Black Tiles

[plasmacannon]

Any news on what causes this?
Any permanent solutions?

I read somewhere that someone's custom assets folder could have been corrupted by other mods, like BUG and I did have Blue Marble installed.

I got so pissed off at having to alt-tab, reload the save, reload the mod and restart the whole Civ4 game for an hour to finally get a save where I could see the map.

I uninstalled everything Civ4 related and deleted all files that I couldn't uninstall, except for one save game file which I put in another folder during this process.
I reinstalled Civ4Gold and BTS, downloaded 3.19 patch and RI 3.25 only to see Black tiles on my first load attempt.

I really need a solution to this.
RI has been my favorite mod to date. It is just this Black Tile issue that makes it unbearable.

In case it is relavent, I am running Win7 home edition with DirectX 11.1 and a Geforce 650 video card with updated drivers from Nvidia.com.

My friend has the same setup as I do except he has a Radeon 6950 video card and has never had this problem.
As we conduct LAN games, we have to wait until I get a usable screen to start. This gets very frustrating.
Has anyone else experienced this with a Geforce card?
Could this be a nvidia driver issue?

With a fresh Civ4, BTS, 3.19 and RI install, I don't see how this could be a game issue yet.


I opened this is a separate post, so that others can search this in the future and hopefully find a solution here as well.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

I have a very similar setup, and I've never run into this issue. I also have an Nvidia card (maybe even 650, or in any case something close, I don't remember), so if it's an Nvidia issue, it's not universal. Are you sure you properly deleted customassets folder? IIRC it is not normally deleted during uninstall process. It is found in My Documents/My Games/Beyond the Sword.

 

[plasmacannon]

I have a very similar setup, and I've never run into this issue. I also have an Nvidia card (maybe even 650, or in any case something close, I don't remember), so if it's an Nvidia issue, it's not universal. Are you sure you properly deleted customassets folder? IIRC it is not normally deleted during uninstall process. It is found in My Documents/My Games/Beyond the Sword.

Yea. I deleted all Civ folders in My Games also.
A new one was created. I just rechecked the CustomAssets folder and all of it's subfolders are empty. Even things like CustomAssets/art/terrain/resourses/cow is empty.

Oh, I didn't include the obvious things that I have eliminated as not the cause, such as that I am using a quad core 6600, 4gb RAM plus shared 4gb more with over 800gb free hd space.

I thought it might have been the blue marble that was effecting it, and I didn't find an uninstall for it specifically, so I uninstalled what I could, then deleted everything Civ4 related that I could find. Figuring that a completely fresh install should fix this.

I tried a Play Now single player game and I get Black tiles there too.



Also, on a separate note, the RI icon seems to load RI. The load screen and civilopedia is RI, yet save games come up saying that RI has to be loaded, then reloads the mod. I'm not sure why that is happening.
The icon's properties say:
"C:\Games\Civilization 4 Gold\Beyond the Sword\Civ4BeyondSword.exe" mod="\Realism Invictus"
as expected.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

4gb RAM plus shared 4gb more

What do you mean by that, exactly?

 

[plasmacannon]

What do you mean by that, exactly?

4gb base RAM + 4 gb more in Virtual Memory.
Here is a screenshot of my system Info.

Last night I loaded the save 10 times and got Black Tiles on every save.
I started to think it actually needed one of those other mod's files.
So, I thought I'd try it again and somehow got normal screen colors for the first time.
So, I have no idea what's causing this. It appears to work perfectly when it wants to, LOL.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

What are your in-game graphics settings? Try changing those, especially the ones related to quality.

 

[plasmacannon]

1920x1080 resolution. The same as my monitor.
Graphics level : High
Rendering Quality: High
Globe Quality: High
Movie Quality: High (Though also set to: No Movies)
High Detailed Terrain (All games were loaded with this off and it loaded, so I checked it and it still loads)

The next time it goes Black Tiles, I'll try Medium settings, then Low quality graphics to see if they make a difference.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

Yes, changing quality was exactly what I was going to suggest trying.

 

[plasmacannon]

I just loaded it with high settings and it went Black Tiles.
I changed it to Medium Settings and unchecked the High Detailed Terrain option.
It loaded.
I'll keep loading it in Medium settings unless I see Black Tiles again, then I'll try Low Settings.
If it happens on Low Settings, then I have no idea what the solution could be.

I have had this Quad core motherboard since 2007, so RAM for it is no longer readily available if I wanted to add more.

 

[[Y]]

I sometimes get this same problem. One thing that works fairly consistently is holding down a Shift key as soon as the Civ IV Loading screen appears and holding it down until the game is done loading. Somehow, after doing that once or twice, the problem seems to go away for a while (but not permanently)

 

[gay_Aleks]

That deletes cache, doesn't it?

 

[[Y]]

That deletes cache, doesn't it?

Yes it does.

 

[plasmacannon]

I got the Black Tiles on Medium settings. I switched to Low Settings and haven't had a problem yet.
I switched the settings back up to High hoping for Black Tiles to try the shift solution, but it worked fine.
I'll keep it on High to test this later.

 

[[Y]]

I got the Black Tiles on Medium settings. I switched to Low Settings and haven't had a problem yet.
I switched the settings back up to High hoping for Black Tiles to try the shift solution, but it worked fine.
I'll keep it on High to test this later.

Yeah, it's a weird issue... Switching setting never did anything for me, but the shift option did. Which was weird, because manually deleting the cache didn't work...

 

[plasmacannon]

RI's been working fine for a few days.
Strangely enough today, on a fresh startup it loaded Black Tiles on Low graphics settings.
I reloaded it from the main menu and it happened again.
I used my Ccleaner to remove files, restarted the PC and RI and got Black Tiles again.
I rechecked that it was on Low settings and yes it was.
So I reran Ccleaner restarted RI held down the Shift key and got Black Tile again.
I reloaded RI again holding down the Shift key and it happened again.
At this point, I don't know what to try.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

What is the other stuff that's running along with Civ 4 at your PC? Might it be that something is siphoning the resources of the system?

 

[[Y]]

What is the other stuff that's running along with Civ 4 at your PC? Might it be that something is siphoning the resources of the system?

I don't think that's it... When I get this problem Civ IV is the only thing running (literally... I use my desktop only for RI at this point; the only other thing I have installed is Chrome).

It's worth mentioning that this problem isn't just with RI, but with CiV. If you google, you'll find other people having the same problem but with the base game.

 

[plasmacannon]

Nothing else. Just Win7 Home ed.
I usually don't even have IE11 open.
Task Manager shows 1.31gb RAM used.

I just loaded RI on Low settings, while holding shift down and it loaded fine.
I had IE11 open to this thread and RAM usage shows 2.03gb. So, it's not using all my RAM either.

 

[plasmacannon]

It Black Tiled last week and that was it for me.
I removed the Geforce 650 video card and bought a Radeon R7 360 video card and haven't seen any Black tiles in over a dozen loads so far. So yea, I'm thrilled.

I plan on using the Geforce card to build a 2nd computer. It's still good enough for everything else, just not Civ4 mods.