Blue Marble is a terrain graphics mod for Civ4 created by ColdFever/Kai of civilized.de. This thread gives details.

The high and low resolution versions at now at the following links:

UPDATED November 30, 2008: These links point to version 4.50 Gold of BlueMarble. Thanks ColdFever.

UPDATED August 25, 2009: These linked zip files now include the files required for use with Beyond the Sword

High resolution (http://civilized.worldserve.de/download/civ4/mods/CivBlueMarbleHighRes.zip) for those with high performance systems

Low resolution (http://civilized.worldserve.de/download/civ4/mods/CivBlueMarbleLowRes.zip) for the more challenged Macs.

The expanded files and folders are in a top level folder called CustomAssets. They go into your own ~/Documents/Civilization IV[ Warlords][ Beyond the Sword]/CustomAssets/ folder, replacing the empty folders that are there already.

WARNING: If you already have a mod installed there then this will replace it.

If anyone is interested, I have updated my Drag and Drop Mod Installer to work with Blue Marble, and any other mod that comes in a zip file with CustomAssets as its top level folder. This version is here (http://gotm.civfanatics.net/civ4games/ModInstaller_Civ4.dmg).

- Download it and open the disk image.

- Drag the Mod Installer application to /Applications/ and launch it.

- Select Civilization IV in the popup menu at the top. It should look for Civ4 on your hard drive and show it as an entry in the window.

- If this doesn't happen, drag your /Applications/Civilization IV/ folder into the window.

- When your Civ4 folder is listed in the Mod Installer window, drag the BlueMarbleHighRes.zip or BlueMarbleLowRes.zip file onto its icon. Confirm that you want to proceed, and it should install Blue Marble in your CustomAssets folder.

- Launch Civ4 and marvel at the new terrain graphics.

Mod Installer hasn't had a lot of user testing, and none since I added Civ4 to its repertoire, so any feedback you can provide will be welcome.

Wow, thanks Alan! Both your links are for the High-res textures. Might want to fix that. :)

Wow, thanks Alan! Both your links are for the High-res textures. Might want to fix that. :)
Thanks! My usual trick - copy/paste instead of copy/paste/EDIT

Thanks, I'll give this a try!

Thanks for your support Alan. As a Windows user I cannot test anything for Mac, so I have to ask: does your tool have an "Uninstall" feature or would it be possible to implement one? The feature just had to delete the installed files from the CustomAssets folder (or delete the entire CustomAssets folder if a specific file uninstallation would not be possible). From many Blue Marble support questions I know that an easy uninstallation is as important as an easy installation, because many people still prefer the original graphics. Here the original BlueMarble homepage:
http://www.civfanatics.net/~bluemarble

I did consider generating a log file for each installation process done by the Mod Installer, and then have a facility to select a roll-back point which would revert the files to the state they were in before that point. As you can appreciate, that's not a trivial development, so I don't want to embark on it unless and until I can see a significant demand for the Mod Installer.

As you say it's simple for users to do - "Delete the ~/Civilization IV/CustomAssets/Art/ folder". But then, so is installing your mod. And most Civ4 mods are easy to install as well. You either copy them into the /Applications/Civilization IV/Mods/ folder or the ~/Civilization IV/CustomAssets/ folder. Neither of these locations has the same mystique as some folders in Windows, and Mac users tend to be more comfortable with moving files and folders around.

So I think the jury's out on whether users will want or need my Mod Installer at all.

I did consider generating a log file for each installation process done by the Mod Installer, and then have a facility to select a roll-back point which would revert the files to the state they were in before that point. As you can appreciate, that's not a trivial development.
Better (and more easy) than a static log file could be a dynamic approach using the installation zip file, like reading the mod files from the zip storage and deleting them from the target path instead of installing them, or (if reading from zip is difficult) installing the files to a dummy path and then delete all files found in the dummy path from the CustomAssets folder.

I dropped the hi-res version into my copy of Civ IV and it all seemed to work properly. I haven't used your installer yet. Maybe sometime this evening.

