patch 109 now out

[Spastic Primate]

After installing the patch I have a much faster start up. It still crashes after a while but there is a much longer time between them. The new thing is that after the crash my desktop video is locked into a 800X600 4bit mode and I have to restart the PC to restore the normal resolution.

This makes it only slightly less annoying than it was before. If I wanted to spend my time troubleshooting problems instead of playing I would cut my vacation short and go back to work.

 

[TheBarnacle]

my verdict on the patch: what the hell did this fix??

there seems to be no to little noticable improvement with regards to the laggy/choppy/slow play. i still have to force 1.1 shaders and use low graphic settings and still end up dropping down to 2-3 fps by later game.

and now the wonder vids play worse (?!?!) than they did before. oh, but thankfully, i can watch that opening 2k vid just fine since there's no cutting play on that anymore.....but the opening vid itself still stalls and hangs.

other odd or quirky things seem to happen now too. not sure if these are b/c of the patch or just things i hadn't noticed before.

1. when in the foreign affairs advisor, some of the civs are cut in half lengthwise. so i see the top of ghengis' head. weird.


2. several times when my scout was attacked by lions, etc, he was cut down to 0.0 strength, but somehow survived. hadn't noticed that before.

3. sometimes the music doesn't play at all...ever

4. the sound (working with no acceleration) is WAY behind. sometimes several turns. before the patch, even on no accel for sound the sound effects were pretty close behind the actual event

bottom line, with all the fanfare, hopefully this patch helped some people play the game better and it was not merely cosmetic "improvements".

 

[patz]

The game actually works fine for me without the patch. But it would be nice to fix the small things like the ironworks bug and such. But considering the amount of problems people have been having I thing I'll wait for the next patch. This seems to develop into something like what happened to daggerfall. They must have released more than ten patches before they got it right.

 

[Sigilwen]

I installed the 1.09 patch which correct the "hammer issue" for me...during 5' then BSOD!

XPSP2, P4 2 GHz, 1,5 Gb DDR 256, GeForce4 MX 440 with 81.95 drivers

 

[gamefather]

Has anyone noticed something strange with julius caeser? After the patch his eyes have a large white border on the top. Really unnerving. The sound glitches in the videos disappeared, but it is now even more choppy. I am still getting huge slow downs in anything over standard size maps. And even in standard it crawls at the end.

 

[Titus Pullo]

Well, limited progress for my laptop. (Compaq 2195US, Radeon IGP 320M 64meg card)

Cheshire cats are gone, replaced by leaders with spooky eyes. Black terrain still a problem for me, except for scenarios with terrain revealed, which have never been a problem.

 

[lord_graywolfe]

np here's what im using
AMD Athlon 64 3200+
windows XP
directX 9.0 or better
GF FX 5200
video BIOS 4.34.20.42.37
IRQ 16
bus AGP 8X
memory 128MB
forceware 81.94
512MB RAM

Hate to be a pest, but could you post your specs in order to start to get a feel for what rigs are still having issues? TIA

:On Edit: I am not going to slam you; I am one who has had issues and am very sympathetic.

 

[RKumono]

Everything working good for me. I haven't made it to a wonder movie yet, but this has fixed everything else so far: cheshire leaders, black map, fog of war issue, intro movie no longer skips, food/hammer/coins now display on the map properly, no more water glitches, missing sounds/messages now play/display.
Game runs slightly slower now, but not harmfully so (at least in a young game).

Windows XP Pro SP1
Athlon XP 2000+ (Soyo Mainboard with VIA Chipsets)
1024MB PC133 RAM
360GB HDD Space (Installed via AIO external controller)
ATI All-in-Wonder 7500 AGP 4x 64MB (using Omega Driver 2.6.75a)

Now I just have to undo the Art0.pak fix and the black map fix...

 

[sutejo]

Well, limited progress for my laptop. (Compaq 2195US, Radeon IGP 320M 64meg card)

Cheshire cats are gone, replaced by leaders with spooky eyes. Black terrain still a problem for me, except for scenarios with terrain revealed, which have never been a problem.

Hello Titus Pullo ,
We have the same Video Card , Radeon IGP 320M.
I think 2K don't like Radeon IGP 320 M.
Anyone can help us ???.

 

[4_HoTA]

I'm trying too figure how too modify scenarios,the patch has fixed a few things in world builder but leaves "traces" of the old terrain behind in the fog of war and darker patches when i lower mountains too hills..ect,my biggest gripe is trying too figure out how too load maps for multiplayer that i have modified,still this is new too me and i may be overlooking a few things,seems harder than it should be too do some things though,still wrapped with the game and know the team at firaxis work hard too fix problems.

 

[lord_graywolfe]

ok i dont know if this is due to the patch or not but ive never run across this glitch before. has anyone else?

 

[classical_hero]

I get this error.



My computer specs are more than ehough, so what is the problem.

 

[Charles 22]

Following up on my previous post in this thread.

Things aren't looking so rosey anymore, though there's a few ideas I have. In any event the large sized map with the default amount of civs playing, I abandoned, so I never got past my usual bad portion of the game, but it looked very good to that point.

Now, however, I've done the same thing but with a huge map. It's still speedy, but I'm running into CTD's again. There had been maybe 5 or 6 times that it looked like it might crash, such as the terrain going to the Twilight Zone, and then reappearing. I've also had some diplo. screens that were about to lose it. one thing in particular seems to be setting it off and that was when it went to my recon chariot very deep into the opposite end of the map, with a caravel in the general vicinity too.

