Odd Tree Glitch (Mac Pro)

[Maledin]

Hello all, this is my first post here.

I have scoured the internet to find an answer to my problem, including this forum, but no one seems to address it. I am experiencing a glitch which causes all trees to be rooted a sea level, i.e, only the top of them is visible on land.

On hills, even less of the tree is visible, causing the environment to look very odd.

This doesn't conflict with playability; the game still plays fine. I just wish there was a fix for this glitch, as it takes away from the game's beauty drastically.

This is my set-up:

Dual Xeon 2.66 GHz
2 GB RAM
Nvidia GeForce 7300 256 MB VRAM

Has anyone else experienced this?

 

[AlanH]

Hi. Welcome

Yes, I saw this, and reported it to Aspyr, and they've acknowledged it. It seems to be specific to the Nvidia card. Note that the 7300 is not incldued in the list of supported cards for Civ4, since the Mac Pro wasn't released at the time they were final testing the vanilla version. But it *is* included in the supported cards list for Warlords.

I confirmed that the problem is the same in both versions of the game at the time I reported it. I think I've also seen screenshots showing this problem for some hardware configurations on Windows.

If you use Camera Flying, you can actually drop the camera below ground level and see the full height of the trees

 

[Maledin]

So there is no fix at this time?

And yes, both Vanilla (why is it called that?) and Warlords both have the problem.

 

[AlanH]

Nope! I don't know of a way to make the Civ4 trees grow. Maybe if you are a whizz at OpenGL you may be able to find a solution. There are mods that change the sizes of units, so maybe there's a way to mod the trees to stand taller or to plant them at higher altitude. I *think* it's a bug in the Nvidia card driver, if so it may well be down to Apple to fix as I believe they wrote the driver for the 7x00 cards.

Vanilla used to be the nearest thing you could get to unflavored ice cream. It's become the term used around here for the unexpanded version of a Civ product. Like Coke "original", I guess. The problem with using "original" is that it may be confused with "the original version" - ie. 1.00. But "vanilla" Civ4 is at version 1.61, and it's still "vanilla".

I hope that's confused you sufficiently to make you into a fully paid up member of the MacCivFanatics community If so, please check out my new posting re. Folding@Home. Stanford University needs your Mac Pro's spare CPU cycles.

 

[Welnic]

I also see this on my nvidia 7600 GT card. I have also seen it on another of my rigs, I can't remember which one, but the rest all have ATI cards. I think on that one I could change back to low res graphics and fix it. But I haven't found anything that fixes it on the nvidia. Excellent description of the problem, by the way.

 

[gidds]

Vanilla used to be the nearest thing you could get to unflavored ice cream. It's become the term used around here for the unexpanded version of a Civ product. Like Coke "original",

So whats up with Vanilla Coke then.........hehhehehehehehhehehe....



Happy New Year...

 

[AlanH]

I don't know! I don't drink the stuff in any flavour. I've seen what it does to old coins, and I don't fancy that happening to my stomach lining, thanks.

 

[OscarWildebeest]

I don't know! I don't drink the stuff in any flavour. I've seen what it does to old coins, and I don't fancy that happening to my stomach lining, thanks.

I agree, although the acid in your stomach is way more powerful than the acid in Coke. I don't drink it either, though, 'cos it's nasty and why give them my money?

(Sorry, off-topic.)

 

[Welnic]

If anyone wants to see what this looks like here are a couple of pictures. It doesn't happen on every Mac. These pictures are from my 24" iMac with a 256MB Nvidia 7600GT video card. The first is running the game in OSX and the second one XP. I find it interesting that some of the river meanders are different and some are the same. But the sunken trees just plain suck.

 

[Premier]

Embarrassingly, I didn't realize this was a glitch. Does this happen on both Blue Marble and non-Blue Marble?

I'm more upset with this than the missing Mehmed II.

 

[Welnic]

The Blue Marble doesn't affect this. It just changes what the trees look like, not that they are drawn underneath the ground. The main reason that I knew there was a problem was that some of my machines with poorer graphic cards don't have this problem. I think on some machine it worked better with the graphics set to lower resolution, but I don't know exactly which one of the settings that it was.