Better (and more easy) than a static log file could be a dynamic approach using the installation zip file, like reading the mod files from the zip storage and deleting them from the target path instead of installing them, or (if reading from zip is difficult) installing the files to a dummy path and then delete all files found in the dummy path from the CustomAssets folder.
That works for a single mod, if the user still has the original zip. If I were to build an uninstaller I would want it to handle regression for a sequence of installations. I also think it's dangerous to assume the original mod file is still available, or that it's the correct file or version.

Thanks! My usual trick - copy/paste instead of copy/paste/EDIT
Maybe it spread from me like a virus? ;)

Now I've told you before, ainwood, Mac users don't get viruses :p ... Atchhooo!

That works for a single mod, if the user still has the original zip. If I were to build an uninstaller I would want it to handle regression for a sequence of installations. I also think it's dangerous to assume the original mod file is still available, or that it's the correct file or version.
I see no problem as long as things stay simple. Good Windows mods have an install and an uninstall feature to install/remove the affected files. For Mac you wrote an installer that copies the affected files, so it would be logical to give it a uninstall = "negative install" feature too that is able to remove the files a mod brings. Or to have a 2nd tool you can drag a mod over to do this task. Trying out a mod would become much easier this way, instead of having to handle all installed files manually. If people will have to deinstall manually, they probably will prefer installing files manually, so that they know what to do in case they do not want to keep a mod.

Alan thanks for the blue marble mod. I am using the high res version and your Mod Installer worked perfectly..

Thanks for the feedback, waltham845. You're the first independent tester to report back on the installer. Did it find your Civ4 installation by itself, or did you have to tell it where it is? And do you think it helps?

I'm pretty sure I had to tell it where CivIV lives. (In /Games, not in apps.)Can't say it really helped much, since all the files go in one straightforward place.

Wow, this mod is gorgeous. So much better than the original terrain! I'd love to see what the high-res textures are like, but I know that would cause my powerbook to choke and die.

per Cougar cat I had to locate Civ4. It wouldn't locate it for me. Oh yes it definitely helps. :)

I also had to locate Civ4 for it, but the installer worked just fine. Mod looks very nice - far more vivid than the default (using the high-res version).

Where is the Civilization IV application folder installed on your hard drive? The Mod Installer uses the unix locate utility to look for Civilization IV.app in /Games/, in your default Applications directory, and in your Home directory, searching their subdirectories. I'd be interested to find out which of these is failing.

Mine is in ~/Games.

Mine is in Applications/Games/Civilization4. Hmmm....

Thx. I'll try putting copies there and see why it doesn't pick them up.

The locate database is updated for new files every 24 hours if your Mac is able to run its unix housekeeping tasks. I suppose it's conceivable that 24 hour civing at 180% CPU utilization could get in the way of that ;)

Thx. I'll try putting copies there and see why it doesn't pick them up.

The locate database is updated for new files every 24 hours if your Mac is able to run its unix housekeeping tasks. I suppose it's conceivable that 24 hour civing at 180% CPU utilization could get in the way of that ;)

My understanding is that laptops won't be awake to do their housekeeping tasks because they sleep or get shut-off. It's typically only if you have a desktop that doesn't ever go to sleep that the housekeeping tasks get done. I could be wrong, but that was my understanding of the justification for the program MacJanitor - housekeeping doesn't get done as often as it might because home users don't typically run their PCs 24/7. (I think the scheduled times for these are some time between midnight and 6am.)

I read somwhere that in 10.4.x, the unix scripts run at startup if the computer was not on at 3am. So as long as you periodically restart the computer instead of just putting it to sleep you should be fine.

10.3 and earlier should use macjanitor periodically.

Hope that helps!

Macaroni is another utility that was produced to help with this.

Yes, 10.4 did make allowances for people switching their computers off. I believe maintenance tasks that were missed at 03:00 because the computer was off or asleep are now done when it next wakes or is started up. See last post here (http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=2612565)

Deleted. Please don't cross post the same question in multiple threads.

Not sure if its still helpful to know when mods work/don't work, but yesterday I downloaded the low-res BlueMarble. Seems to be working fine- the jungle in particular is much improved. I installed using AlanH's Drag and Drop. Thanks!

I'm not far enough in my game to notice whether there's any performance boost...

I'm on a 15" Powerbook g4, 1.5ghz, 1gb ram, ATI Radeon 9700 64mb.

