Blue Marble V4.0 Gold

Hi ColdFever!
You are from Lübeck, thats nice....iam from Bad Schwartau, so nearly your neighbour.
Just a quick question. Is it possible to use the ocean graphics from colonization for CIV BtS. It would be very nice. Cant test it myself because i havent Colonization...

NuDDen

nudden said:

Is it possible to use the ocean graphics from colonization for CIV BtS?

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Sorry, no. I tried it, but the Colonization water uses a new pixel shader (with higher system requirements) that only the newer Colonization game executable supports, not the older Civ4 game executable. One thing from Colonization that is usable for Civ4 is the coastline floor, and this graphic is included with Blue Marble V4, kudos to Firaxis.

ColdFever said:

Sorry, no. I tried it, but the Colonization water uses a new pixel shader (with higher system requirements) that only the newer Colonization game executable supports, not the older Civ4 game executable.

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Is it possible to edit the executable, to make it compatible with col's water?

Apenpapp is back!

Hi. I have Civ4 and BTS, both bought from Steam. How do I install the Blue Marble mod ? I tried installing it first, and then the BUG mod afterwards, and while BUG is present, I can't see the Blue Marble graphics. Any ideas ?

Edit: never mind, found it. Used the workaround that apparently works for the cd-version of civ and the steam-version of bts as well: copy the civ4 exe to the bts folder, point the blue marble mod installer there, and proceed.

Huayna Capac357 said:

Apenpaap is back!

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Thanks for your enthusiasm, but what do you mean by that comment? Was my question exeptionally stupid?

No, I mean you were inactive for a while. And now you're back

apenpaap said:

Is it possible to edit the executable, to make it compatible with col's water?

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I believe only Firaxis Games itself would be able to update the graphics engine layer of Civ4 to use the new pixel shaders of CivCol. But - so very silent as Firaxis Games currently are, I would think that they already are working hard on the next big thing instead of improving the last big one...

I'm having a bit of trouble getting this installed. When I run the installer then it tells me that a valid installation of Civilization IV was not found. What am I doing wrong? I tried running the installer from the desktop and from inside My Documents-My Games folder and neither one worked.

Suggestions?

Thanks.

djvandrake said:

I'm having a bit of trouble getting this installed. When I run the installer then it tells me that a valid installation of Civilization IV was not found.

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As the documentation says, the BlueMarble installer only can handle the standard CD/DVD versions/installations. Other versions/installations (Steam, Gamesload, Pirated etc.) can differ considerably and are not supported. For Steam somebody found a workaround he documented somewhere in this thread, perhaps this can help. Starting the BlueMarble installer from inside the Civ4 main installation directory also can help.

ColdFever said:

As the documentation says, the BlueMarble installer only can handle the standard CD/DVD versions/installations. Other versions/installations (Steam, Gamesload, Pirated etc.) can differ considerably and are not supported. For Steam somebody found a workaround he documented somewhere in this thread, perhaps this can help. Starting the BlueMarble installer from inside the Civ4 main installation directory also can help.

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I'm sorry but I don't understand what your saying. I have the CD versions of CIV IV gold and the CD version of BTS and they are valid (and legal) copies. I don't do pirated anything.

So I suppose I should clarify and say that I ran the installer from the desktop, from inside the "My Games" folder and inside the "BTS" folder and it doesn't find my install anywhere. I did run it from inside the Civ IV main installation directory and it didn't work. Any other ideas? Where is this documentation that you're referring to? The ZIP file that I downloaded has no read me or documentation files attached.

Thanks.

What happened to CivScale?

djvandrake said:

I have the CD versions of CIV IV gold ... I did run it from inside the Civ IV main installation directory and it didn't work. Any other ideas? Where is this documentation that you're referring to?

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Civ4Gold never has been released in Germany, so I could not test this version. If the BM installer does not work for this version it should help to run the installer from the Civ4 installation. If this also does not work I have no clue, sorry. The documentation I was referring too is given in the text window of the BM installer.

mqduck said:

What happened to CivScale?

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The CivScale tool is not supported anymore, because the XML changes it allowed caused severe problems for some people:

First, the changes were not multiplayer compatible. This at least could be handled by reverting the changes before doing multiplayer.

But what really brought users into trouble: When CivScale modified XML files with new scale values the XML file dates where updated. It showed that this confused the official Civ patches from Firaxis, because these patches would *not* update the affected XML files anymore, since the file dates of the modified files could be newer than the dates of official files part of official patches.

This has been esspecially fatal in case of GlobalDefines.xml where patching could lead to defected installations. I needed a good while to realize this and many people had to reinstall their programs. Of course this is rather a problem with the official patch installer than with the CivScale tool, but I decided to drop the CivScale tool anyway because I have no influence on the faulty official Civ4 patch installer.

The Text tools of CivScale now are integrated in the BM installer (see Tab 2). These font scaling tools are safe because they do not have to change any XML values (fortunately font definitions for Civ4 are independent from the game core).

Does that mean it's safe to use (as I've been doing), so long as no official patches are installed afterwards?

mqduck said:

Does that mean it's safe to use (as I've been doing), so long as no official patches are installed afterwards?

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Exactly. If you have the old CivScale tool you still can use it - as long as no official patch is installed afterwards (would get confused by changed XML file dates).

Do you think, there will be more patches?
-> You should upload it again, i don't think there will be any more problems.

If you put it a bit out of the way, and add a disclaimer, shouldn't that be enough?

Who wants the latest version of CivScale again and knows what he is doing can reach me at kai@civilized.de to receive the file via mail. But I won't put it up as a regular download again because a majority of people does not read any attached info at all and just clicks on "install".

Is this compatible with the Direct 2 Drive version of CIV4?

A few pages back in this thread is an instruction, how to make Blue Marble work with the steam version of BtS. http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=7404381&postcount=33