Hello mac mates,

i am a happy user of the new MacBook Pro with the intel processor (2GM ram and 2,16 CPU :crazyeye: ) i think civ would run fine and smothly on my machine but i am a bit skeptical about the modding situation.

i alreadz play civ on my pc, its a older machine and below the system requirements but its running fine (i think it will also perform on older macs fine ...) my main concern are the mods, i really love them and i would like to know if someone already got a mac civ4 and can tell me if mods really work.

thanks,
JFK

btw: is it necessary to keep the dvd in the drive during the game runs or we get more trust then pc guys

I believe you should be able to install and use any mod that is graphics, XML and Python only, ie. doesn't use a CvGameCore.dll file. Until someone has the game and tries, that can't be confirmed, of course.

Aspyr use CD protection as a general principle. I very much doubt if that will change for Civ4.

would be great if they all work, i strongly belive that the gaming experience on an mac is much greater then on a pc ... :lol:

did i mentioned that i LOVE my macBook Pro ???

No offense... but why do you think the gaming experience would be any better... or different... on a Mac vs. a PC?

I'm not sure what that means either. I doubt if the game itself will feel any different.

However, I wouldn't want to use a Windows PC, or even Boot Camp, to play it, because I want to be able to mix playing with the rest of my Mac-based activities. I don't feel the need for the "total immersion" mode of gaming favoured by some players, and when playing a strategy game like Civ I find that dropping back to read forums, email, do a bit of work between turns etc. avoids the danger of rushing through a game without thinking.

well, thats because everything "feels" better on an mac :lol:

Having converted to Mac the only question in my mind is why anyone bothers with PC anymore. WIndows is quite a dog at this point compared to Tiger+.

Placing that aside, I don't know for sure why there would be any playability difference in a Civ game between Mac and Windows -

The only advantage that I'm hoping to see is that the bugs will be mostly worked out since the PC version has been out for so long. When my PC friend got the first version of Civ IV, it crashed repeatedly.

SHIPPED TONIGHT!!!! 3-4 days...

I thought this too - how wrong we were!??!!

Hello. New this AM. Glad you are here, Aspyr seems pretty silent on support issues, other than: "buy the latest equipment or don't bother"

I received my civ4 yesterday, sure it would load/run on my Powerbook 1.25 (768 ram) or my Ibook 1.33 (512 ram), (running 10.4.7) albeit with issues. So far it has not. I don't have enough room on either hard drive, so I loaded on external, but it won't run. Error messages are "xml load error" (failed loading xml file) and "xml error"

Any thoughts? I really don't expect much in the way of performance, but I thought it would run.
I'll probably move on to a macbook/pro, but I'm waiting for next iteration.
Thanks, Pete

I ran it on a G4 powerbook, it was slow but ran okay. I copied it from the hard drive on my G5 to an external drive and it ran from there on both my G5 and my G4 powerbook.

But those had both ran it from the startup drive before. Maybe something needs to get installed when you first run it. I know that there is an offer to register when you run it the first time, that doesn't come up again after you deal with it. Maybe you are going to have to install on your machine, and then you can remove it after you run it once.

I removed the original copy on my G4 powerbook and it still ran off the external hard drive. Tomorrow when I go to work I'll take my hard drive and see what happens when I try on a machine that has never had it run the normal way.

Thanks, Welnic, I'll try that. I did try starting up from the external, no soap.
pete

Having converted to Mac the only question in my mind is why anyone bothers with PC anymore. WIndows is quite a dog at this point compared to Tiger+.

PCs are cheaper (both in terms of upgrading and buying), and run infinitely more programs. XP also has never crashed on me in 3 years of use. No viruses either. Aesthetically of course OSX is the winner, and it has some nifty features (which are named quite bizarrely), but the hardware is simply too expensive, and in most cases too inferior, for most people to switch.

Placing that aside, I don't know for sure why there would be any playability difference in a Civ game between Mac and Windows -

A combination of factors: Aspyr is incompetent, and Mac hardware is a bit behind -- and more expensive than -- its PC counterparts.

The "no sound" issue will never cease to amaze me.

This thread is about mods. Please move discussion of the performance and reliablility issues (and platform wars) to a more appropriate thread. New arrivals will not find your gems of wisdom here.

I remembered my wife's G4 powerbook, which I hadn't tried it on yet. It ran okay on the external drive. So unless the issue is that something happens to the files on the hard drive once they are run, since I did copy them from my hard drive instead of the DVD for speed reasons, I don't think starting from the hard drive first will help. I looked in the Civ folder on my hard drive and there is just one file with a recent date, which was some simple error log.

So I don't know if it would be worth the trouble to make room on the hard drive. I think I would recopy the files on to the external drive first.

Speaking of mods, it's time to start getting all the fanatics stuff built for PC deployment into the Mac OS framework. I'd suggest to people beginning with the new civilizations that have been built here, one of the aspects of the default game configuration is it that it is a little skimpy on the number of civilizations.

Mod request...

Alan: I just downloaded the Total Realism mod (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=173492) but the .exe was borked... erm... it gave the "not compressed" error, etc.

Which makes me think (for once): were you planning a utility that takes these suckers apart or were you just planning a reverse engineer on the Blue Marble mod?

BlueMarble was not reverse engineer-able because its installer would only run if you have a real copy of Civ4 for Windows. But I've not had to reverse engineer BlueMarble, because I've been in touch with Kai and he has passed me the zipped file sets.

My objective is to update my Mod Installer to handle mod installation into Civ4 for any file set that yuo can get as a zip file.

