Civ4 sound problems and fixes

[Brad Oliver]

Just to be clear, the just-released beta patch does fix some sound bugs in Mac Civ4, but some sound bugs remain.

We know about these other bugs and should have most (if not all) of the sound bugs fixed when we go final on this patch. At this point, we don't need any more data about sound problems you are encountering; I believe we have all the info we need.

We're all very excited that the patch seems to help most everyone, and we will continue to make fixed going forward. We're not done yet!

 

[thegreatluke]

Hi Brad.

Thanks for working so hard on making us spoiled whiners happy!

Do you guys know if any bugs causing the game to crash or freeze have been fixed? My copy has a problem where, upon meeting Tokugawa for the first time, the game freezes and a hard restart is required. I just want to check before starting a game with random opponents.

Thanks,
tgl

 

[Brad Oliver]

Do you guys know if any bugs causing the game to crash or freeze have been fixed?

Yes, but it'd be impossible to say with certainty without a) info about your Mac, b) the version of OSX you are using. Intel-based Macs with ATI hardware have a known bug that can cause total lockups as you describe. Turning off multisampling is known to eliminate (or greatly reduce) those particular crashes/lockups.

 

[iamliberal]

Brad, thanks for all your hardwork at aspyr and for taking time for us here at civfanatics

Just letting you know that my performance greatly improved with the beta patch. I have 1.8 singl g5 powermac, radeon 9600, 1.5 gb ram. Game is much smoother just scrolling around the map, viewing city screens, and scrolling between cities while in the city screen. (I just can't break the old habit of "entering" a city to adjust production and stuff, lol.

One bug I'm still having is that when I select global view (or zoom out to global view), the globe does not display properly. It shows Tokugawa's face, or Victoria's one time, super large. I was able to view the globe almost correctly twice when I viewed it right after loading the game. It's a minor problem, but would like to be able to use it in time.

-Brian (iamliberal)

 

[khedron]

One bug I'm still having is that when I select global view (or zoom out to global view), the globe does not display properly. It shows Tokugawa's face, or Victoria's one time, super large. I was able to view the globe almost correctly twice when I viewed it right after loading the game. It's a minor problem, but would like to be able to use it in time.

It seems like it shows the face of the last person you talked to, to me. If you haven't talked to anyone in the current game session, it doesn't display.

 

[Brad Oliver]

One bug I'm still having is that when I select global view (or zoom out to global view), the globe does not display properly. It shows Tokugawa's face, or Victoria's one time, super large. I was able to view the globe almost correctly twice when I viewed it right after loading the game. It's a minor problem, but would like to be able to use it in time.

Yes, this is a bug in OSX that we don't have a workaround for. You may be able to eliminate it by decreasing the globe view detail, decreasing your screen resolution, decreasing texture detail or turning off anti-aliasing. Each of these options will reduce VRAM usage, which is what is causing the globe view to fail (it eats up a lot of VRAM at the highest setting).

 

[galganog]

My Game after playing it for a long time slows down greatly but if i quit and start it up again it is faster for about 10 turns could it be a memory leak or something with the cache?

 

[iamliberal]

I'm pretty sure I already have my video settings turned down as low as possible by default because I have the lowest processor spec. But I do have a radeon 9600 with 256mb vram, so I'm surprised that the globe view thing would be a problem for lack of vram. But then again, what on earth do I know about how these things work?!

I spent a few hundred dollars to upgrade that video card last year, and went through a lot just to get that. Why is it so hard to get better video cards for macs?

Btw, I too notice that sometimes when I restart I get better performance again for awhile. I've had a few crashes when the restart was not voluntary, lol, but it wasn't very often and maybe won't happen at all since the beta patch.

 

[awb]

Else than a few combat sounds disappearing, music going in and out, and problems with the globe, everything seems to be going pretty well (though this is only from after playing approximately 30 minutes with the patch). I'm on a MacBook 2 GHZ with 2 GB of RAM.

 

[macwhiz]

I'm pretty sure I already have my video settings turned down as low as possible by default because I have the lowest processor spec. But I do have a radeon 9600 with 256mb vram, so I'm surprised that the globe view thing would be a problem for lack of vram. But then again, what on earth do I know about how these things work?!

I had the same problem with a Radeon 9650 with 256MB VRAM.

By accident, I found that turning the quality up actually solved the problem. Try "medium" for the three graphics levels, antialiasing of 2, high detail terrain on, low-res textures off, globe view buildings disabled off. That's working for me in a 1440x900 window.

