IMPORTANT: Support page & New Fix for Radeon Cards

[Colfran]

I have a 3.2ghz p4 1gig ram with an ATI 9800 and XP.

My problem has been slow-downs mainly, but since applying the "fix" on the art pak and deleting the cache am now just left with horrible graphic corruption which starts in a small way and progresses until the game becomes unplayable.

Coloured areas on the map suddenly grow lines and angular artifacts that grow into sheets and pyramids of colour that obscure the whole screen.

When I get out and then back in again its OK for a while, then repeats.

Any suggestions please?

 

[Daniel J.]

I too have a Radeon 9550, and Am having the exact same problem that Jabbewocky is having.

I have installed, uninstalled, reinstalled it numerous times, and followed the exact directions as given on the support page without any result.

I ran the unpak option, and it has gone from giving me an error about failing to render, to now going to a black screen and then returning me to my desk top.

Can anything else be done?

 

[srwei]

I have had problems with Civ 4 - most annoying is the black terrain.
By the sheer volume of posts in Civ 4 chat rooms I am not alone.

The ONLY way to send a message to Firaxis that it is UNACCEPTABLE to sell a defective product is for EVERYONE experiencing problems to RETURN THE GAME and tell your friends NOT TO BUY IT until the bugs are fixed!

The black terrain problem is not even mentioned on the Civilization IV support page! WHY? Why is this problem being ignored? This is a MAJOR BUG affecting a large community of loyal Civilization customers. By ignoring the black terrain problem, Firaxis is saying, “We don’t care about you.”

Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King started the Civil Rights movement through the Montgomery Alabama Bus Boycott. We CAN do the SAME and send a message to Firaxis, Sid Meier, and 2K Games – that this is UNACCEPTABLE to sell a defective product.

Boycott Civ 4 until these bugs are fixed! How? RETURN your game and tell your friends NOT TO BUY IT!

We did not pay $50 to debug their program! Firaxis should be paying us $50 to beta test the game – not the other way around!

We have waited years for the release Civilization IV -- we can wait a little longer until all of the bugs have been fixed.

If enough people return the game and tell their friends not to buy it, it will send a message to Firaxis. You can always repurchase Civ 4 when these bugs have been patched. The game is useless for me anyway as I have not been able to play it yet due to the bugs.

Return your game now before your 30-day return period ends. You should not have a problem returning the game even if the box is opened because this is a known technical support issue. If you still have problems returning an opened game, have the store call tech support themselves!

SEND A MESSAGE TO SID and his team. Hit them where it counts -- in their wallet. There are lemon laws in the auto industry specifically to prevent the sale of defective products – why not software?

RETURN YOUR GAME NOW and TELL YOUR FRIENDS NOT TO BUY Civilization IV until these bugs have been fixed!


-Seth

 

[Eyemaze]

Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King started the Civil Rights movement through the Montgomery Alabama Bus Boycott. We CAN do the SAME and send a message to Firaxis, Sid Meier, and 2K Games – that this is UNACCEPTABLE to sell a defective product.
-Seth

You are quite possibly the biggest smackmonkey I have ever encountered online; comparing your paltry problems with a computer game to a human rights movement.

 

[CrackityJones]

I had some strange incompatibility problems, but the fix took care of them.

I had only the recommended minimum of 256m of RAM when I purchased the game, and it was able to run and had no graphics problems, but was unbearably slow as the game progressed.

So, I bought another 512, popped it in, and began encountering graphics errors immediately. (Introductory "ads" had sound, but no picture; Main menu had background picture, but menus were invisible.) Not sure why adding RAM caused a new problem with graphics, but this fix took care of it.

For the record, I have a Mobility Radeon 9200, and was unable to download any ATI updates for the reasons others have already pointed out. Just unpacking the Art as instructed herein, however, appears to have been enough to do the trick.

Now it's running beautifully, and the RAM made an enormous difference in speed.

Just found it odd that the same graphics card could have or not have problems based on the amount of RAM in my system. Don't know if others are having similar complications.

 

[GreatHeart]

Moving the Movie folder out of the Assets>Art folder did the trick for me. I moved it up to the main Civ IV and the game started with no movies. After I exited I moved it back and the game works now.

Go figure on that one.

 

[Scubagal]

Like too many others, none of the fixes have worked for me. I have installed and reinstalled my ATI drivers, and the game. I have followed the directions to the letter on unpaking the art folder and NOTHING works. I give up. My real quandry is whether to give my friend the copy I got her for her birthday or take it back and just give her the cash (so she can use it to buy a game that actually works!). I'm leaning towards returning both copies.

I've spent the past two evenings (about 10 hours total) trying to get this game to work and I give up. I don't get the error message anymore but the game just won't load. What a complete waste of time.

I'm running an AMD 64 3200 with 1 gig of RAM
Radeon 9600 256mg

 

[Scubagal]

I forgot to mention that my OS is XP w/SP2 (and every other update I could find, just in case...). Direct X is absolutely the most current version available.