Has anyone been able to get Blue Marble mod to work with Warlords. I tried to get it to work with AlanH's installer, but the installer wouldn't accept the Warlords folder. If someone has gotten this to work and there isn't a thread on it already, I would be much obliged if someone could help.

Just expand the BlueMarble zip file and drop the resulting folder into your ~/Documents/Civilization IV Warlords/CustomAssets/ folder.

I'm currently in the process of updating the Mod Installer to deal with mods for Civ4 and Warlords more comprehensively. Should have something for you in a week or three.

Thanks Alan,
And a Merry Christmas to you as well.
P.S. Blue Marble now works as advertised

Please help a very inexperienced gamer. I have downloaded the mod, which unzipped as a folder called CustomAssets. It contains only a solitary folder, named 'Art'. I'm reluctant to drag this into my existing CustomAssets folder, as I don't want to over-write the existing folder's contents.

Feel sure I'm missing something obvious, here...

If you have not installed anything in CustomAssets before then all its folders will be empty, or will only contain empty folders, so you can replace the Art folder with no problem. If you later delete the BlueMarble fodler no harm will be done.

If you have an existing mod installed in CustomAssets/Art fodler then you either have to forego BlueMarble or replace your previous mod. The simplest way to replace it is to change the existing CustomAssets folder name to, say, CustomAssets.Old, then put the BlueMarble one in the same place. The game will then load up BlueMarble instead of your previous mod. If you don't like BlueMarble you can trash it and rename the .Old folder again to restore your system.

Alan, I have no mods installed previously. I only installed the game first time round, as required. I seem to have a great many folders in the CustomAssets folder, but all of them appear to be empty (or contain empty folders; or contain folders which contain empty folders, etc.). For safety I think I'll use the work-around you suggest, however.

Not for the first time, many thanks for your help.

Alan, just FYI I ran CIV today with the BlueMarble mod and all seems to work OK. Thanks!

Just downloaded Blue Marble and the Mod installer and both worked great. I found that when I chose Civ IV from the drop down menu, I needed to click rescan system first to help it find the game. Once I did, it had no problems finding the game, despite the fact that I had the game in /applications/games. Can't wait to try out the mod! Thanks Alan.

Omaha

Just downloaded Blue Marble and the Mod installer and both worked great. I found that when I chose Civ IV from the drop down menu, I needed to click rescan system first to help it find the game. Once I did, it had no problems finding the game, despite the fact that I had the game in /applications/games. Can't wait to try out the mod! Thanks Alan.

Omaha

Pleased to hear it.

Mod Installer initially looks in /Applications/ and /Games/, and ~/. The option I didn't think of was /Applications/Games/ :(

Please note that I originally developed the Mod Installer when installing mods into vanilla Civ3 was like doing major heart surgery. It really isn't optimised for Civ4 or Warlords. Hand-installing mods in these apps is pretty simple, so I just haven't devoted much time to the changes it would really need for the Civ4/Warlords folder structures. So please don't expect it to work as a general mod installer for Civ4 as it currently stands.

I haven't tried to modify my civ 4 yet with the new Blue Marble 3.0 mod, but since a Mac specific one was made for us before, I assume that we can't use the it (3.0).
Am I right or wrong on this assumption?

The 3.0 version was so it would work with BTS, as far as I know. It has a lot of different goodies for BTS, such as leader head color changes, background screens and stuff like that. I don't think that they added those things to vanilla or Warlords, but I don't really know since I haven't fired those up after BTS was installed. The artwork for the terrain looks the same in BTS. I could poke around in my PC folders and see if there is a difference between what 3.0 installed and the Mac version for vanilla and warlords. But I don't think anything changed.

I noticed the few gui changes.Those look cool.Although I like to keep my Civ IV pretty basic, I work in GIS so map mods are always interesting. It would also be interesting to see if the gui changes would work with vanilla or warlords. It does seem like they didn't change the terrain.

I just drug my PC warlords CustomAssets folder into my Mac warlords CustomAssets. It seems to work fine. At least one extra thing is the main menu screen of the gnarly guy sitting next to the fire has the Blue Marble logo on it. The folder is 38.9 MBs instead of 36.5. I think this stuff was probably in the earlier versions of Blue Marble, they just didn't make it onto the Mac side of things. I'll try to figure out how to make it accessible.

