silhouette with question mark- help!

[laurel miller]

Hi there. I am using a mac book to play this game. It has/meets all the MINIMUM requirments but is not prefered for the video card. At a certain point I reach a person who is a black silhouette with a question mark. Does anyone know what is happeneing/wrong and can you help me fix it, please!?

[AlanH]

Hello, welcome

If it's a MacBook, not a MacBook Pro, then its graphics card isn't up to the minimum requirements, but I doubt if that's causing the problem you describe. That may be due to a missing or corrupt leaderhead file, or a bad XML file. Some questions:

- Do you know who the mystery-man is supposed to be?
- Are you using a mod?
- What version are you playing? Civ4 or Warlords. If Civ4, is it patched to Rev A?
- What language are you playing in - if not English you may be seeing an error due to badly encoded accented characters.
- Have you tried reinstalling Civ4?

[Snaerff]

Hi, I'm using a brand new 20" iMac and I get the same issue. The missing guy is Mehmed II.

I think it's an issue with the port over to Mac. There are various other bugs I've noticed, too.

[AlanH]

Mehmed II is a Warlords leader, so I guess we're talking Warlords? That's only just sneaking across the Atlantic, so I don't have it yet. I'm a little surprised it reached Australia already!

[the Falcon]

Does this help?

[sensible_shoes]

I just kicked Mehmed II off my continent in my current game and had no issues with his picture. This is on a dual G5; perhaps it's only a bug on the Intel Mac side?

[Edit: never mind, after reading the thread linked by the Falcon above, it seems an nVidia graphics card issue--I had an ATI card. The linked thread has the fix for this.]

[SkyknightXi]

Unfortunately, I installed your replacement files in the Leaderheads folder, and I *still* get the "mystery man" graphic for Mehmed. (At least I haven't had to contend with crashes...It's just a visual nuisance, is all) But I'm wondering what it is that sets Mehmed apart from the other characters' leaderhead graphics...

I'll just have to find a way to keep Mehmed out of my games for the non...Fortunately, Churchill is my main choice of character right now.

[Welnic]

Well, if you played as Mehmed then you wouldn't have him coming to talk with you. I just had him in a game for the first time and he worked fine for me. That was on a Macbook Pro, so Intel with ATI graphics.

[AlanH]

If it's an Nvidia issue, I'll be able to confirm it, and the fix, here if I ever get my copy of Warlords. I imagine the problem is a peculiar animation effect in that leaderhead than trips a bug in the Nvidia drivers .. or a bug in the leaderhead file that is ignored by ATI cards.

As I understand it, an early fix was just to rename a copy of Sid's leaderhead file the same as MehMed II's leaderhead file and replace the duff one. Then you'll see Sid as the Ottoman leader instead of a question mark. However, if it isn't crashing, I don't really see the problem, as long as a patch arrives eventually to fix it.

[Welnic]

On my iMac with an nVidia card I just get the question mark. I tried the fix at the link that the Falcon posted, but it didn't help. In the changes for 2.08 they mention fixing the non shader version of Mehmed II, so it should be fixed when we get that patch. In the linked thread they were trying to fix it because the game would crash, so I think that I can just live with the question mark instead of a head until it's fixed.

[Premier]

Same here - playing on a Mac Pro with the nVidea GForce 7300 and Mehmed II does not appear. The fix linked above does not work, but maybe I'm doing something wrong.

The downloaded Mehmed Leaderhead files go in the Applications Warlords folder, not the user-level Warlords folder, right?

[AlanH]

Originally Posted by Premier

Same here - playing on a Mac Pro with the nVidea GForce 7300 and Mehmed II does not appear. The fix linked above does not work, but maybe I'm doing something wrong.

The downloaded Mehmed Leaderhead files go in the Applications Warlords folder, not the user-level Warlords folder, right?

Welcome

That's correct. The entire folder should replace the one of the same name in:
/Applications/ or /Games/ or wherever you have it ..../Warlords/Assets/Art/Leaderheads/

I expect my Warlords to arrive in the next 24 hours, if the Christmas post doesn't swallow it. I'll let you know how I get on - I have the same system spec.

[Premier]

Greetings and Happy New Year, Fanatics!

Has anyone managed to fix the missing Mehmed leaderhead? I gave a couple tries, but I think last news was the problem is video card-specific.

Alan H., did you ever get the chance to look at this?

Many thanks,
-P

[AlanH]

Sorry, no. I'll give it a try .... watch this space.

[AlanH]

I've tried various options and can't get it to work properly. The only workround I found was to edit the /Applications/Civilization IV/Warlords/Assets/XML/Art/CIV4ArtDefines_Leaderhead.xml file. I copied the details from another leaderhead record to replace the section:

		<LeaderheadArtInfo>
			<Type>ART_DEF_LEADER_MEHMED</Type>
			<Button>,Art/interface/LeaderHeads/Btn_LH_America_Washington.dds,Art/Interface/Buttons/Warlords_Atlas_2.dds,2,8</Button>
			<NIF>art/LeaderHeads/MehmedII/mehmed.nif</NIF>
			<KFM>art/LeaderHeads/MehmedII/mehmed.kfm</KFM>
			<NoShaderNIF>art/LeaderHeads/MehmedII/mehmed_noshader.nif</NoShaderNIF>
			<BackgroundKFM>art/LeaderHeads/MehmedII/MehmedII_BG.kfm</BackgroundKFM>
		</LeaderheadArtInfo>

That put another leader's image in place of the correct one.

[SkyknightXi]

{sigh} We'll just need to bring this up with Aspyr and/or Firaxis themselves, then...

[AlanH]

Aspyr are your contact point. Firaxis have fixed it for PC users as far as they are concerned, so I recommend you raise a ticket on Aspyr's support site. Make sure they are aware that it's the GeForce cards that are affected. Remind them that these cards *are* in the list of supported cards for Warlords, as they are usually quick to point out that they don't appear in the vanilla list (they didn't exist at the time Civ4 was first released).

[Premier]

Thanks, Alan! I appreciate you looking into this and also the tips on opening a ticket with Aspyr.