Possible black terrain fix (worked for me)

Ok, so I'm not promising this will work for everyone, but it worked for me and I was desperate. I'm sure there's a lot of you out there who are dying to play so I'll offer what helped for me.

I'm off to Europe next week and so really wanted to get the game working on my laptop (for the plane). The laptop is a Dell Inspiron 8200 with a GeForce 4 440 GO.

So, I had the black terrain problems. Tried everything I read on the forums and official website (so you might have to do all of those before using 'my' fix). I tried running in windowed mode, turning the graphics options down, the cache fix, unpak fix, upgraded my video drivers and chipset drivers from the Dell website and nothing worked. All I was ever able to get was to see some of the terrain on Duel size maps.

So, I downloaded the tweaked Omega drivers (not sure if this has already been suggested by others, apologies if so) from here http://www.omegadrivers.net/ (I used the 'Quality' settings).

Now I can run the game in full screen, huge maps at 1600 x 1200 and the map appears! No more blackness! So, you shouldn't need to upgrade your computer hopefully.

I'm thinking that these drivers might also help people with other cards chipsets.

Disclaimer: These drivers aren't supported by nvidia (or me) so use at your own risk. But they are working fine for me and I can finally play CIV!

Good Luck.

Hoplite

I had the black map problem and the cheshire faces (eyeballs, mouth, beard, no face).

Tech support tells me, "the game is not ENTIRELY compatible with intel graphics cards".

Translation: Sid strikes again. Another piece of manure foisted on the public.

Fortunately, for those of you with this problem, Amazon has apparently heard enough complaints. They agreed to take mine back no questions asked.

I may have lost my Sunday morning, but I am not out the fifty bucks!

Ehrenfahn

This fix worked for me.

(Dell C840 with GeForce 4 440 Go)

Thank you, Hoplite!

Arathain

I have the same black map and leaderhead problems.... I have an ATI mobility radeon 7500 card with 32 mb ram.
I left feedback at Firaxis' homepage and within an hour I have been contacted by Dshirk from Firaxis, requesting the log file from my dxdiag. I have sent that, hopefully that can help them make a patch / solve these problems for us

The Black Map and Cheshire Faces

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I had the black map problem and the cheshire faces (eyeballs, mouth, beard, no face).

Tech support tells me, "the game is not ENTIRELY compatible with intel graphics cards".

Well I have a SiS Graphics card and I have the Chesire cat/ black terrain problems. Any sugegstions on what I can do?

But on the other computer, not this one, the game works fine. I don't get it.

Thank you so much. This fixed my problem.

I have the same graphics card (GeForce 4 440 Go), and had the black terrain problem. Definately try this if you have this graphics card. The Omega drivers are highly recommended by a friend mine... don't have any worrys about trying them.

Thanks again!

SteP.

Err... help this kid out! I've got the Geforce4 440 GOs, not sure which things to download off the website...

One of you savvies, tell me the answer!

Because I may be a lover but I ain't no dancer.

You gotta love just downloading random stuff in a futile hope for success! w00t college! w00t good internet!

Aeon221: Did you find the right one?

The one you need to download is here.

Just download it, unzip it, and run it. You'll have to restart, after which CivIV should work fine! Good luck!

I gots it and shareds it. heh it only took me one try too! And, get this, it WORKED!

Now I just have to figure out why multiplayer autocrashes...

English Monarch said:

The Black Map and Cheshire Faces

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I had the black map problem and the cheshire faces (eyeballs, mouth, beard, no face).

Tech support tells me, "the game is not ENTIRELY compatible with intel graphics cards".

Well I have a SiS Graphics card and I have the Chesire cat/ black terrain problems. Any sugegstions on what I can do?

But on the other computer, not this one, the game works fine. I don't get it.

Click to expand...

Im in the same boat. Any help for Sis drivers??

I'm not very good with comp so this may be a stupid question but, what if there is know xml file. I looked in the folder and it's empty. help please

Hi,

Thanks for the heads up! Installing the Omega drivers and updating to the DirectX version on the CD seems to have worked for me. My system is a Dell Inspiron 8500 with a GeForce 4200 Go, 64 MB VRAM (within the minimum spec, but nothing fancy).

I suspect this could potentially solve many video-related problems with Civ4 on older Geforce chipsets, but I wouldn't guarantee that!

I imagine that this procedure might be a bit unsettling for the less-savvy among us, so here's a walkthrough.

1. Download the latest version of the Omega driver file for WinXP (see the earlier link) and run it.
2. Some versions of the Omega drivers (not sure if this applies to all) may be contained in a self-extractor. If this happens, running the downloaded file will automatically extract a new file, which is the actual driver installer. You'll have to specify where to extract that (hint: the desktop is a pretty good place). After that, you can delete the old file and run the extracted one.
3. The Omega drivers should go through a first-stage installation. After several rounds of installing different subprograms, you will be prompted to reboot your computer. This first prompt may not actually reboot the computer; after it closes, a second reboot prompt will appear, and this one will restart the computer.
4. Upon next startup, your computer may display some pretty funky resolution changes. (Doesn't look like it's running in safe mode though, 'cause the colour depth seems to be still 32-bit.) Don't panic. The installer will come up again and you'll have to proceed through a second round of installation, after which you will have to restart your computer yet again. (At least, I did.)
5. Now tweak your video options to your taste and fire Civ4 up. It should work... finally.

I tried this, and unfortunatly for me the problem got worse! I will just have to wait for the damn patch.

That worked for me! My system is:

P4 3GHz HT
512Mbx2 OCZ EL
Asus P4P800
Creative GeForceFX5900

I downloaded and installed the quality ones, and the game ran smooth without any CTD, and with more image quality!

Thanks

Guess i'll try this on my gforce mx 440 when i get back from work

Just another word of thanks from a grateful player... Civ4 regularly locks up in a blocking wait on my desktop, and it gave the black terrain on my laptop. Using the Omega drivers, the laptop (HP Pavilion, AMD64 3200, 1G RAM, NVIDIA 4 440 Go) works like a dream. I played for 5 hours last night with no hangs, crashes, or other unseemly interruptions.

Now to see if I can find an Omega driver for my 5700 FX...

Richard

Hoplite,

Thank you for your post. I have the exact same laptop model that you have and the new drivers also resolved my issue.

Have fun in Europe.

Thanks Frank

I tried the driver and in the first like 30 turns it was ok (I said a lot of praise for Hopite),but then again the black terrain but is not all black...in the center of he screen is black like not discovered territory a.k.a. fog of war and on the sides I can see everything.
So this is probubly a problem with fog of war in the game...(Fraxis you can fix this in a second).
I tried omega drivers v.66.93 and v.45.23 (45.23 was the fastest driver from nVIDIA for graphic card GeForce 4 MX and down),so it didn't help.

What drivers everybody is using?

I have Innovision Tornado GeForce 4 MX 440

Richard Bartle said:

Just another word of thanks from a grateful player... Civ4 regularly locks up in a blocking wait on my desktop, and it gave the black terrain on my laptop. Using the Omega drivers, the laptop (HP Pavilion, AMD64 3200, 1G RAM, NVIDIA 4 440 Go) works like a dream. I played for 5 hours last night with no hangs, crashes, or other unseemly interruptions.

Now to see if I can find an Omega driver for my 5700 FX...

Richard

Click to expand...

Are the Omega drivers any good for the Sis m650????

Or does it have to be Nvidia??