Total darkness and no shield/gold icons

[civjunkie]

Just loaded Civ4, was looking forward to playing but I can't see any leaderheads, only teeth and eyeglassess. The entire map is dark, even after settling a city. I can see fish jumping out of tar (I'm assuming I'm along a coast somewhere), I cannot see any hammers or gold, only food icons.

I've got an IBM Thinkpad T40, Radeon 7500 (only 32mb ram though), 512 MB memory, Pentium M processor 1.5 Ghz. Other than being 32MB short of video ram, I meet the minimum requirements. Why am I having all these problems?

 

[LlamaGod]

I tried playing the game on a PC with a 32MB video card and the same thing occured. I'm guessing not enough room for textures.

There is a fix, but I am getting no help in doing it from posts i've made. I need to unpack the art file, but nobody seems to know how to do it.

 

[batteryacid]

Hi
This no hammers and no coins bug are now a lot of people complaining about

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=134046
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=133141

I have it too with my 7500 Radeon; GF2 and GF4xx users are also facing this problem. Perehaps this bug should be put in an official sticky bug list

 

[PikeHead]

I have the same thing- territory I've explored stays black, even around my city. All I can see on the map is a kind of squidgy grey thing that I assume is a river.
When I zoom out to the "world" view it's obvious that this territory is lit and visible, but when I'm on the normal map view I can't see a bloody thing.

I'm not really technically adept but as far as system reqs go I have more than the recommended everything...anyone have any ideas? I heard someone say something about "your graphics don't support hardware T &L" but unfortunately I don't know what that is or how to get it.
Thanks and sorry for my ignorance- this is insanely frustrating....

 

[Steve2000]

Hi
This no hammers and no coins bug are now a lot of people complaining about

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=134046
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=133141

I have it too with my 7500 Radeon; GF2 and GF4xx users are also facing this problem. Perehaps this bug should be put in an official sticky bug list

Agreed. There are over 50 posts in that second link - so that might be the one to STICKY - although I guess I am not sure if it belongs here (tech support) or in the bug reports forum.

 

[bio_hazard]

Yes, this is a common problem especially with laptop users. Apparently most laptops unless they are super-hi end have graphics cards that do not have the T&L capability. So when you see people say "practically every card made since 2000 has T&L", they are only refering to desktops. Laptop users are pretty much screwed, since their (our) cards are frequently integrated, and we can't simply plunk down some cash for an upgrade.

My compaq presario is less than 2 years old and meets all the other recommended requirements, but is unlikely to ever run Civ4.

In one of the stickied threads, there was a link to an Apolyton page that had a list of graphics cards that would (or would not) work provided they had the correct drivers. For example, i have the Radeon IGP 320M, which is listed as NOT working.

I haven't heard any reliable info that this can be patched, since the T&L is so crucial to the graphics of the game.

So I will likely return the pc version and bide my time til the mac port comes out "in early 2006".

 

[BlackTerrain]

same problem, whoever decided to release at this point this game must be crazy to take the risk to dissapoint so many fans (see more? signature link)

 

[bio_hazard]

@BlackTerrain

some of the issues are software/driver related, but from what I've gathered especially for laptop owners, we've been buying the good, medium priced models that we feel intuitively "should" work on a game like civ, while the laptop manufacturers have been putting in more and more out of date graphics cards. So when all of a sudden a game we want requires this mysterious voodoo "T&L", we feel betrayed because we have an otherwise current computer that can't support civ4's graphics.

 

[BlackTerrain]

is T&L any mysterious today? its not a new invention, even my old Radeon7500 should be capable of it I think, and I'm not even using a
laptop and tried out, like, every driver and solution I could find, but
no way to get the camera work, everythings foggy

 

[bio_hazard]

Its mysterious if you pretty much only have been playing Civ3 for the past 2 years!

 

[BlackTerrain]

yeah, u'r right.

and whats all that 3d good for but causing trouble?

anyone who creates a 2d interface for C4 recieves a special price from me, will bake a cake or something (hope the firaxis guys are keen on cake)

 

[Rognvaldr]

I have a radeon 7000 w/h 64mg on my PC and i was getting the black terrain and i dont know why but i found that in 30-50 min of game play it starts to go away and the game is tolerable. I just had to switch between the the 2nd layer map and the zoom in map to play the game. It is a pain in the ass but i find that since i can still tolerate the ****ty graphics in civ1 i can tolerate the graphics problem till it fixes it self.

 

[BlackTerrain]

wow, u must be a huuuuge fan of the series, tried it myself
but got annoyed after, like 5 minutes... =)