I will see if I can load it into the custom assets folder. Have to use my warlords as a guinea pig. Most of the visual stuff was in Blue Marble before, I remember seeing the logo on Vanilla, but not on Warlords when I loaded it in. However I noticed on the Blue Marble page that there was an issue with terrain mods not working in BTS on a PC? Unless a new patch has been issued that rectified that? thanks, I will wait to see what you come up with.

I think the mac version as it is now is specifically for vanilla. It works for doing the terrain for warlords as the terrain files are the same, but it doesn't have things like the main menu screen with the logo. I do remember now that I was having trouble with BTS crashing when I first started running it, so I backed off on all of the extra goodies. There might be more interface differences in warlords if I install all of that too.

The issue with BTS is you can't use Blue Marble when playing multiplayer. It is a little overzealous in making sure that everyone is running the same code, so it balks about the BM stuff even though it shouldn't. It works fine in single player.

Thanks for the help Welnic, I was wondering if I could ask for a favor however. I have tried to get my Virtual PC working (archaic i know, but I'm still a G5 owner), no dice. I haven't been able to dissect the .exe file. So could I get a hold of some dissected files? :) I missed the line where it mentioned multiplayer BTS was the only thing that errored out on Terrain mods. I'm going to wait for BTS for mac. I'm probably one of the few.

I'll try to get it up somewhere once I try the install again with everything turned on to make sure that everything fancy is installed.

So I tried the Warlords CustomAssets folder from my PC after the V 3.00 install. It is pretty cool, the BM logo is on the main menu screen and some of the other screens have some different backgrounds. But in a succession game that I am playing when I load it up all of the sudden I am playing Catherine of the Romans, against people like Gandhi of the Incas. If I change the CustomAssets folder back to stock then the game is okay. So I need to figure out what is going on there before this is of any use.

Sounds like an interesting modification. Random leaders, must be part of the new add on. Does it change the leader stats for each leader head when combined with a different country. So maybe you can now randomize everything. If you find anything give me an email or a post here.(I usually lurk) I changed my email address just recently to my current one. The old email address was on there was from a year ago.

How do I get The "Mod Installer"?

Link in my sig.

For some reason I'm missing the CustomAssests folder. :cry:

Where have you looked for it? It should be in /Users/<your_user_name>/Documents/Civilization IV/. If it isn't there then you must have deleted it. But Civ4 should recreate it automatically next time you run it if this is the case.

Thanks. I accidentally installed multiple versions of Warlords, so I assumed that was one of those I forgot to delete.

I have replaced the BlueMarble .zip files linked in the first post. The links now point to the terrain files for version 4, kindly provided by ColdFever.

http://civilized.worldserve.de/download/civ4/mods/images/BlueMarbleTerrain700.jpg

ColdFever's description of the changes in the new version:


V3 only updated the mod for BtS, so it did not bring news for Mac owners, here are some notes for V4:

V4.00 - warmer colors, Civ4:Colonization terrain style (kudos to Firaxis Games for Civ4:Colonization updates)

V4.20 - sunnier grassland & detail maps corrections

Thanks for the update AlanH. I found out that I like to keep my civ 4 as uncluttered by mods as possible, but this one is a keeper. With a G5 any mac(OS X) specific mod for civ4 is a keeper.

ColdFever has updated BlueMarble to version 4.50 Gold. The list of changes is:

- new snow graphics
- improved terrain detail balance
- small refinements

The first post now has download links directly to ColdFever's latest files.

Thanks again, ColdFever :goodjob:

ColdFever has now updated the BlueMarble file sets to include the extras required to run with Beyond the Sword for Mac.

Thanks yet again, ColdFever :goodjob:

Just one question before I update the Modding Index, do these files still work on vanilla and Warlords? If not is there still a link to older versions?

As far as I know, they just add new files to the existing sets. But why don't you try?

ColdFever has now updated the BlueMarble file sets to include the extras required to run with Beyond the Sword for Mac.

Thanks yet again, ColdFever :goodjob:

And thank you, Alan. I'll try it out as soon as I finish my current game.