[QUESTION] How do you use Steam Workshop Mods on the Mac Version?

I enjoyed many a mod with the vanilla game on my mac and I hope to do so in the future with G&K (once I've played it for a while yet) so I guess we will have to wait until some G&K mods are available on the civfantatics forum for us to download and then see if they can work for us Mac folk after editing the newly located MainMenu.lua. Perhaps we might get a few before this dreaded DLL Source Code is released and completely locks us out.

With that in mind, is there a thread on Mods that do work for the mac version? Perhaps we can keep some mods away from this DLL armageddon.

Especially if the Steam Workshop won't work for Mac users either.
 
Okay after some playing about I managed to get some mods working on my Mac with the Gods and Kings Expansion. However it's not a straight forward process as you need access to a PC version of the game and expansion. So through bootcamp I logged into Steam Workshop, subscribed to a few of the Mods that are available for Gods and Kings, loaded the game and 'Got the mods'. Quit out the game. Then located the files in the Mods folder in My Documents/My Games. Copied them onto a USB key and then shut the computer down. Rebooting the computer back into OS X and then copied the files into Aspyr folder in user/Documents/Aspyr/civilization V/MODS as well as copying the maps in to user/Documents/Aspyr/civilization V/Maps. (not sure if this is necessary but did it to be sure).

Then located the MainMenu.lua which is now in it's new place as detailed in Alan H's post 24 (of this thread) and edited that infamous line. Fired up the game, the Mods option is in the menu so I clicked on that and the game crashed. oh.

So I tried again - by REMOVING ALL previous Mods and Maps in those folders for Vanilla Civ 5, leaving just the G&K mods. Opened the game again and it worked. There aren't too many mods that are available yet, but I tested the Europe map in 'Yet (not) Another Earth Maps Pack (v.15)' with 'End In Medieval Era (G&K) (v 1)' And got quite into the game as Austria without any problems despite Bismarck being a bully.

So the good news is that mods can still be played on a mac. Now if these were made available on Civfanatics then in theory anyone with a mac will be able to play the Mods without having to do that whole bootcamp process. After all not everyone has bootcamp running on their Mac. Whether the mod's authors will post them on here I don't know.

I could post the few mods I got myself but being merely a Chieftain round here I don't know if I am allowed to post other people's Mods or where I would post them to. What are the rules on that one?

Anyway, someone else might find a cleaner less annoying way to access G&K mods on the Mac but the above worked for me.
 
Lord Smiley said:
Okay after some playing about I managed to get some mods working on my Mac with the Gods and Kings Expansion. However it's not a straight forward process as you need access to a PC version of the game and expansion. So through bootcamp I logged into Steam Workshop, subscribed to a few of the Mods that are available for Gods and Kings, loaded the game and 'Got the mods'. Quit out the game. Then located the files in the Mods folder in My Documents/My Games. Copied them onto a USB key and then shut the computer down. Rebooting the computer back into OS X and then copied the files into Aspyr folder in user/Documents/Aspyr/civilization V/MODS as well as copying the maps in to user/Documents/Aspyr/civilization V/Maps. (not sure if this is necessary but did it to be sure).

Then located the MainMenu.lua which is now in it's new place as detailed in Alan H's post 24 (of this thread) and edited that infamous line. Fired up the game, the Mods option is in the menu so I clicked on that and the game crashed. oh.

So I tried again - by REMOVING ALL previous Mods and Maps in those folders for Vanilla Civ 5, leaving just the G&K mods. Opened the game again and it worked. There aren't too many mods that are available yet, but I tested the Europe map in 'Yet (not) Another Earth Maps Pack (v.15)' with 'End In Medieval Era (G&K) (v 1)' And got quite into the game as Austria without any problems despite Bismarck being a bully.

So the good news is that mods can still be played on a mac. Now if these were made available on Civfanatics then in theory anyone with a mac will be able to play the Mods without having to do that whole bootcamp process. After all not everyone has bootcamp running on their Mac. Whether the mod's authors will post them on here I don't know.

I could post the few mods I got myself but being merely a Chieftain round here I don't know if I am allowed to post other people's Mods or where I would post them to. What are the rules on that one?

Anyway, someone else might find a cleaner less annoying way to access G&K mods on the Mac but the above worked for me.
Click to expand...


This sounds tedious, especially since I am a mac noob. There has got to be a better way of doing this. The old way is so easy, why the hell does someone have to "fix" something that was not broken in the first place.....so anoying.
 
Please do NOT post other people's mods here.