 

[Macintosh]

I had the same problem with a Radeon 9650 with 256MB VRAM.

By accident, I found that turning the quality up actually solved the problem.

I can confirm that. With low resolution the globe view shows "black bricks" or "red bricks" instead of landscape.

I have this video card too and the game works fine with all graphic options pushed to max. limit except this antisaliasing thing which I left at zero as it was the default setting and I have absolut no idea what this is good for!

 

[iamliberal]

Thanks for the suggestion... I'll need to play around with it some more (nevr occured to me to experiment with *increasing* graphics lol), but first imipression is that the higher settings DO make the globe view appear almost perfect (no more leader faces the size of jupiter), but a few blocks of black or red in the norhtern hemispher are randomly there.

I"m trying not to get into playin civ tonight because.. well, I need a break before my laundry piles higher and I get carpotonal, lol

 

[Brad Oliver]

By accident, I found that turning the quality up actually solved the problem. Try "medium" for the three graphics levels, antialiasing of 2, high detail terrain on, low-res textures off, globe view buildings disabled off. That's working for me in a 1440x900 window.

That is absolutely fascinating! Any idea which of the settings made it work?

 

[iamliberal]

I'll experiment when I play tomorrow night, but I forgot to mention that although increasing the graphics improved the Globe View, it did seem to decrease performance in normal views - scrolling the screen right and left, etc. So I probably won't play regularly with the higher settings on just to see the globe view.

But like I said, I'll experiment when I play tomorrow night...

 

[thegreatluke]

Yes, but it'd be impossible to say with certainty without a) info about your Mac, b) the version of OSX you are using. Intel-based Macs with ATI hardware have a known bug that can cause total lockups as you describe. Turning off multisampling is known to eliminate (or greatly reduce) those particular crashes/lockups.

I'm running a stock 1.83 GHz MacBook Pro under 10.4.7 (build 8J2135a).

I didn't know that. Next time I play (today) I'll try a game with multisampling off and see what happens when I meet Tokugawa.

 

[dmichaeln73]

I have a quick question regarding the three graphic settings. When I try to change them I am told that the changes will not take effect until I restart. When I restart everything is the same. Am I missing something here.

 

[AlanH]

I also am playing the game on a under-spec machine. I have a PowerMac G4 1.25 GHZ with a radeon 9000 64MB and 768 megs of memory.

I believe these are your system specs. You don't say what you are trying to change from --- to.

If you stuck on minimum settings, and if you are playing on a minimum-spec or below-spec system, then maybe the game overrides your settings and enforces minimum graphics?

 

[dmichaeln73]

That must be it Alan. I don't expect to play with the setting at anything other than low. I just wanted to play with it a little. To possibly see what the game could look like. I remember someone saying that you could kill the opening message saying that I don't meet minimum requirements. I wonder if disabling that would let me play around with the settings. I will try when I get home. Just to let you know off topic. I have played several games. I dont go any larger than standard map. I am very happy with my performance. With low expectation going in, and taking a 54 dollar chance when I purchased the game. I feel I'm getting my moneys worth. The patch has helped incredibly. I now have most of my sounds. No combat sounds though. Even the music is there full time after the first era.

 

[macwhiz]

That is absolutely fascinating! Any idea which of the settings made it work?

I did some testing, and I found that I could make the bug come back if I changed "Globe Quality" to "Low" and restarted the game. It would stay present, even if I turned the quality to "Medium," until I quit and restarted the game. Upon restarting with "Globe Quality" previously set to "Medium," the globe view was back to perfection (aside from a lengthy rainbow spin during the first zoom-out at the transition point, which appears normal).

Changing the texture checkboxes didn't appear to make a difference.

 

[Brad Oliver]

I did some testing, and I found that I could make the bug come back if I changed "Globe Quality" to "Low" and restarted the game. It would stay present, even if I turned the quality to "Medium," until I quit and restarted the game.

You're absolutely right; I was able to reproduce it on my Mini by tweaking just that one setting. So definitely, changing the Globe Quality to "Medium" instead of "Low" will do the trick. I believe you might have to restart to get it to stick.

If you are on a low-end Mac and you get the warning dialog about not being able to play, you'll find that Civ4 forces your settings back down to low each time the warning appears. To stop this from happening, edit the CivilizationIV.ini file (located in ~/Documents/Civilization IV) and change the line that has "HideMinSpecWarning" so that it reads "HideMinSpecWarning = 1"