaging = 1

Set to 1 for no in-game movies
NoMovies = 0 (after one run through i dont need to see them)

pecify the number of turns between autoSaves. 0 means no autosave.
AutoSaveInterval = 0 (cuts the CTD down alot)

; Sync input to smooth interface (may run slower)
SyncInput = 1

; Enable D3D9 Queries
D3D9Query = 0 (or 1) someone may help me with what that does... its here more out of curiousity

now mid modern era on large globe with the whole word uncovered it runs very nicely. it can take some time inbetween turns sometimes, but graphically its great, and thats on HIGH for everything. i should also note, that with movies on that can really lag you when its initiating one, thats part of why i stopped them.

hope that helps everyone!

i still CTD about once an hour, just remember to save! you can usually tell when its coming, it lags more and wierd things happen (like water in mini map goes white)

another thing i should add

sometimes when the game crashes it takes my video drivers with it, and im in 640x480 and 4bit colour. and i need a reboot to fix it

well i guess that wasnt as helpfull as i had hoped, i suppose i'll just go back to playin mine

1c0n said:

2nd, i set my card settings to high performance, and manually rset anti aliasing to off (not app. controlled) and did the same with anisotropic filtering.

Click to expand...

Im not great with this kinda stuff....can you tell me how to do these 2 things? It would be much appreciated.

i've just changed all the settings you suggested to the ini file and it works!!

i did however stumble across the reason behind this just before reading your post. I ran game on the small map (previosly been trying standard) and i noticed an improvement - less black, minimap looking good etc. Then i ran a game on Duel map size (smallest) and all black was gone, but the textures were a little dark. You're changes make it all even better.

Im guessing its a combination of low specs which make it display like that, whether it be RAM or CPU, both of which Im not too high on! (AMD 2Ghz, 512). Probably explains why tutorial always worked OK but not big maps.....

Anyhow thanks - gonna have a little play with it (for the first time!!)

OK - ive had a little play with it, its an improvement. What I've found is that the larger the map the worse the blackness was.

Standard Map - Black terrain and leaderheads with just eyes and mouth!
Small - Slightly better terrain although mostly black, the leaderheads are now slightly better as well, eye brows and a bit of face!
Tiny - Land visible (but darker than normal) - leaderheads better yet
Duel (smallest) - Land perfect all nice bright and green grassland - leaderheads complete .....

Thoughts....?

yeah seem like u tried to help , but me and some other members already posted this solution in other thread

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=133116

this will help solve the situation for small maps , but when u try to play on big maps , things are just not as playable as it should be.

tried huge maps and it's always unplayable when u reach 1000AD [ ingame date ]
when u alt-tab to check on the resources civ4 uses , it using up at least 450-500mb of system memory and is growing as the turns passes , something which doesnt seems right.
someone suggested a memory leak in the game codes , which might be highly possible seeing how a memory hog civ4 can become

the above fix is only a temp fix for smaller maps
we still need a patch to put a stop to all these nonsense

right cool, i guess im just behind you guys, covering already known stuff

i dont see where all the things i posted are listed, atleast not in one convinient post. and all i said was this worked for me, now i play on huge globes all the way through with little to no troubles. i didnt really wanna get flamed for posting what people claimed to have found before me. i dont really care who figures it out, so long as more people are able to enjoy the game. i scoured this site and found some helpfull things, some not so helpful in MY case atleast. thre are lots of people trying here, so please dont give me a hard time for trying too. i fixed it last night, then spent today trying to remember what exactly i did. i dont need to come here anymore, mine works, im here to help others. if anyone can build on what i have put, please do, otherwise please dont post just to tell me you thought of that 1st.

also i wanted to add, with the things i did, the size doesnt matter, it works on anything from tiny to huge. so your "mine works fine on tiny" is nice, but irrelivent in this post

Helped as far as convenience goes - I always click off the movies... no point to them. But my issue is severe lag, particularly after the foreign leaderheads. When I first start it's great. Then one of the weaselly jerks talks to me and I have to restart again. I tried checking and unchecking most of the ini file. Couldn't find any way to cut off the foreign leaderheads. Does anyone know how?

hay 1c0n, thanks for linking to this, im sure this will help a lot of people.

1c0n said:

; Sync input to smooth interface (may run slower)
SyncInput = 1

Click to expand...

Does anyone know what this actually does? No guesses please.

Regarding that blackness issue - what to do if you have the game installed on a laptop and, as you stated, can't update my gfx-card (was actually surpriced there was no way to update your gfx-card). I play the standard sized map and i can only see a little terrain in the upper left corner.

Thx for any help you can give me..

tell me more about the lappy your on.. i'll try
tho in my experience reading on here, the odds are strongly against smooth play with laptops. assuming you can get it at all

Well, the game is running but i have that blackness issue as said. Here's the specs - plz tell me if you want more specs and i will see if i can find it.

HP 3000mhz
500 ram (think it is DDR)
Nvidia GeForce 4400 Go 64M

Hum, what else information would you need?