Civ IV Ubuntu (font issue)

[PiR]

I've switched from Windows 10 to Ubuntu on and old desktop as the PC does not have the hardware requirements for Windows 11.

Civ IV used to work perfectly with W10.

Steam and other games work with Ubuntu.

But Civ IV has graphical issues, it says the hardware requirements are not met and put the graphics on minimal.

As you can see the text is not beautiful at the moment:

Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS 64 bits
Linux 6.14.0-27-generic
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti
8GB RAM

Any tip?

 

[a pen-dragon]

You are using the steam installation? If so that should handle the game itself running without errors. Steam is using Proton which is based on wine, so the following should be similar.

If not are you using wine directly?

Anyway look at the Wine HQ Civ4 page .

Now the text looks like you are not using the fonts provided with the game. The game font can be found at .../Civ 4 (base game)/Assets/res/Fonts as Sylfaen.ttf .

This font needs to be copied to where your wine (proton) installation stores its fonts. For wine it is (your wineprefix)/drive_c/windows/fonts .

But Civ IV has graphical issues, it says the hardware requirements are not met and put the graphics on minimal.

This is probably just the program not seeing the true capabilities due to some wine thing and should not matter. Set whatever graphical settings you want and restart the game. If this does not help, I am out of my depth. I would suggest you then take a look at your graphics driver, maybe try out open-source and proprietary drivers. For how to do this, look in Linux / Ubuntu specific formus. (Askubuntu or archlinux come to mind)

 

[PiR]

Thanks a lot!

Yes I'm using Steam.
After a few hours playing, I can confirm that I don't have any graphical issues except the font. I can play without any performance issue. It's not the case for all games, but as long as Civ IV is working, this computer is useful

So you're right, it's just the font.
The font file is present here:
/home/username/snap/steam/common/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Sid Meier's Civilization IV Beyond the Sword/Assets/res/Fonts does contain sylfaen.ttf

I'm not familiar with the path for wine/proton so let's find all occurrences of this folder "drive_c"... ^^

./home/username/snap/steam/common/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Proton - Experimental/files/share/default_pfx/drive_c
./home/username/snap/steam/common/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Proton Hotfix/files/share/default_pfx/drive_c
./home/username/snap/steam/common/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/8800/pfx/drive_c
./home/username/snap/steam/common/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/1493710/pfx/drive_c
./home/username/snap/steam/common/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/813780/pfx/drive_c
./home/username/snap/steam/common/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/2180100/pfx/drive_c

Copying the file in the first 2 did not fix the issue but the fonts folders were empty, so that was expected.
Copying the font into the 3rd folder was the solution!

Thanks a lot!!!!
My eyes feel so much better!

 

[a pen-dragon]

This is just me speculating based on the different folders, but...

Proton installs a wine instance for every game. This is beneficial due to making it possible to run each game in an optimal environment.

The number in the paths most likely is some steam game ID, I know for certain that 8800 is BtS, so that is the wine installation responsible for running BtS.

Therefore this is the folder that needs to be modified to impact BtS.

The first two are probably for some proton specific utilities, and the last three are other games.

For future reference the Steam game ID for the different Civ 4 versions are:

• Vanilla: 3900
• Warloards: 3990
• BtS: 8800
• Civ4 Colonization: 16810