Rainbow Color and Polygons Shapes

[DKDiveDude]

For about a week I was able to play Civ 4 as it came, ver 1.0 out of the box, after having turned AGP down to zero (0) in the ATI control panel under SmartGART. Then I it stopped working without constant problems. So I patiently waited weeks for the patch, using the Civ4 package as a door stopper.

Now with the 1.09 patch I still can't turn up AGP to 4 or 8 without problems, as the map turn into rainboe colors see attachment.

So for I played a few games with AGP set to zero, and all of a sudden these polygon shaped and opther graphic garbage begin to flicker on and off on my screen, see second attachment. I expect the game to crash any moment now, and it's almost completely unplayable as I can't see what's going on because of these shapes popping up.

Lesson learned. Never again by a Firaxis game, until at least one year after the the game and several patches has been released.

I am wasting my time and crappy code, and am now going to quit and wait, AGAIN for the next patch!

My PC's configuration:
AMD XP3200, 1GB RAM, Windows XP sp2, Net 2.0, Radeon 9800, SB Audigy 2ZS

[panzooka]

its not their fault, its more likely the engine, which is not developed by firaxis.
i recommend u set AGP back to 8. get latest driver, and see what that does.

what problem were u experiencing when u had AGP x8?

[Goombaz]

No offense as I have nothing against ATI, but from all my forum-reading days with various games, I have to say that ATI errors just keep getting more and more bizzare. Is it ATI's fault or the individual companies faults, I suppose that's the question. I do not claim to have an answer to that question, but I will say this: ATI graphics errors are like some kind of twisted art form. It's never anything even remotely normal like "artifacting" or "crashing", it's always argyle colored candy canes shooting out of the ground, or giant spinning boat anchors, or random terrain fabulousity!

I wonder what kind of bizzare ATI errors we'll have in the coming years. I might have to buy an ATI card just to document some of this stuff

Again, I am not bashing ATI, I am just in awe of these awesome errors. You can't make some of this stuff up

[DKDiveDude]

Originally Posted by panzooka

its not their fault, its more likely the engine, which is not developed by firaxis.
i recommend u set AGP back to 8. get latest driver, and see what that does.

what problem were u experiencing when u had AGP x8?

I think you are misunderstanding me.

The game shows rainbow colors, see attachment, when AGP is set to anything but 0 speed! Actually even with the ATI Control panel loaded and AGP set to zero, it seem to show rainbow colors. So I edited the auto loading of all ATI stuff out on the registry.

I myself am not gonna tinker with it anymore, as life is to short to spend hours upon hours to get a game to work properly. I'll wait for a solution, either from here or in the form of the next patch. Damn I wasted my money!

[Goombaz]

If nobody else is getting this error it is something local to your system. Wouldn't want to hazard a guess what is causing it, but I am fairly sure this isn't a common error, so a patch probably won't fix it.

An unfortunate reality of computer gaming is that due to the uniqueness of each persons OS install it is IMPOSSIBLE to avoid errors like this. Sometimes your number is simply up. I remember back when I played DAOC I basically had to reinstall my OS, because I had some kind of all-but-totally unique error. Reinstalling fixed it right up.

Come to think of it, Civ 4 didn't work for me initially until I reinstalled either.

Basically I would first and foremost see if anyone else has this error. If not, my honest advice is to just start reinstalling stuff. Start with your drivers, then work your way out and reinstall the OS if you need to. It really depends on how "trashed" your system is and how comfortable you are tinkering with it.

Also, make sure you don't have this issues in other applications. The sad truth is you can't always rule out hardware damage. Or Civ 4 could have yet another bug, and then you will just need to wait for a patch.

[panzooka]

why do u blaim ATI for their fault?
my friend has nVidia geforce2 Ti card, and had similar experience with DKDiveDude here.

[AsnoT]

nothing new there, this forum is full of people blaming the game for things their crufty computers are causing.

i have seen guys with the same hardware as i have complaining the game was unplayable etc. in some cases, it then turns out that something like the chipset AGP driver wasn't installed ...

i would guess that a very high percentage of people screming blue murder here have a huge OS problem, nothing else.

[Firebird]

Originally Posted by AsnoT

nothing new there, this forum is full of people blaming the game for things their crufty computers are causing.

i have seen guys with the same hardware as i have complaining the game was unplayable etc. in some cases, it then turns out that something like the chipset AGP driver wasn't installed ...

i would guess that a very high percentage of people screming blue murder here have a huge OS problem, nothing else.

I think it is great that you seem to have a working game. And some people might be in trouble because they have not updated drivers or the OS. But there are certanly some out there (my self included) where the problems are out of there hands. Unless they buy a new comp, but then they would never be sure that they wouldn't have problems with that new one, because no one knows what causes the problems.

I have spend days trying to tinker with my system in BIOS, OS, nVidia-utilities and civ4. I have tried upgrading (and downgrading too) every driver in the system and checking multiple times that I am not missing a driver somewhere. I have checked my directx-files and my OS-files even by hand to another pc, where the game works. I have scanned for virus and spyware, and I have experimented with the processes that run in the background shutting them down one by one or all of the nonessentials together to see if that made a difference. I have tried using different graphicscards (although both with nVidia-chips), testing and replacing my ram and I have defragmentated my HDs and uninstalled and installed on a number of different harddrives and configurations. I play with all graphics on lowest settings and without sound and I get BSODs after 30 secs to 1 hour or I run every thing on full steam with crashes after... surprise! 30 secs to 1 hour, and it even seems to be worse when I patch the game.

I have seen people with problems like mine and/or other problems on a variaty of systems from lowend to highend and that is after they have done what I have done with my system. I cannot blame the game or windows or the graphiccard or anything else with certanty but I can say that I have done what I can, and now I have to wait for a patch, a new videocarddriver or something else like that before I can, in any reasonably way, use civ4.
I have posted my specs, logs and problemdescription to the publisher, so they have the info I can give them (and they are welcome to ask for more).

Personally I will not play civ4 untill the next patch is out, the next nVidiadriver comes out or something like that occurs. That's too bad because I really like the gameplay and modability, but that doesn't count for much, when you can't play.

Best regards

Firebird

[NinjaCool]

I never knew there was a hippy version out man

[trutch]

Also get the same problems but not as drastic with the rainbow colours. This usually just appears around menus.

I also get a problem where the terrain just goes black.

I have a Radeon 9800 pro graphics card so that looks like the cause of the problem. Ive downloaded the patch and have tried different versions of the driver for the card from the ATI site so does anyone have any suggestions as to what I can try next?

[Chieftess]

I have a Radeon 9800, and mine works fine. Did you download the catalyst driver?

[trutch]

I use the ATI control panel. For some reason I get an application error as windows is loading when I have Catalyst installed and everytime I run it I get the same problem but the normal control panel actually runs so I stick with that.

ATI's website isnt the best for support so I just stick with what runs.

[weakciv]

Originally Posted by Chieftess

I have a Radeon 9800, and mine works fine. Did you download the catalyst driver?

I have a Radeon 9700 and it works fine. but when I downloaded the Catalyst drivers I had a CTD in about 1 hour. backed them out and have had no troubles.