I've received and installed Civ4 today. I confirmed that it's unplayable on my system, for the surprising reason that there's no fog of war. So I'm not distracted by actually playing it. I have spent some time on the mod installer, and it now works with BlueMarble.

I've also been posting in the C&C forum to find out how mods are supposed to be installed. There are at least three potential locations for mods, and I wanted to understand how the mod makers expect them to work. IBlueMarble is a relatively simple case, as it is only graphic files. I now need to implement something that can work with more complicated mods.

I have contacted Kai again to let him know that we have a solution for BlueMarble on Mac OS, and we'll work out how best to make the downloads available for others to try it out.

I'll have a look at Total Realism and see if I can extract the files from it, but the safest way forward is to get the mod maker to provide a zip file. See Skippy's thread in C&C for his efforts at getting them to do this.

In C&C...? I'll check that out.

Alan, thanks for your work... this community would be a lot poorer without your contributions.

Looks like the Total Realism installer has trashed my Windows 98 installation and a reformat reinstall is in order :(.

Holy cow! :eek:

I just downloaded the CivMore mod. It looks pretty good and I thought another experiment was in order. It decompressed without a problem and everything looked to be in order – I figured it should work okay... I threw it in the User/Documents/Civilization IV/MODS folder, fired up C-IV, chose the mod and it restarted to use the mod. Everything looked good until the game restarted.

I got about 80 different error windows, mostly XML problems. Somehow, the game still didn't choke but it certainly didn't run right as I tried a game just to see what would happen. After choosing my leader and planet traits, I got a black map, a few new error messages and a window saying that I'd just lost.

In more ways than one, I guess... but just the battle, not the war.

Edit: There's got to be something either incredibly simple to this or incredible complex; a million other people are running the mod without a problem...

There was a post in the C&C thread today pointing out that some mods use Python libraries that suss out where the user's installed units are. That code will surely fail on a Mac, as the paths are obviously not the same. Dunno whether CivMore uses this stuff, but if it does it could explain your problems.

Hi Alan and ejday,
See my newer post (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=4367533&postcount=8). I have fixed the Path problem for CivMore, replace the CvPath file I posted there in both directories within CivMore. While I'm sure that there are no more python errors that show in the debugging logs, fixing this however does not fix the XML issues. There is something else to that.

I've been attacking CivMore because at least it does not crash like SevoMOD, so I have more hopes that I will get this one debugged. I also try to do the separate pieces to test which one of them are failing, which is how I got into the Civ4lerts fix.

So in CivMore even after everything is good in python the first file that fails to load is: GameTextInfos_Diplomacy.xml
and then it claims to be in GlobalDefinesAlt.xml

As ejday says, you then get 80 or so xml errors and finally it comes around and loads but then clearly things didn't load properly because the new leaders/units etc do not exist and then when you load the game you already have lost :(

Current guess is one of two... there is some other hidden code that needs the path reported (but it does not use winreg which is window specific) or there are some more of the issues with the xml that Alan found in TAM. Alan could you take a look at the XML in this one?

Platypus

...I've been attacking CivMore...
Platypus, you are da bomb!

We'll figure this out yet!

EJ

Hi Alan and ejday,
See my newer post (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=4367533&postcount=8). I have fixed the Path problem for CivMore, replace the CvPath file I posted there in both directories within CivMore.
Well done. However, it would be better if the user didn't have to manually edit their application path into the file.

So in CivMore even after everything is good in python the first file that fails to load is: GameTextInfos_Diplomacy.xml
and then it claims to be in GlobalDefinesAlt.xml

As ejday says, you then get 80 or so xml errors and finally it comes around and loads but then clearly things didn't load properly because the new leaders/units etc do not exist and then when you load the game you already have lost :(

Current guess is one of two... there is some other hidden code that needs the path reported (but it does not use winreg which is window specific) or there are some more of the issues with the xml that Alan found in TAM. Alan could you take a look at the XML in this one?

Sure, but after I get C-IV SGOTM 2 up and running on Tuesday. Do you have a link for it?

Hey Alan, we forgot about this...
The link to CivMore (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=163596) ... I've been playing with it, so far all I got is prove that the python part works well with my modification. As far as the XML, the terrain modifications have no problem. In any case do take a look to the files I mentioned before, you might something obvious in them which I don't.

I'm starting to think that it's some sort of bug in the port which we would then have to report to Aspyr.
Platypus

Hi,
I have finally traced down the problem. The port has a problem reading UTF encoded XML files. This takes two forms, one is if you have UTF-8 in the encoding string, it will complain and not read the file; easy to solve just change it to ISO-8859-1. However if there are UTF-8 characters/codes in there as well it will refuse to read the file anyway, harder solution since you need to find them and do something about them.

So after spending hours searching for them by hand, I finally found a perl script that does it for me. I plan to report this issue to Aspyr. In the meantime, I can provide the fixed files to patch civmore once I test it some more.

Platypus

Hi,
I have finally traced down the problem. The port has a problem reading UTF encoded XML files. This takes two forms, one is if you have UTF-8 in the encoding string, it will complain and not read the file; easy to solve just change it to ISO-8859-1. However if there are UTF-8 characters/codes in there as well it will refuse to read the file anyway, harder solution since you need to find them and do something about them.

So after spending hours searching for them by hand, I finally found a perl script that does it for me. I plan to report this issue to Aspyr. In the meantime, I can provide the fixed files to patch civmore once I test it some more.

Platypus

Keep up the good work!