 

[GreatHeart]

Scubagal, you are having the same problems I had. Try moving the Movie folder.

 

[yeancheant]

I have a Radeon 9700 Pro and experience a lot of problem in the game which I initially put down to old driver and basically a card which is at the end of its life (always give me problems when playing graphic intensive games.

Anyway I bought a new Sapphire X700 (just the 128MB one as I am now quite poor), installed the driver which came with the card and the game STILL wouldn't run properly.

I then experimented with the drivers and noticed this

1. The newest drive from ATI homepage loads the game with a lot of graphic problem and is basically unplayable

2. The driver from the CD (I think Sept 04) loads the game, is playable but you get a lot of graphic corruption. eg. when the 3d image of the leaders come up

3. The driver from my old drivers pack (Feb 04) works perfectly fine. No issue with gameplay, ALT TAB, wonders movie, etc.

Strange ? Anyway I have since kept that driver and have no problem playing the game at all. There was an earlier post about how some of the earlier drivers soft the problem. Out of curiosity I tried the different drivers for my 9700 Pro but that didn't made any difference, presumably because it was knackered card anyway.

Hopefully this helps

 

[chessming]

it works but still clashing all the time!!

 

[Wzbbb]

Hi, I, like many of you, are having problems running the game with a radeon video card. After reading through all 14 pages of posts and trying the methods, all it seemed to do is change one error message into another.

When I first got the game and ran it, it was working fine, the only glitch is that the game would crash to desktop after 3-4 hours of play, which I didn't really mind because it just meant I had to reload, the autosave was fairly frequent.

After about 2 days of playing, suddenly, after 1 crash, the game freezes everytime I tried to load the save files. After about a dozen times of trying it and hoping it'll work (don't ask me why), the game started freezing during the load up, before the movies start playing. I tried altering the .ini file a number of whiles, and occasionally got onto the game screen but still freezes after loading.

After more trials, it still freezes during the loading, just as the music comes on, but now after freezing for about a miute, the screen turns black with the message
Out of Timing
V: 22hz
H: 18.4kHz
This gave me the clue the error was in the graphics, so I looked up graphics problems on this forum. Tried the unpak thing, did nothing. Then I tried removing the cache in addition to skipping intro movie, that got me onto the game screen, but after trying to load, a error message appears from windows saying something along the lines that my graphics accelerator isn't responding to my graphics driver and that it could not fully recover, so it switched to software rendering.

Afterwards, I tried updating my display driver to the latest version, catalyst 5.11, and now it once again freezes during load up, and after a while, screen goes black but instead of saying out of timing, the message is now no signal. Either way, its not working.

My computer is a Athlon xp 2500+ with 512 DDR ram and Radeon 9600SE 128mb video card. This meets the recommended requirement, yet it just seems to get worse and worse with time. So if anyone has any solutions as to how to make it work, it'll be deeply appreciated.

 

[YankBastard]

6. Move the Art0.FPK file out of your Assets folder so that Civ4 can't find it.


MOVE IT WHERE???!!!!

 

[YankBastard]

**** IT! It doesn't work. I followed all the instructions and did everything. The only discrepency might be where it said:

6. Move the Art0.FPK file out of your Assets folder so that Civ4 can't find it.

I didn't know where they want it put instead, so I took it out of the game and put it on my desktop. My system is an AMD Anthelon 2600 512, 120 gig, my graphics card is a GeForce 4 MX w/ 64mgs. If I can play SWG, then I should be able to play this. If this patch doesn't work then that's really going to suck because I believe BestBuy won't even give a refund if the game's been opened.

 

[Quarkster]

I ran into the "Could not initialize renderer" on a P4 2.6GHz machine with an Nvidia FX5200 card. In fact, I continued to get the error no matter WHAT video card I put into it, even the video card from a machine that runs Civ4 perfectly. I went through four different Nvidia cards upto and including a 6600. Also tested three different ATI Radeon cards.

So, I figured "damn the torpedoes" and pulled a spare hard drive out -- reinstalled XP from scratch on it, installed the video drivers for the Radeon AIW 9600XT I wanted to use (that didn't work previously in this machine on my existing XP install), and then installed Civ4. Everything worked just fine, interestingly enough.

My theory, given the testing that I've done is that it's most likely a DirectX software conflict/install issue that's causing these issues everyone is having. I am going to flip back to my old drive and try the 3rd party DirectX uninstallers since MS doesn't make any available and then I'll report back if that helps to solve the issue on this machine or not.

Food for thought, regardless...

Cheers!

 

[Kilroy]

Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King started the Civil Rights movement through the Montgomery Alabama Bus Boycott. We CAN do the SAME and send a message to Firaxis, Sid Meier, and 2K Games – that this is UNACCEPTABLE to sell a defective product.

Fortunately for you, your civil rights aren't at stake here, and you have a decent chance of getting the game to work if you spend less time babbling about civil disobediance on a message board dedicated to a video game of all things, and more time tweaking your setup. You don't even have to face the fire hoses or anything!