Only problem is, I can't recall what I did to start this game. I certainly didn't clear the cache (I'm not only not sure whether it's even necessary, but also don't know how long to hold it - just as it's had that small loading window?). I'm thinking I also went into starting straight after cancelling the previous large map game, but I'm pretty sure I dropped the game and reloaded without reboot.

Also I noted the barbs were virtually non-existent before, but that was my fault, as I didn't realize the game starts with chieftan as default (this happened because I uninstalled/reinstalled with the patch, because my previous patch was the corrupted CFC one). They're every bit as menacing when put to the noble setting I had before.

Anyway, I'm going to reboot the machine and see how that last CTD gaem goes. I expect that to do not much good, and then I'll likely reboot again to see how long a large map with default civs will last.

I would like to also add that I had a CTD with my video going wacky. That game went black, apart from the cursor, which suddenly grew in proportion, seeming to suddenly switch to 800X600 or worse. When the game crashed my desktop there was that gaudy resolution, but the colors seemed to go EGA. This is the first time I've seen that wild twist in all this CIV4 gaming. Anyway, off to guinea pig land.

 

[Dudeitsciv]

Hello Titus Pullo ,
We have the same Video Card , Radeon IGP 320M.
I think 2K don't like Radeon IGP 320 M.
Anyone can help us ???.

I have radeon igp 320m too..

For a while I was able to make it work perfectly using the

Radeon Omega Driver 2.6.42 driver..
(no chestchire cat / black map)

You can find it from:

http://www.ngohq.com/home.php?page=Files&go=cat&dwn_cat_id=14&go=giveme&dwn_id=141

Remember to turn off the frame counter (osd?) from the atitray.. Else there
will be red blinks on the game screen..

The problem was though that the game started crashing like 800 ad.. The screen would go white and the hd light would stay on..

Also.. The omega driver does not support hardware video overlay for the
320m.. Meaning.. Computer crashes when you try to play videos.. The work
around for that is to disable hardware overlay from the video player of your choice..

Bottom line is.. The black map at this point is due to the ati driver. Ati has
stopped supporting the 320m around july 04.. The last truly compatible omega driver for 320m is the 4.5 (but even that has problems with the dual screen
support / although the video playback works on those)

Better hardware like ati 9600 seems to be able to play the game even with 4.12 drivers.. Meaning that the problem most likely has to do something with
the shader emulation (that ati 320m has to use since it has no hardware support for those) / both in the driver / on the directx..

So in theory.. It could be done.. but no one is going to bother to rewrite the
drivers for our 3 year old hardware.. (there is no money in it from hp / other laptop makers, who just want to sell new laptops..)

In the end.. I just stopped playing the game and installed the last hp drivers for my computer (since i need dual screen support)..

 

[RKumono]

Everything working good for me. I haven't made it to a wonder movie yet, but this has fixed everything else so far: cheshire leaders, black map, fog of war issue, intro movie no longer skips, food/hammer/coins now display on the map properly, no more water glitches, missing sounds/messages now play/display.
Game runs slightly slower now, but not harmfully so (at least in a young game).

As a follow-up to this, from further play, my remaining problems are:
Missing Animals (Cow, Pig, Sheep, Horse, Ivory, etc)
Movie Skipping (Now the video jumps instead of the sound as videos progress)
Videos Freeze (Many wonder movies just stop playing--crashes the game if Ok is not clicked quickly)
Speed Problems - As game progresses, speed is halved from before the patch

 

[Slackeyed]

I'm running a Dell with the integrated 85XX graphics, and the patch fixed quite a lot of my problems.

Cheshire cat leaders are now fixed.
Intro splash logo is now fixed (not that I needed it, but it's working)
Wonder movies are now fixed (as well as technology discovery movies)
Dark terrain is fixed
I now see the settler's posse (before the patch, all I saw was one man)

Persisting issues are:
The Nimoy narrated opening movie when you start a new game still has stuttering video
Some animals are still invisible (but I can see the shadows)


But other than that, the patch made the game far more tolerable, but not perfect.

Oh, by the way, I get the message upon startup that my computer is below minimum specs and will not run the game.

 

[Elbea]

Well, that helped nothing. Was playing on a standard map, noble level. about the time gunpowered shows up the game started acting wonky and then crashed the desktop. In the process, it messed with all the color settings on my computer (good news here; quick reboot fixed it). All in all, it is still broke and 2K still needs to fix it.

P4 3.0 gig
1 gig RAM
110 gig HD
iVidia 5600XT 128 meg video card (drivers current)
Realtek AC97 sound card (drivers current)

 

[FullyCompletely]

<double post>

 

[FullyCompletely]

I wonder how big the bags of money were that 2k gave the major reviewers to ignore the gross technical issues in this game. Thanks for a worthless patch that took nearly a month to complete.

 

[corsetgal]

I honestly thought that the cheshire cat leaderheads and the black terrain was the same problem...

Yet: after the patch the leaderheads all look great but no matter what I do (even mods with all terrain revealed) the terrain is black.

We have two computers this works great on, but trying to get this to work on a laptop with onboard graphics sucks. It is so blazing fast on the laptop I would love to get this to work.

So, if it isn't a T&L problem because the leaderheads work, what could it be ?? (other than crappy graphics that you can't change because they are integrated. Grrrrr)