MerakSpielman
Warlord
- Joined
- Oct 27, 2005
- Messages
- 217
I've been getting frequent bugs and graphical glitches, and after a look at these forums, I'm not alone.
The infuriating thing for me - and surely the developers who will (hopefully) be trying to patch the glitches - is that they're inconsistent. Do you know how hard it is to pin down an inconsistent glitch? Sometimes the game runs flawlessly. The game is playable with the common glitches, but if I get the others...
Common glitch: In diplomacy, the image of the leader is sometimes just a large black rectangle. Once it was a large red rectangle. In addition, sometimes when this glitch is active there's odd flickerings around the screen, like it can't decide what images should be on top. So elements of the map will be flickering on top of the diplomacy screen.
Common glitch: Sometimes the wonder/religion movies don't work. I'll get stuttering music and a blank movie window. Or I'll get a colorful window full of scrambled nonsense. The same flickering, map elemets will sometimes be going on here. Sometimes the wonder movie starts out fine, then starts showing gobbledy-****, then is fine again, then goes to hell, then is fine again, and then goes out completely.
I consider the game unplayable with these Uncommon glitches, and I restart things until they go away.
Uncommon glitch: Zooming out to world map view, sometimes the image of the earth vanishes and the image of the clouds is all I can see. A white, shifting mass. No terrain. But I can still see icons/names for the cities. This often occurs at the same time as the following glitch.
Uncommon glitch: Mini-map problems. Sometimes the mini-map won't show the terrain I've explored, only my own territory. When it's doing this, if I try to zoom in and out, the white rectangle that represents my viewfield leaves images of itself all over the minimap. If I zoom all the way out and all the way in, the entire minimap will be totally white from images of the view rectangle. Once I was playing with the minimap glitch, and it just suddenly went away and started working correctly.
Rare glitch: Drop to desktop. This has happened twice.
Rare glitch: restart computer. This has happened once.
These are all very disapointing to me, especially considering the amount of testing they say they've done. I hope a patch addresses these - the latest video drivers didn't fix them (latest drivers did fix many other similar glitches in OTHER games, so I thought maybe I'd re-download them and re-install them, just in case. No luck.).
Needless to say, with these glitches, I'm very wary of starting a Real-Time multiplayer game (as opposed to PBEM).
However, I do have an additional thought here. A month ago I re-installed Evil Genius and was getting frequent graphic corruption. I also started playing World of Warcraft and sometimes the graphics would start deteriorating on certain models (it would go away if I restarted the game). The corruption I got in EG was very similar to the corruption I'm seeing in the wonder/religion movies here in Civ4. Random colors, but in a sort of striped/checkerboard pattern, with glimmers of movement underneith. Back when this happened with EG and WoW, I downloaded the latest Radeon drivers and it fixed it all.
But now, similar errors with Civ4... and many other Radeon users are reporting similar errors. It sounds very much like an error with the Radeon drivers to me, not with the game coding. Hopefully the drivers will be patched and a new version available soon. While I can play the game with the errors I'm getting, I know many people can't.
What surprises me, though, is that these errors apprenlty slipped past the play/beta testers. ATI Radeon cards are very common, and I'd think they would have been installed in a significant percentage of the testing machines. Yet here they are, listed as being suitable for playing the game.
How could this have slipped through?
The infuriating thing for me - and surely the developers who will (hopefully) be trying to patch the glitches - is that they're inconsistent. Do you know how hard it is to pin down an inconsistent glitch? Sometimes the game runs flawlessly. The game is playable with the common glitches, but if I get the others...
Common glitch: In diplomacy, the image of the leader is sometimes just a large black rectangle. Once it was a large red rectangle. In addition, sometimes when this glitch is active there's odd flickerings around the screen, like it can't decide what images should be on top. So elements of the map will be flickering on top of the diplomacy screen.
Common glitch: Sometimes the wonder/religion movies don't work. I'll get stuttering music and a blank movie window. Or I'll get a colorful window full of scrambled nonsense. The same flickering, map elemets will sometimes be going on here. Sometimes the wonder movie starts out fine, then starts showing gobbledy-****, then is fine again, then goes to hell, then is fine again, and then goes out completely.
I consider the game unplayable with these Uncommon glitches, and I restart things until they go away.
Uncommon glitch: Zooming out to world map view, sometimes the image of the earth vanishes and the image of the clouds is all I can see. A white, shifting mass. No terrain. But I can still see icons/names for the cities. This often occurs at the same time as the following glitch.
Uncommon glitch: Mini-map problems. Sometimes the mini-map won't show the terrain I've explored, only my own territory. When it's doing this, if I try to zoom in and out, the white rectangle that represents my viewfield leaves images of itself all over the minimap. If I zoom all the way out and all the way in, the entire minimap will be totally white from images of the view rectangle. Once I was playing with the minimap glitch, and it just suddenly went away and started working correctly.
Rare glitch: Drop to desktop. This has happened twice.
Rare glitch: restart computer. This has happened once.
These are all very disapointing to me, especially considering the amount of testing they say they've done. I hope a patch addresses these - the latest video drivers didn't fix them (latest drivers did fix many other similar glitches in OTHER games, so I thought maybe I'd re-download them and re-install them, just in case. No luck.).
Needless to say, with these glitches, I'm very wary of starting a Real-Time multiplayer game (as opposed to PBEM).
However, I do have an additional thought here. A month ago I re-installed Evil Genius and was getting frequent graphic corruption. I also started playing World of Warcraft and sometimes the graphics would start deteriorating on certain models (it would go away if I restarted the game). The corruption I got in EG was very similar to the corruption I'm seeing in the wonder/religion movies here in Civ4. Random colors, but in a sort of striped/checkerboard pattern, with glimmers of movement underneith. Back when this happened with EG and WoW, I downloaded the latest Radeon drivers and it fixed it all.
But now, similar errors with Civ4... and many other Radeon users are reporting similar errors. It sounds very much like an error with the Radeon drivers to me, not with the game coding. Hopefully the drivers will be patched and a new version available soon. While I can play the game with the errors I'm getting, I know many people can't.
What surprises me, though, is that these errors apprenlty slipped past the play/beta testers. ATI Radeon cards are very common, and I'd think they would have been installed in a significant percentage of the testing machines. Yet here they are, listed as being suitable for playing the game.
How could this have slipped through?
