Fellow Children of Sid:

I am quite happy with Civ IV, and deliriously happy with the recently release patch. But there is an elephant in the living room, I think - and I'll point it out.

Much of Civ Fanatics is about .... major modification packages, scenarios, etc.

My understanding is that some of the biggest and most interesting mods, scenarios, etc., require an SDK originally created for the Wintel version of the game code. My understanding is that, without that SDK ported over to Mac-land, we have fundamentally limited mod capability.

Can someone who knows better than I tell me/us what the real capacity for running variants on the Mac-DVD game really is, and what it is likely to be?

Part of the fun of the game is that one is not supposed to be fundamentally tied to DVD releases to expand the game.

Your understanding is correct. I think I've stated it in at least four threads now. You can't run any mod that includes an SDK-compiled Windows .dll file. The Mac version of Civ4 will not/cannot read such a file or link to it.

Only Aspyr can tell you whether this will change in future. I suggest you contact them directly, as there's no reason for them to read or answer your question here. If it ever does then my guess is we'll have to recompile such mods from the source code, using a Mac SDK, to create a Mac version of the mod.

To enlighten the non-Mac people - do Mac's have equivalents of DLLs?

Yes, but they aren't compiled in Visual C++, and they aren't called DLLs. They are just libraries. But Mac Civ4 hasn't even been coded to handle a separate mod library, regardless of what it's called and how it's produced. It has the contents of the Windows CvGameCore.DLL compiled in with the game engine as a monolithic executable. At least that's my understanding.

Holy cow. Doesn't that cause some mem issues?

Holy cow. Doesn't that cause some mem issues?
I haven't noticed it chewing up lots of RAM while playing. In fact, I've been surprised how little RAM it has been using. I'll check my stats next time I'm playing but I don't think it was taking up more than about 100-200MB.

Holy cow. Doesn't that cause some mem issues?
Why would it? The game can still page in the pieces of the code it needs, as and when. Why would having it split into two executables make any difference to that?

Sounds about the same as the PC then. I just thought with everything dumped together it might cause an issue, but obviously it doesn't. :)

Only Aspyr can tell you whether this will change in future. I suggest you contact them directly, as there's no reason for them to read or answer your question here. If it ever does then my guess is we'll have to recompile such mods from the source code, using a Mac SDK, to create a Mac version of the mod.

For mods that use code DLLs, we actually need support for platform-specific CRCs in the mods, which is a change that has to come from Firaxis. It's my understanding that this will arrive on the PC side as either as part of Warlords or in a patch shortly thereafter.

If platform-specific mod crc support is coming with Warlords there's a kind of implication that it will be *needed* to support multi-platform Warlords. Or is that too much of a leap of logic? :p

If platform-specific mod crc support is coming with Warlords there's a kind of implication that it will be *needed* to support multi-platform Warlords. Or is that too much of a leap of logic? :p
Ya know... sometimes speculation just equals teasing.

If platform-specific mod crc support is coming with Warlords there's a kind of implication that it will be *needed* to support multi-platform Warlords. Or is that too much of a leap of logic? :p

I'll let you know when I know for sure, but right now I'm speculating as to when this will arrive on the PC side. I've asked my contacts for a clarification about this.

Thanks for the reply. Given that there is a sticky note on compatibility and the question gets asked over and over, would a moderator or admin please close this thread out? The clutter is not desirable, I know.