Bright cursors

[BristonXII]

Hello everyone, I hope someone can help me.

A couple of days ago, I noticed that the cursors have a different tone, almost too bright, and I’m not sure why. I have the GOG Complete version. This happens in Beyond the Sword and all other expansions, including Colonization. I’ve reinstalled the game, but the issue persists. The rest of the game’s colors appear as expected, and I haven’t noticed any other graphical problems.

I should mention that some time ago I replaced the cursors with custom ones and modified the interface’s color tone, but I doubt this is related. Reinstalling the game and restoring all default files should have fixed it.

I also reinstalled an older GPU driver (GTX 1660S) and tried different compatibility modes (something I’ve never needed before), without any results.

The effect looks like a sort of “burned” color, as if it’s not displaying in 32-bit color or… maybe some DX9 incompatibility? I’m not exactly sure what I mean—just throwing out ideas to see where to start looking for solutions.

I wanted to show a screenshot of how it looks, but the image doesn’t capture the cursor, so I decided to record a video and then take a screenshot… To my surprise, the cursor appears exactly as it should. This might provide useful information.

Thanks in advance for any advice or suggestions. I really appreciate it.

Edit: I forgot to translate into English. My apologies.

 

[lymond]

Moderator Action: Moved to Technical Support forum. Cheers - lymond

I should mention that some time ago I replaced the cursors with custom ones and modified the interface’s color tone, but I doubt this is related. Reinstalling the game and restoring all default files should have fixed it.

I think this still may have something to do with it. Uninstalling the game generally does not remove the custom assets in your document folder. Try deleting it. Our uninstall/reinstall but deleting everything civ 4 and bts in my docs/my games before reinstalling. You may also need to delete cache in AppData.

Honestly, though, I don't really understand what the problem is, but if you are not seeing what you want, I would start there.

Aslo, make sure your graphic card drivers are up to date, and you can try reinstalling DX9. But when you mentioned tooling around with cursors and assets, that is a big red flag.

 

[BristonXII]

Yes, I also assumed that modifying it might have something to do with it, especially since I haven’t been able to find a single reference to my exact problem anywhere on the internet, which made it suspicious. At the very least, it seems to be a rather uncommon bug. Still, I’ve been playing the game intermittently for years with that same modification and nothing like this had ever happened before.

In fact, it seems to go beyond a simple script issue, because in the screenshot the cursor was displayed in its original color. The monitor can be ruled out, since I have a secondary one and the same thing happens there as well. It looks more like a rendering problem or something along those lines.

I’ve deleted everything related to Civilization IV that I could find in AppData, run a full registry scan and cleanup with CCleaner (just to rule it out), and I’m now preparing to do a fresh, clean installation in a different directory.

I’ll report back with the results.

Update: None of that worked. I had already reinstalled DirectX 9 before making the first post.

 

[a pen-dragon]

Rename (or delete if you do not need it) your My Games/BtS/CustomAssets folder. If you installed anything there it would probably not be reset by doing a fresh install.

 

[BristonXII]

No, I haven’t touched CustomAssets.

I shouldn’t have said that I modified anything, because I think we’re drifting away from the main focus. I know with absolute certainty that this is not the problem, although I appreciate the suggestion — I would think the same.

What I modified was a single parameter in Civ4Theme_Common.thm (I know there are better ways to do it) to give the interface a darker blue tone, the same tone used in Civ VI, and I added custom cursors directly into the folder
“Civ4\Beyond the Sword\Assets\res\cursors”.

None of this should interfere with the other games (Civ IV, Warlords, Colonization), let alone continue happening after restoring all the original files following a clean installation.

As I said, I’ve been playing for years with these customizations and never had any issues with them. I haven’t added or edited anything new since then, and considering that in the recording the cursor appeared exactly as expected, I’m inclined to believe that the problem goes beyond the game itself.

Edit: I’ve just received the GeForce Ready Driver update 591.74, and after installing it, the problems disappeared.