The Ancient Mediterranean Mod - Discussion

[Dionysius]

<purged.>

 

[AlanH]

Thamis has now produced a Mac-friendly version of The Ancient Mediterranean mod. It will not include the AI mods that have been added in the CvGameCore.dll, but the maps, units, civilizations and scenarios should all work.

The thread is here, including some brief instructions I've posted on installing and running the mod on a Mac.

 

[AlexandrNyetski]

Well, I'll try the ancient med mod -

 

[AlexandrNyetski]

Ancient Med mod is quite playable, though some holes exist, in particular wrt civilopedia entries.

 

[BiZuRnZ]

i did everything that you have said alan, but i dont know, is it supposed to be a mod for different civs because when i play the scenario there is no Ancient Med. scenario. they are the same scenarios as always, but the civs are different, for instance i have a persian civ. please tell me what i should be looking for.

 

[AlanH]

Hi, welcome

Note that the current Mac version of TAM is 1.96, not 1.59.1 as was the case last time I looked at this.

The first thing to look for is the change in the graphics on the main menu screen to indicate that the mod is loaded. If that's the case, then when you select Load a Scenario you should have a list of scenarios beginning with 'TAM', eg TAM Mediteranean Normal v1.96. Select one of those, then click OK. The next screeen should list a lot of new Civs (new to Civ4, that is), including Gallic, Dacian, Iberian, Illyrian, Kolchean, Lydian .....

If you are not seeing these then you've missed something when following my installation instructions.

 

[BiZuRnZ]

Hi, welcome

Note that the current Mac version of TAM is 1.96, not 1.59.1 as was the case last time I looked at this.

The first thing to look for is the change in the graphics on the main menu screen to indicate that the mod is loaded. If that's the case, then when you select Load a Scenario you should have a list of scenarios beginning with 'TAM', eg TAM Mediteranean Normal v1.96. Select one of those, then click OK. The next screeen should list a lot of new Civs (new to Civ4, that is), including Gallic, Dacian, Iberian, Illyrian, Kolchean, Lydian .....

If you are not seeing these then you've missed something when following my installation instructions.

i have done everything that you have told me to in that exact order and it says ancient mediterranean mod in the upper right hand corner in the main menu, but when i go to play a scenario, there is no TAM scenarios. the AoD1 works fine, but this one hasnt. please help. thanks in advance.

 

[dojoboy]

i have done everything that you have told me to in that exact order and it says ancient mediterranean mod in the upper right hand corner in the main menu, but when i go to play a scenario, there is no TAM scenarios. the AoD1 works fine, but this one hasnt. please help. thanks in advance.

Did you install the mod folders into home directory -> Civilization 4 -> Mods and Public Maps folders? Or, did you place them in the same titled folders but through Applications -> Civilization 4 -> etc.

I placed them thorugh my home directory, not the applications folder. Runs well.

 

[AlanH]

Either location will work, I think.

If you are not even seeing the scenarios then you can't possibly have the world builder saves in the right place.

The TAM scenarios are defined by the seven Civ4WorldBuilderSave files. They have to go in the PublicMaps folder, not inside their own folder, and not in the Mods folder. They should be in the PublicMaps folder that's in the same root folder as the Mods folder where you have placed the rest of the TAM mod.

[PS] I note that you only mention the upper right corner of the main menu screen. TAM's presence should be a little more substantial than that:

[IMG=CENTER]http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/25796/TAMSplash.jpg[/IMG]

 

[AlexandrNyetski]

As far as I can tell, this is the only Mac-friendly mod of any major scope that we've got. I like it, but after a number of runs, it seems clear that the Mac community needs more mods and scenarios ...

Why it is that the platform compabitility should be impacted by either platform specific file system conventions pertaining to character case or the lack of a ported API for game creators, by now, is beyond me - in the one case, one normally designs away case senstivity concerns before one creates software, and in the other case, Aspyr could have produced the API months after the software release, were it a priority.

 

[AlanH]

Text files
The mod problems are nothing to do with case sensitivity. The case sensitivity issue only impacts a few Mac users with case sensitive file systems.

I've done some work on the character set issues in XML files in mods. I'm working towards a simple set of rules for converting mods to work properly, and *possibly* a utility that can apply those rules to any mod you throw at it.

So far, I've discovered the following:

1. Some XML files have a .txt extension, and are ignored by the Mac version, but presumably not by Windows. Change their extension to include them in the loaded file set.

2. Some XML files have no header line, so they have no encoding="" attribute. A Mac defaults to treating them as UTF-8, I think, which will fail if they are actually ISO 8859-1. Windows presumably defaults to some other encoding that is more tolerant - probably ISO 8859-1, or some Windows proprietary "code page". Try adding the following line at the very top of the file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>

3. Some files claim to be UTF-8 in the header, but actually contain ISO 8859-1 characters, or vice versa. This may be as a result of editing files that were originally compliant, on localized systems with different encodings, without due care and attention. You can often get these files to load by changing the encode="xxxx" text at the top of the file from one of these two values to the other.

