another black terrain problem - please help?

[ChristheMeek]

I've been playing the game for almost a week now, experiencing choppy graphics and very slow gameplay (especially the later in the game I get), but no black terrain issue. Was reading posts today about updating drivers so I went ahead and downloaded the latest drivers for my video card (nVidia GeForce4 Ti 4600). My other specs are I have a 1.4 Ghz processor and 640MB of RAM. Well long story short, with my UPDATED drivers I thought game was running better but now I get what I think is the black terrain problem. The problem appears to be related to map zoom in/out (it happened right after I built Stonehenge) but zooming back in did not help me. What do I do?

Praying for a patch....this game would be so much better if it just ran correctly.

 

[Subtestube]

What drivers were you running before? I assume you're now running the 81.85 official drivers? If your previous drivers were not "75 series" drivers, I'd recommend trying the 78.05s. I have no reason to think that they'd be much better, but it's worth a shot - they're about as good as the '75 series' ever got, and they're probably an intermediary between where you are now and where you were. You can get them at the URL below:

http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_downloads_winxp_2k_78.05.html

 

[ChristheMeek]

I can't get downloads to work from that website. The links appear to just be html files now. Yes, I am running 81.85. Any other suggestions?

 

[ShortBus]

http://forums.civfanatics.com/archiv.../t-133056.html

This thread tells you how to effectively turn fog of war off and that fixed the black tile problem for me. It makes the game quite a bit darker, but at least it's playable.

 

[Reactant420]

i actually had black terrain crop up a few times on my radeon 9800 pro (latests cat's), but it was only on ice/tundra textures, alt-tabbing out and then back in removed the problem though.

 

[ChristheMeek]

That page doesn't exist. Help!

 

[ShortBus]

That's weird, I can still open it up. Ahhh, the link is wrong. Anyway, I'm copy/pasting the important part and I'll relist the link.

here's what i did:

open up Firaxis Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4\Assets\XML\Technologies\CIV4TechInfos.xml

and do a replace all changing <bMapVisible>0</bMapVisible> to <bMapVisible>1</bMapVisible>.

now everyone starts with the map revealed. terrain is fine, although the oceans look a little funny for me. you still need to explore to find goody huts and your opponents, but unfortunately the terrain types and resource locations are revealed. but you are at least on equal footing with the ai since they will see everything too.

This is quoted from merm (thx merm). Don't forget to do the replace all. And here's the right link:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/archive/index.php/t-133056.html