Ffp mac os

[glacialheart]

I have Civ IV for MAC OS. I've been unable to install the mod. I've searched the forums here and haven't found a Mac downloadable for this mod. Is there one? And how do I install it?

If this has been answered already I apologize.

 

[God-Emperor]

FFP does not work on Macs because it requires a custom DLL. There is no equivalent for the Mac version of Civ4 - all the stuff that is in the DLL on Windows is compiled directly into the main program executable on Macs.

In theory my "Finaler Frontier" mod should be able to work on a Mac. A conversion was tried a while back, but the person doing it was not an expert on this sort of thing so it was not completed. (If you are interested: The mod is here. The thread in the Mac forum is here.)

 

[glacialheart]

Downloaded Finaler Frontier. Moved the files into the Mod directory. Started up Civ BtS loaded the mod. When it restarted, loading the mod. It freezes on "[Finaler Frontier] Init XML (uncached)".

Running game build 317 and then I updated to 319. The loader freezes at the same place with both builds.

 

[God-Emperor]

Yes, it evidently needs a little bit of converting. The XML parser used for the Mac version is not as good, so the XML files need to be adjusted (standard practice for getting mods to work on a Mac). There might also be a few Python issues since the Mac version of BtS uses a slightly older version of Python.

What FerF needs the most to get it working on the Mac is someone with experience doing mods on a Mac to give it the necessary adjustments. It does include a rather detailed change log in the changes.txt file.

For the Mac, the extra content would be nice but the main benefit is probably getting all the bugfixes for FF that it has (everything up to its release date from the official FF thread should be in there plus a couple more, as I recall).

 

[glacialheart]

Darn, so there's not a current working Mac version?

I know some python, but I'm not sure I'm up to this challenge. What version of python does the Mac version use? What are some of the differences between the python versions? I've taken a look at the changes.txt file.

What type of cleanup needs to be done to XML files?

 

[God-Emperor]

Nope, no working Mac version so far.

If you want to proceed with this, you should check the "Civ4 - Macintosh" forum for info on modding for the Mac. There is a sticky thread called "Mac Modding Index" that has some info. For the XML you need to "zap Gremlins" with some software that you can get from a link in that thread. I don't have a Mac so I can't really be very much help, other than giving some suggestions about where to look when problems show up. Check the thread I posted the link to and you can see that s.bernbaum got to a semi-working state just from doing that to the XML files and setting the mod to not load custom assets (since he had BUG installed in Custom Assets, which interferes with the mod).

 

[TC01]

You could try installing Wine on OSX. I've only ever used Wine on Linux, and I admittely haven't played Civ 4 using it, but that might possibly work.

Aside from that and Finaler Frontier, you really don't have any options. Final Frontier Plus is far too wound up with a custom DLL to try and make any sort of OSX version- nearly everything in FF+ has something to do with the custom DLL. That's where better modding support and speed improvements come from. I can't do anything about that.

I really don't understand why the people who made Civ 4 for OSX didn't use a Unix/Linux/OSX shared library file format instead of not using a shared library at all. That way, we could at least port over the C++ code into something slightly different. But no, they just threw everything into the executable.