These problems are mainly due to carelessness on the part of the modders, resulting in some non-compliant XML files. The Mac doesn't forgive the same XML encoding errors that Windows does, but neither OS has any obligation to forgive *any* errrors. XML is a strict specification, and a bad XML file *should* fail on both platforms.

Software Development Kit (SDK)
I assume this is what you refer to as the 'API'?

I wouldn't pretend to know the business decision model in Aspyr and Firaxis wrt the SDK development priority, nor am I trying to defend it. But here are a few simple guesses:

- The SDK issue is non-trivial. There are a lot of problems making a game logic development system that can produce mods that will work cross-platform, even by cross-compiling.

- In order for an SDK to produce mods that will work cross-platform both companies have to be motivated to work together to make it happen.

- An SDK and its resulting mods may well be judged to generate far less return on investment than, say, working on Warlords. How many more copies of Civ4 are going to be sold if it comes with an SDK, or can run mods generated with one.

- If Aspyr just gave us a Mac-only SDK that could make mods that will work on a Mac but that will never play multiplayer games across platform, then it would be much less hassle and a far lower investment in development. I don't know if this has been considered. Maybe the holy grail of cross-platform compatibility is blinding them to a simpler option that would do 80% of what their customers want.

 

[MickyKitsu]

Figured i might as well report a few errors when i ran this today.

There's two XML files that fail to load:
Assets/XML/Text/Hittites.xml
Assets/XML/Text/TAM_Civilopedia_BuildingsProjects.xml

And the other obvious error so far is that if i select the Thrace civilization, the game crashes to the desktop.


Is this mod still being developed?

 

[captainmajestic]

yup, I've got the same errors that MickeyKitsu has.

Also, when I build the Persian hero the game instantly crashes. I'm using 1.97 version, the latest one for the mac. Is there a more stable version or any ideas how to fix these problems??

help much appreciated. From what little I played, the MOD looks the . .. .. .. ..

so help, help, help!

me beg!

please!

 

[AlanH]

The version I have here works fine. I guess it's still the one I tried back in the day. There's no version number that I can find in it, but it's CvGameCoreDLL.dll file modification date is July 19 2006.

 

[captainmajestic]

hmm I'm not sure whether i can find that version. on the The ancient Mediterranean mod website it's the latest (my one). I can't find any links to older versions for MAC. On the download page under MAC.

The version, if this forum is the best idication, is that most are using is 1.95.

at least as far as I can tell and thats probably very little.

 

[AlanH]

OK, I'll try to find time to download it and see what's changed. What's the modified date on the Civilization IV/Mods/The Ancient Mediterranean/Assets/CvGameCoreDLL.dll file in your version?

 

[captainmajestic]

well we have the same version me thinks wed 19 July 2006, and im figuring you may have figured as much. Im not used to a MAC and it's my girlfriends so the OS is in German. navigation is sometimes a little difficult.

do you think that this would affect anything?

anyway thanks for te help.
cheers.

 

[AlanH]

I've downloaded version 1.97 and reproduced the XML file load errors.

Here are those two files, modified so that they load without error on a Mac. They had new Italian text, added into an ISO Latin 1 encoded file, but using Unicode characters. Windows users seem to be able to get away with this sort of thing, but the Mac XML parser complains.

I can confirm the Thrace crash, but I'm afraid I haven't played it to the point of creating a Persian hero. I don't actually play Civ4

The Thrace crash is probably due the lack of any data for Thrace in TAM/Assets/XML/Art/CIV4ArtDefines_Leaderhead.xml. I've included a modified version of that file in the attached package, using Porsena's artwork. Probably not a good choice - Porsena seens to be Etrurian! Couldn't find any images for the named leader of Thrace - Teres. Anyway, you can at least start a game as Thrace now.

I can't track down the problem with Persian heroes. Sorry.

The three files go in the following locations, replacing the existing files of the same name. You might want to rename the originals in case you want to revert. Put .bak on the end of their names for example.

/The Ancient Mediterranean/Assets/XML/Text/Hittites.xml
/The Ancient Mediterranean/Assets/XML/Text/TAM_Civilopedia_BuildingsProjects.xml
/The Ancient Mediterranean/Assets/XML/Art/CIV4ArtDefines_Leaderhead.xml

Let me know how these work out for you guys.

 

[captainmajestic]

thank you very much sir, a scholar and gentlemen you are! I'll start right away!

 

[captainmajestic]

hmm the paths seem to be different- i'm on an Austrian mac with an os all in German. the xml folder in TAM doesn't have a text folder. It has art, buildings civilizations etc. And in the civilization folder there are 3 files, 1 for the leaderheads, another for the infos, and another for the traits. so I'm not sure exactly where to put the hittites file.

infact all the path names are different any clue why this would be so?