My suggestion is to try a number of different drivers for your hardware, keeping in mind that the newest drivers are not always the best. If you have an ATi chipset, do not ignore the [url="http://www.omegadrivers.net]Omega drivers[/url]. They are what finally worked best for me, and this is not the first time I've got an otherwise unplayable game working with them either. They seem to offer a bit of stability and combatability in exchange for some performance.

Don't assume that someone else's solution will work for you. The chances that their setup is identical to yours is basically zero, so while someone else's work is a good place to start you may have to do some thinking for yourself. Sorry. This is how PC gaming has always been, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. You pays your money and you takes your chances. If you are getting this worked up over a matter of $50 I suggest you stop spending your money on expensive hardware and read a book instead. Maybe something that will help you get some perspective.

Finally, this is not a flawed release. Civ3 was a flawed release, and then some. KotOR 2 was a flawed release. There are countless examples of releases far more deserving of the title "failure" than this.

 

[BomSquad]

Just thought you might want to know..

I was having some issues with my graphics while playing the movies of CivIV.

I'm running Windows XP x64 edition, so I thought that was my main problem. I thought I'd try running the ATI fix just to see what happened.

Well what happened was GREAT. I now have no video corruption.

I followed the directions to the letter. I also followed the direction to clear my game cache.

I will continue further testing....

 

[DrCollins]

Does anyone know if I should anticipate problems with a Xeon Workstation - 2.8 GHz, 1Gig Ram, 128 MB ATI Fire GL X1 Video Accelerator - i was going to install a Radeon 9550 - but it seems silly to install a $129 graphics card when I have a $699 card!
I initially loaded Civ4 on my laptop - AMD with a cheap motherboard based video card - had the Fog of War. Now I am so desperate to play - I am going to use the computer that I usual reserve for work.

 

[threat]

@erpcom,
EDIT- Bad news from apolyton site
http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=141405
ATI Laptop Cards
Mobility 320/340 IGP (athlon/pentium versions of the same thing): DO NOT support T+L

is the mobility 320 card the same as my MOBILITY RADEON 9200 64MB dedicated graphics card? I will burn the HP building to the ground if this is true.

 

[threat]

Hey everyone.

First off I do want to thank everyone who spends their time in these forums helping people out when they could be doing any number of other things. Your help is appreciated, and I thank you on behalf of everyone who has not.

I've read through all 14 pages of posts in this thread to arrive back at the drawing board. I'm tempted to wait another week or so for the Firaxis patch when it comes out, but hearing about many people having similar problems finally getting off the ground has led me to think that I am missing some really small step along the way. Please, geniuses of the forums. I beseech you. Be my eyes and ears for me. Be my creative problem-solving team, and help me think of what I could possibly be doing wrong:

I am facing the same issue of it crashing to the desktop during the "Checking XML" load-up.

* - SYSTEM INFORMATION - *
HP Pavilion zx5180 Laptop
Win XP/SP2 installed
Intel Pentium 4 3.08 GHz
80 GB HD - 512 MB RAM
ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 - 64MB dedicated (so runs at 128 I think)
(hope I'm not leaving anything out...)

* - Progress Report - *
- Tried installing, uninstalling.
- Tried making a cloneCD and using daemon tools & alcohol 120% with a SafeDisc hider, (though that was never the issue and the game installed with the original CDs no problem, so I have disregarded this as being probable cause)
- Tried Unpacking the FPK file as recommended on 2kgames, moved the Art0.fpk file outta there once the Art was unpacked.
- Tried editing the .ini file and disabling the movies (value to 1).
- Tried moving the Movies folder out of the Art folder
- Tried doing all of these steps during a reinstall on a seperate WinXP account (worked for someone, I forget whom).
- Tried adjusting the Windows shortcut to launch the game in Win2k compatibility mode.

And most of all, I have attempted all of these steps individually between installs as well as together in various orders, thinking that my approach might be the wrong way to get it going.

I'm not screaming, kicking or crying. I'm not afraid. I know that the computer I own has the brawn and that we all have the brains to make this work. I've pretty much resigned myself to the fact that it'll be saved in the patch. I am getting a bit annoyed at myself for purchasing this machine when I did (what kind of DVD burner doesn't allow you to burn DVD-Rs? I can only burn DVD+R /+RW! What a sham!).

I owe everyone here a debt of graditude already, for just trying to debug this machine all the way out here in Japan would have been impossible without the suggestions already made on these forums. Thanks again.

Please, if anyone can think of something that I've missed, post it. Post it or email me. I'll be checking both everyday until I can fix it or until a patch does all this work for me.

Best,
threat

edit: gabe recommended also updating my soundMAX digital audio drivers, though the "most recent" drivers posted on the HP website are actually somehow older than the ones on my computer. go HP. I have installed the "new" drivers and I'm in the process of reinstalling the game. again.