1. Other people's mods are their property, not yours.

2. Other people's mods may have bugs or get updated. If you post another copy that they do not maintain, then it will get out of date or worse.

3. This is not the place to post large files. There is a place to upload mods, and this is not it.
 
Yeah I figured posting/uploading other people's mods wouldn't be cool.

And yes it is tedious. Very tedious. If the mods are on Steam anyhow I can't see why they can't be accessed by Mac users who are on Steam. I appreciate Aspyr may not have the resources to support mods but I always thought it was done at the user's own risk and if the mod doesn't work then it's not really Aspyr's responsibility.
 
Lord Smiley said:
Yeah I figured posting/uploading other people's mods wouldn't be cool.

And yes it is tedious. Very tedious. If the mods are on Steam anyhow I can't see why they can't be accessed by Mac users who are on Steam. I appreciate Aspyr may not have the resources to support mods but I always thought it was done at the user's own risk and if the mod doesn't work then it's not really Aspyr's responsibility.
Click to expand...

My only comment on your method, Lord Smiley, is that if I have to boot into Windows to get the mod off Steam Workshop, I might as well just play Civ there. And that's basically what I've decided to do. To me, having to boot into Windows to play popular mods on my Mac Civ just goes against the reasons to even have a Mac-native version.

I won't derail further, as I already put my other comments on this issue in another thread.
 
Mavfin said:
My only comment on your method, Lord Smiley, is that if I have to boot into Windows to get the mod off Steam Workshop, I might as well just play Civ there. And that's basically what I've decided to do. To me, having to boot into Windows to play popular mods on my Mac Civ just goes against the reasons to even have a Mac-native version.

I won't derail further, as I already put my other comments on this issue in another thread.
Click to expand...

That would be the logical non crazy choice, but for me Civ V runs better on Os X. On bootcamp it's a bit flakey and constantly crashes. So I have to dance all round the houses to play mods.
 
Lord Smiley said:
That would be the logical non crazy choice, but for me Civ V runs better on Os X. On bootcamp it's a bit flakey and constantly crashes. So I have to dance all round the houses to play mods.
Click to expand...

Interesting. My Win 7 and my OS X are equally rock solid, and my main reason for wanting a Mac version of games I play is so I don't have to boot over to Windows. :D
 
I have the same problem as the OP.

While I can enable and use mods on Civ V Mac (including Civ V G&K Mac), I need to download and extract them to a subfolder in ~/Documents/Aspyr/Sid Meier's Civilization 5/MODS manually.

This is no big deal (though it does involve some searching and applying a couple of tricks), but I can not manually download mods form the Steam workshop -- I can subscribe just fine, it's just that Civilization V Mac does not seem to contain the code that automatically downloads the subscribed mods.

I usually search for the mods, and download them from elsewhere, eg. the download section in civfanatics, but it seems that nowadays some mod authors no longer upload their mods there.

I have begun to kindly ask those mod authors to make their mods available here as well (e.g. http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=11681013&postcount=30), but this is tedious at best and adds to the workload of mod authors.

If there would be a way of manually downloading mods from the Steam workshop, that would be so much better. Surely there is a way - if the game can download the mod, so can I. However, I don't know the URL.

Did someone succeed in manually downloading mods from Steam? If so, I'm eagerly awaiting your story....
 
I've looked at the Workshop download process in Windows to see if it's possible to emulate it manually or using a Mac app.

The good news is that, if you know the URL that Windows uses then you can download the file using any browser, and expand it using Ez7z. The bad news is that I have not found a way to work out the download URL, other than by monitoring the Windows packets. I suspect it may be encrypted in some way, known only to the Civ5 software.
 
Thanks Alan! That's a mixed blessing indeed. One could argue that download and installation of random mods leads to a more, let we say, interesting gameplay. Not sure if that's the challenge I'm after though :)

I realised that not only Mac players are affected by this limitation, but also Windows players who acquired Civ by another retailer than Steam (like Amazon or the 2K int'l store -- Steam is just one of about twenty retailers listed at http://www.civilization5.com/buy/). Hopefully that argument convinces mod authors to make their mods available on civfantics.com or elsewhere.
 
I doubt if you could successfully create a valid random download URL. The file names are 40 alpha-numeric characters.

All retailers except the Apple App Store send you a copy that has to be registered with Steam before you can play it. So all Windows copies should have access to the Workshop.

Aspyr appear to have a policy of not supporting the use of mods in the Civ titles that they port to the Mac. Mac players have no Mods menu out of the box, and we have no map or mod editing tools. Lack of support for the Workshop is simply an extension of this policy, and only applies to Mac players.
 
