Drawing Bug on iMac G5

[JEG2]

My wife is running into a nasty drawing bug with the Rev B Warlords patch on her iMac G5. Her game will randomly draw shapes over the main game map. The shapes appear to be rectangular or triangular, though they can be at tilted angles. The colors of the shapes seems like they might be the tribe colors: blue, red, green, peach, etc. These shapes are random degrees of transparent.

This problem did not exist before the patch and it does not occur on my MacBook Pro. On my wife's computer though it does affect all single- and multi-player games.

The problem seems to increase the longer a game goes on. In the end, it's drawing large opaque shapes on the map and you cannot see through them to play. Bringing up the city screen will sometimes remove the current artifacts, though this seems to be less effective the longer the game goes on. A save, quit, and reload cycle does seem to ease the problem, but it will come back faster with more advanced games.

I just wanted to see if anyone has seen these problems and found any workarounds for them. We just reverted back to the previous version when we first noticed the problem, but we have been playing with a friend lately and had to upgrade to match his version.

I believe theses issues to be unrelated, but her computer also draws jungle trees too short. They are sunk into the ground and you can only see the tops of them. Her city screen also fails to draw the circles around the worked tiles, from time to time.

Any information is appreciated.

 

[AlanH]

Hello, welcome

Aspyr fixed the stunted trees in Warlords Rev. B on my system (Mac Pro). Are you sure the patch has been effective? Check the Get Info screen for the Warlords application file. The version info should be 2.08 (25430).

I have seen patches install into the wrong folder.

Those graphics effects appeared in earlier versions of the game, and there are still reports of them in the latest patches. Sometimes you can get rid of them by zooming out to globe view and back in again. Other times it takes a quit/relaunch. If you look carefully, you may find that they are actually a very magnified 'ghost' image left over from the last leaderhead image that was displayed.

 

[JEG2]

The patch did take, yes.

I have seen the leader head bug. Trust me, this ain't it.

If you took a screenshot of your world map into Photoshop and drew a huge light blue square on top of it somewhere, you would be seeing what she sees. It's quite odd.

 

[Bazzalisk]

I get the same multi-coloured shapes bug with Vanilla Rev C (but not with previous versions) on a Powermac Quad G5. Zooming out and in fixes it, but it is irritating.

 

[enkiduMT]

At last someone speaks of my secret shame! For I too have a iMac G5 (mine's a 1.8, 2GB, 64 MB g4mx card) and sooner or later this bug is in nearly all my games. It does seem to be progressively worse the longer you play a game. Zooming all the way in and out (painful on this gfx card) can reduce or eliminate it, but it always comes back. A restart can be helpful.

I have huge polygons in various wild colors popping all over the screen. Occasionally I have a part of the terrain that will go bonkers and the geometry shows up as a mash of hundreds of polys (no textures?). In some games enemy units in cities show up as a red hemisphere.

Doesn't ruin game play, but...

This doesn't happen on my new MacBookPro (tho antialiasing makes lock up).

 

[AckAck]

I'm having a problem with short trees as well - I have Vanilla Civ 1.61 with Rev A, running it on a Tiger Macbook with 1 GB RAM (I think... where do you go to check these things?). What can I do to fix that?

 

[AlanH]

Welcome

They fixed the short trees on my system in rev C of Civ4, rev B of Warlords. Links for these patches are here. The first post in this thread indicates that it isn't fixed for everyone, but maybe it's worth a try.

I've already been beaten up for suggesting that the later revs don't run on GMA950 graphics, so it appears you should be able to run rev C.

You can find the memory capacity of your system by selecting About This Mac in the Apple menu - top left of the screen. There's more system information available under the More button.

 

[cmvc2cc]

Hi,

the same problem with multi-colored shapes does still exist on my iMac G5 1.8 GHz (64 MB Video RAM).
I use the Vanilla Rev C patch version of Civ4.
Honestly I doubt that there will be any more effort to fix this from Aspyr.

Since march Aspyr has not published ANY bugfixes, although these errors are a) obvious and b) severe.

I just regret that I spent money to buy the Warlords extension at the beginning of the year, because I don't play the game hardly any more. The bugs are too bad (at the end of a game I only see the multi-colored shapes as described in this thread) and the performance on my iMac is very low.

I plan to buy a new iMac next spring, may be then it will be fun again to play Civ4 with a better graphics card. But I doubt that I will ever buy a game from Aspyr again. The quality of support and porting of the game software is too bad.

Greetings from Berlin,
Markus