List of Mac-compatible MODs

[AlanH]

Does it crash without the mod loaded? Need to narrow it down a bit. There should be a crash log. Check in the Console in Utilities.

 

[Keinpferd]

Hi! I just got my new MBP and downloaded Pie's Ancient Europe. Looks so great! But the game just starts crashing after a while. No excuse or crash log given. I have BTS 3.19. Does anybody else have the same problem? Or even better: a solution?

And oh: I'm running on 2,2 GHz Intel Core i7, 4 Gt 1333 MHz:n DDR3, Intel HD Graphics 3000 384 MB, Mac OS X Lion 10.7.2

If you feel, it's something rather non-Mac-specific, maybe you should take your question in the main PAE thread over here, too (just to increase the number of people that might be able to help).

 

[Garfunkl]

Hi, and thanks for answering. Regular BTS works fine. I also noticed that my MBP gets really hot while playing PAE. I still haven't found what I'm supposed to be looking for, that is crash log. If I locate one, I'll let you know. Thanks! I'll also check the PAE thread.

 

[macthegoalieciv]

How do you run Civlerts on Macintosh? I can't figure out how to do it. Isn't there a line of code that you have to change?

 

[AlanH]

There are probably several lines to change. It assumes you are running on a Windows PC with a Registry.

Why don't you just use BUG or MacBUFFY? Both contain Civ4lerts as well as several other non-game-changing mods to make life easier.

 

[The_J]

I guess it's better to use this thread for general questions than the current sticky....right ?

Does anyone experience differences with loading mods between the latest OS X version and the version before? Because one person reported that my mod doesn't work for him anymore on Lion (no error messages, just aborts), but has worked before...and I'm puzzled why that could be.

 

[AlanH]

I assume the one you are referring to is Mars, Now? It crashes on startup in OS X 10.6.8 for me. That's the previous OS version to the one mentioned by Vortilex, so I don't think it's sensitive to OS version.

The crash is during XML load, and the file being loaded is xml\text\new_civ4gametextinfos_objects.xml. The system crash log says it's trying to decode a multi-byte character. I haven't tried deleting all the text in that file. Has it changed since it was last known to be working?

 

[The_J]

No, nothing changed. That's why I'm puzzled :/.
Normally the file should not contain any illegal characters, because I've let a script run over it to replace them all. Seems I'll have to take a look at it again, in combination with that file :/.

And thank you for your help .

 

[AlanH]

I've run BBEdit's Gremlin catcher over the entire mod. It found a couple of odd characters, but they are not in that file. Normally, odd characters don't crash the Mac version, they just produce error messages.

 

[The_J]

That sounds...bad, I guess .
Nothing worse than an non-diagnosable error :/.

but they are not in that file.

Can you tell me which files they were in?


And thanks again .

 

[AlanH]

BBEdit probably over-reacts. It treats any character with a code above 0x7E as a "Gremlin", so these may not be problems.

CIV4BuildInfos.xml has a reference to a file 'Art/Interface/Buttons/erdwärme.dds'. The ä might cause problems in its own wright, but it's interesting that the file name in that folder is actually 'erdwaerme.dds'.

CIV4CivilizationInfos.xml has several City names with accented characters. BBEdit flagged two: TXT_KEY_CITY_NAME_TEGOCALDERóN and TXT_KEY_CITY_NAME_YAOUNDé. BBEdit didn't complain about other accented characters in the same file.

 

[The_J]

BBEdit probably over-reacts. It treats any character with a code above 0x7E as a "Gremlin", so these may not be problems.

I think I should have gotten rid of anythinf from 0x7F on...obviously I've been wrong :/.

CIV4BuildInfos.xml has a reference to a file 'Art/Interface/Buttons/erdwärme.dds'. The ä might cause problems in its own wright, but it's interesting that the file name in that folder is actually 'erdwaerme.dds'.

mmhh....uh....that means I somewhen renamed it, but most have forgotten to change the reference. That means also, that the "erdwärme.dds" is still somewhere in the .fpk file.
Could that cause a problem (in general, I mean)?

CIV4CivilizationInfos.xml has several City names with accented characters. BBEdit flagged two: TXT_KEY_CITY_NAME_TEGOCALDERóN and TXT_KEY_CITY_NAME_YAOUNDé. BBEdit didn't complain about other accented characters in the same file.

Ah, had not checked that file, only my actual text files, and also there not the identifiers of the text entries...will have to fix that.

Thanks .

 

[AlanH]

I think I should have gotten rid of anythinf from 0x7F on...obviously I've been wrong :/.

Not necessarily. As I said, BBEdit is probably overkill.

