Civ4 and the new MacBook

[shancho]

For those who have Civ IV playing in bootcamp, is there anyway you could take a screen shot of what the graphics look like? I would love to see first hand what it looks like before I make my decision on either the macbook, or the 17 in. iMac with the radeon x1600. I would much prefer a portable however so it would be great if someone could take a quick screen.

Thanks alot!

 

[fbass]

too bad that now i'm in osx and can't get you the screenshot.. i have a new Macbook 2.1, got installed latest patch and warlords on win xp via bootcamp.. and it work flawlessly.. it might get heavier after late 1900s on large/huge map, but it's still really enjoyable and performance are much better than the demo i tried on mac from aspyr.. (never actually purchase mac version after they claimed it unplayable in macbook)

iMac with ATIRadeon would be much better

ah yes, in my macbook the animation details are excellent, e.g. tree animations, birds flying out from the tree when your scout stepped into the tile, your unit mini-animations, combats, zooming out to world view, and much more impressing details

enjoy

 

[vyeh]

There is an application "Grab" in Applications/Utilities that I use for screenshots. First you use the Capture/Timed Screen. This gives you ten seconds to get to the screen you want (if you're using full screen; if you're using a window, use Capture/Window). Then you can crop the resulting image by using Capture/Selection. This produces a TIFF image. To get a JPG image, you open the TIFF image in Preview and then use Save As to save the TIFF image as a JPG image, which you can post on this site.

It took me a bit of research and experimentation to figure this out!

AlanH has a short cut, which avoids opening Grab, but I still think you end up with a TIFF image and have to go through Preview.

AlanH?

 

[AlanH]

The previous poster was actually asking for a screenshot in Bootcamp, so OS X shortcuts and Grab would not help much.

FWIW, I work hard to avoid cluttering my desktop with surplus files. So my preferred short cut doesn't create a file at all until I want it to.

So, with extreme coordination and dexterity, and only when sober, I use Control-Command-Shift-4. This gives you a selection cursor, and puts your chosen area of the screen on your clipboard. You can then paste it straight into an email or another document without ever creating a TIFF file on your desktop.

Or you can "New from Clipboard" in Photoshop Elements or Preview, or maybe any other graphics application of your choice, to create an editable copy of the captured image. Then you can save it in a file format you prefer - jpeg or whatever, at the quality level you need and in a useful location on you hard drive.

 

[dutchking]

Well, as to whether or not a Macbook will run Civ IV, it will, with great speed. But the Graphics look pretty sh#$ty, I own a macbook, the most recent one I believe. And I've seen the Civ IV graphics on an old dell, and they're even worse. So really if you can deal with this: (click for larger view)

Instead of this:

You're in good shape. Most every other game I play runs with great graphics on this laptop though...I mostly play civIV on my iMac...

 

[shancho]

thanks alot for that comparison, and everyone else who commented...Kinda leaning towards the iMac.

 

[dutchking]

thanks alot for that comparison, and everyone else who commented...Kinda leaning towards the iMac.

Anything for a fellow mac user...

 

[sooooo]

For those who have Civ IV playing in bootcamp, is there anyway you could take a screen shot of what the graphics look like? I would love to see first hand what it looks like before I make my decision on either the macbook, or the 17 in. iMac with the radeon x1600. I would much prefer a portable however so it would be great if someone could take a quick screen.

Thanks alot!

My posts in this succession game are all played using bootcamp on the black macbook with an extra gig of RAM. Runs smoothly.

 

[hockeyrox38]

civ iv is an awesome game, (even though i'm still on the demo version) but its just that it's So good that causes it to slow. aspyr or firaxis should come up with a better version that takes up less space, but keep all the features.

 

[vyeh]

Which features? Personally, I don't need the moving smoke or the moving sheep. But I am sure there are gamers who like the contribution to the atmosphere.

Unless you're saying the game was badly programmed, I can't see how you can ask for a version with all of the features and less space. And what slows the game down is the amount of computation that the game requires, especially late in the game, not the disk space.

 

[Mknn]

I am now playing cIV on a MacBook Pro with 4 GB RAM, running XP through BootCamp. I am having issues with sound--for example, when I click on a leader, there is a long pause where their theme music plays for 10 - 20 seconds before the leaderhead itself appears. Or, the sound will go all fuzzy and crinkly after a few hours of play.

I assume this is a drivers issue, as that seems to be what other users who reported the issue found. But none of them were running on a MacBook.

So, the question is: anyone else running into this? And, any advice on how to find a better driver for the video/sound on the MacBook than the one that BootCamp installs?