Hmm, there goes my argument.

Could you provide me with a few example URLs. Are those 40-characters the UUID of a mod, which is included in their modinfo file? (Does the URL also contain a version number? It seems that the UUID does not change between versions of a mod). I can't find the UUID in the the HTML source code of the workshop pages, but at least that would be something to start with.
 
The 40 character file name doesn't seem to correlate to any information in the mod info file. Even if it did, I don't see how it would help. To get the mod info file you need the URL. It doesn't look like an MD5 of anything either, as those are 32 characters.
 
I've asked for a download button at https://support.steampowered.com/. Given the size of Valve, I suspect they only implement requests like this if they get enough requests, so I encourage everyone interested to make such a request too.

I'm still interested in an example URL, who knows I can spot some pattern.

The other option is to dig further into the communication between the game and steam servers. After all, the game must somehow found out about these URLs, so perhaps there is an easy way to find the URLs ourselves; either in communication with the Steam servers or in some cache file on disk.
 
How (im)practical would it be to subscribe while on Bootcamp or some other windows device, copy the saved Mod data (maybe onto a USB stick) and paste it into the mod folder on a Mac?

And yes, I realise this won't work at all for anyone who ONLY has a Mac.
 
@Ford. Rebooting a computer just to download a file is probably too much effort for me. I run some Windows apps using CrossOver, which work well for now-graphically intensive apps. I wanted to check out the World Editor last week and found myself installing Win 7 Professional in a full-fledged VM under VirtualBox. While this started the Civ V API properly, it could not boot Civ V itself. It crashed right after selecting DirectX 9/10 or DirectX 11. So I gave up. Too crashy and too much effort to play a game or download a file. :(
 
You can Subscribe to a mod by using any browser - Windows or Mac - to log in to Steam and browse the Workshop. However, I have not found a way to download the mod except by running the Windows version of Civ5.

@Ford: I can run Windows Civ5 in a Parallels WinXP virtual machine, and I can download mods from Workshop. Once the mod is downloaded into MyGames\...\Mods\ I can copy it across to the Mac version and run it there.

@macfreek:
Three weeks ago, I Subscribed to the InfoAddict mod on Steam Workshop, and the Windows version of Civ5 downloaded the mod from a URL.

During that process, I used Wireshark to monitor the IP packets passing between the Parallels VM and my router, which showed the URL it used. The URL was in the format: http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/[18-digit-number]/[40-character-file-name]/. Windows sent a simple HTTP GET request with no parameters and no cookies.

I was able to use the URL to download the mod again in Safari. This downloaded a 7z format file, which Ez7z expanded into the InfoAddict mod. There's no point in giving you that URL, as it fails now, so I assume it is time limited. As well as the mod reference, it probably encodes a session ID that expires.

If you do not want to invest in Parallels (or VMWare Fusion), you may like to investigate the Wineskin stuff that z0wb13 has described here for Civ4. Civ4 is also pretty graphics intensive, and Wineskin appears to do a reasonable job of running it on my old Mac. Of course, it may be no better than Crossover, since they both use the WINE technology. But I have never had much luck with Crossover, whereas the Wineskin procedure worked for me. Maybe it can be persuaded to run Civ5.
 
Thanks. Your comment that the URL is time-based is unfortunate. I was planning to do roughly the same with tcpdump/wireshark. Thanks for sharing, so I no longer have to.

I owned Parallels, but trashed it in favour of CrossOver for most cases and VirtualBox. I actually got Civ V running over CrossOver. At least, I remember seeing a download at some point. The game itself was to unstable to play. I was trying the World Editor at the time and that didn't work so I trashed that CrossOver bottle (=VM). I'll try again. Off-topic: if you got Civ V running on XP under Fusion, maybe I can try XP too under VirtualBox. Or I'll just use my wife's Windows laptop (at the expense of Lots of Laughter since I always brag that my Mac is better. Sigh. Bye bye, pride)

All: I still suggest all to leave a suggestion to Steam support to make a download link available. Technically, that should be possible and removes the need to run Win-based Civ. https://support.steampowered.com/.
 
I use Parallels, not VMWare. I did have a copy of VMWare, but trashed it long ago in favour of Parallels. The most recent comparison reviews I have seen give Parallels the high marks for graphics performance.

By all means try to lobby Steam to support manual downloads. While it may be easy technically, it may not work commercially. I am guessing they probably use a common set of APis to cover in-app purchases as well as free mods. That's the only reason I can think of for encrypting stuff - if that's what they are doing.
 
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