The underlying problem is that I really don't know what range of character encodings the in-built XML parser in Civ4/Mac is capable of handling. And the encoding is often not explicitly stated in a lot of the files I see in mods. So the safest option is to take the lowest common denominator approach, and only allow non-control characters below 0x7f.

mmhh....uh....that means I somewhen renamed it, but most have forgotten to change the reference. That means also, that the "erdwärme.dds" is still somewhere in the .fpk file.

Could that cause a problem (in general, I mean)?

Depends on how the ä is encoded in the FPK file, and how the internal .FPK expander in Civ4/Mac deals with such characters. If the .FPK expander is directly ported to Mac, then if it works in Windows it *ought* to work on the Mac.

Ah, had not checked that file, only my actual text files, and also there not the identifiers of the text entries...will have to fix that.

Thanks .

Again - these may not be an issue. See my first comment.

Bottom line is - why did people think this mod used to work, but now it doesn't? Something has changed, and based on my testing it isn't the change from Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) to Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion).

[PS] I didn't apply any patches. I just downloaded from the main link. Should I have applied a patch?

 

[The_J]

Not necessarily. As I said, BBEdit is probably overkill.

The underlying problem is that I really don't know what range of character encodings the in-built XML parser in Civ4/Mac is capable of handling. And the encoding is often not explicitly stated in a lot of the files I see in mods. So the safest option is to take the lowest common denominator approach, and only allow non-control characters below 0x7f.

I thought the characters above 0x7f are exactly the problem (...okay...one of the bigger problems) between the Mac and the Win Civ4 versions...or not?

Bottom line is - why did people think this mod used to work, but now it doesn't? Something has changed, and based on my testing it isn't the change from Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) to Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion).

Vortilex said that it already worked once, but now it doesn't anymore. I thought his mentioning of Lion would have indicated the upgrade, because else...like said...the download didn't change, so I thought it must have been something on his computer .
If it's not, then I'm now totally confused.

[PS] I didn't apply any patches. I just downloaded from the main link. Should I have applied a patch?

The .zip from uploading.com (the one where it's written "Mac compatible" in the thread) has all patches already in it (because it was uploaded later than the 2 others), so no, that's the last state.


And again, like in the previous posts: Thanks .

 

[AlanH]

I thought the characters above 0x7f are exactly the problem (...okay...one of the bigger problems) between the Mac and the Win Civ4 versions...or not?

As I said above, it's more complicated than that. Character encodings are a minefield. An XML file *should* include a header stating explicitly what encoding it uses - typically ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8, but there are many other possibilities. An XML parser *should* be capable of reading that header and treating the contents of the file accordingly. If there is no explicit specification then the parser will assume a default encoding.

In practice, a lot of mods contain files that have no encoding specification header. Even those files that do have a header may then go on to contain characters that do not conform to that encoding. This often happens when a file is adapted by a modder.

I have no idea how the XML in Civ4 is parsed in Mac or Windows. Civ4 may use the parser provided by the operating system, or it may include a parser of its own. The Windows version seems to be far more tolerant of mixed or unspecified encodings than the Mac version, so it seems likely that a different parser is used on the two platforms.

Vortilex said that it already worked once, but now it doesn't anymore. I thought his mentioning of Lion would have indicated the upgrade, because else...like said...the download didn't change, so I thought it must have been something on his computer .
If it's not, then I'm now totally confused.

We need to know what version of your mod he had working. If I read the thread correctly, he downloaded the current version as he had lost the previous copy. So his previous experience may have been with an old version.

 

[The_J]

[XML]

*headache* okay .
Bad that they don't have a documentation for that stuff, would be a lot easier.
Assuming I got rid of all the other characters, then adding the encoding to all the files should probably somehow help here, I guess.
Mmmhh...not nice work, but at least not too much.

We need to know what version of your mod he had working. If I read the thread correctly, he downloaded the current version as he had lost the previous copy. So his previous experience may have been with an old version.

I only really had one version, which I thought was Mac compatible, so that cannot really be .


mmhh...well...some work to do then in the next days . Hopefully it'll be enough .

 

[AlanH]

Did you add global warming at a later date? I assume that was the purpose of the erdwärme.dds file?

 

[The_J]

That's a button for an improvement to "harvest" geothermal heat in the mod.
Why the question?

 

[AlanH]

just trying to work out if/when a change might have occurred that could cause the mod to crash. I thought I read a post about adding global warming in the mod thread.

 

[The_J]

I first hijacked the normal global warming process to do something else, but that were just some XML changes. Later that was implemented via Python, but that should not really cause any errors, I think .