Mods built for Macs

[AlanH]

I'm not even attempting to keep up with the mods you guys are adapting and the external units and other art you are importing. But please make sure that anything you use or adapt is acknowledged as the work of the original creator; and that you obtain the approval of the original creator before you use it.

I really don't want to find myself trying to defend Mac users from the wrath of copyright-offended developers, and you cannot rely on me to do so if you ever screw up on this.

Also, please think carefully before you decide to publicise your mods in the Mac forum. Mods *should* be cross-platform compatible. If you fail to make them so then you are descending to the same level as the people we criticise for making Mac-incompatible mods. If you succeed, then surely you want the widest audience for your work - and that ain't here!

 

[Xyth]

Sounds like there have been issues? I've not heard anything directly but if it's in regards to one of my projects please let me know and I'll address it straight away.

I intend to make History Rewritten compatible with Windows as soon as it's stable/complete enough to release to wider public. It may already be compatible but at this stage I have no way of knowing for sure as I don't have access to Windows BTS in any form to test it. There are most probably text encoding errors though. Until such a time that I can guarantee cross-platform compatibility I'd prefer to keep it here on the Mac forums only (I don't even have it listed in the download database) and labelled as a beta. This way Mac users can try/test it and PC users hopefully won't find it until it's properly ready for them too. I hope this is okay.

I've a giant list of credits in my thread (which will be added to the download next version too) though undoubtably I've inadvertently missed some people. Mac Bat and VD are labelled as conversions and credit the original authors/teams.

 

[AlanH]

I don't think there are any serious issues yet, though some comments about Pye's mod alerted me to the possibility.

I simply wanted to:

(a) summarise my position - I am not, and don't intend to be, a copyright policeman.

Note that crediting creators may not satisfy the requirement that you should always obtain permission to use their work - unless it is explicitly given in their own posts.

(b) emphasise that I don't really see why this forum is becoming a splinter from the main creation and customization forum.

Sure, building mods on a Mac, hiding them here and not exposing them to Windows users may give you a limited sandbox to play in. But you could do that in the main C&C forum simply by saying you have not tested in Windows and don't intend to support WIndows usage. If people give you feedback about compatibility issues, you can then either wait until you feel you are ready to deal with them, or take advantage of them early to learn what you need to do to ensure compatibility in your future work.

 

[Keinpferd]

The essence of the mac user experience with Civ IV has been that you can't play any mods. For a long time, the list of playable BTS-mods on the mac consisted of two, then three items. If, eventually, this is changing, it should surprise no one that this change is being discussed here. I have played Xyth's BAT conversion and thought it to be some sort of relief. The last thing that would occure to me would be objecting to him he hasn't made it windows-compatible yet! Let alone suggesting, there might be "the possibility" of copyright infringements with regard to Pie's mod. Haven't they both proven enough originality of their own to trust that they credit their original sources properly?

 

[AlanH]

Please read my words a little more carefully.

My primary concern is that I don't consider that this is a mod development forum. I didn't tell Xyth *when* he should make his mod Windows compatible, only that it seemed to me to be counter-productive to make mods that would never be cross platform.

"I don't think there are any serious issues yet". Does that suggest that I thought there had been any copyright infringements?

 

[Keinpferd]

No you didn't think that, though it alerted you to the possibility.

 

[AlanH]

Indeed, it was just a wake-up call. I wanted to lay down some ground rules before that possibility turned into reality. This is a separate thread, unconnected with any existing activity.

We have no idea whether all the potential Mac mod makers who arrive here in future will know the basics of checking and acknowledging their sources as well as the existing modders do. I'm just trying to help them avoid any unpleasantness.

 

[Xyth]

(b) emphasise that I don't really see why this forum is becoming a splinter from the main creation and customization forum.

Sure, building mods on a Mac, hiding them here and not exposing them to Windows users may give you a limited sandbox to play in. But you could do that in the main C&C forum simply by saying you have not tested in Windows and don't intend to support WIndows usage. If people give you feedback about compatibility issues, you can then either wait until you feel you are ready to deal with them, or take advantage of them early to learn what you need to do to ensure compatibility in your future work.

History Rewritten started out as my personal, ever-evolving setup for playing. I originally had no intention of releasing it at all until I hit a brickwall with fixing VD and some readers of this forum encouraged me to put it out. We Mac users have been mod-starved for so long now and I was happy to share what I've done for others. Unfortunately this meant that I'd paid no attention whatsoever to Windows or non-English language support when first putting it together.

Also, History Rewritten is pretty small and unoriginal compared to the many Windows mods out there so there was also the pride factor of wanting to have something semi-decent before presenting it to the C&C forums - but at the same time not wanting interested Mac users to have to wait even longer for something that was already pretty stable and feature packed when compared to existing Mac compatible mods.

I see your point that mods tucked away here could bring plagarism issues and agree that is indeed a potential problem, particularly for you as moderator which is unfair. I'm nearly finished 0.2 but I'll make the major goal of 0.3 having it Windows compatible and polished enough to release on the C&C forums.

Having said that though, mods are a very popular aspect of Civ and one in which we Mac users have quite different circumstances from our Windows brethren. I think that having crossover from the C&C forum here helps to make the Mac community stronger - especially now that Windows users and modders are turning their attention and effort to Civ5. We Mac users will undoubtably have to wait a lot longer before we see our version of it

 

[Xyth]

Indeed, it was just a wake-up call. I wanted to lay down some ground rules before that possibility turned into reality. This is a separate thread, unconnected with any existing activity.

We have no idea whether all the potential Mac mod makers who arrive here in future will know the basics of checking and acknowledging their sources as well as the existing modders do. I'm just trying to help them avoid any unpleasantness.

Maybe a sticky? I'd be happy to write something when I get home tonight.

 

[AlanH]

Thanks for understanding. It would be a great idea to produce an informed sticky on the subject, it you are prepared to do it. Far better than relying on my uneducated and clearly ambiguous ramblings.

 

[Xyth]

Thanks for understanding. It would be a great idea to produce an informed sticky on the subject, it you are prepared to do it. Far better than relying on my uneducated and clearly ambiguous ramblings.

Today has turned out busier than expected for me but I'll get something together by the end of the week.

I have a query about making xml files compatible on both systems, I know what to do for Mac compatibility but am much less sure on Windows compatibility. I know you helped EmperorFool get BUG working on both systems so hopefully you know:

Is the UTF-8 encoding compatible with the xml parser on both versions of BTS, and if so are any additional changes required? I notice that the default BTS files all use ISO-8859-1 with code for extended characters (&# 228; and such) but parts of BUG use UTF-8 instead.

Also do you know what the difference between UTF-8 and UTF-8 (no BOM) is?

 

[AlanH]

(Un)Fortunately, there were no significant issues with the XML files in BUG. As far as I recall, the only problem I had was that the Mac choked on a very large Civilopedia XML file, and I had to split it up into three separate files.

The only experience I have had with XML files going the other way (Mac to PC) was when we were looking at Flintlock's mod. He can probably advise better than me, but I think most of his cross-platform problems were to do with XML Schema files. These are template definitions that can be used to specify the structure of an XML data file. They specify what element sequences must be included in the data file, in what order, and much more. The Mac XML parser in Civ4 seems to ignore the schema files that are included with the Windows XML, so it was possible for Flintlock to edit an XML data file without worrying about whether his changes conforming to the Schema specification. The Mac version would not complain, but the same XML file would fail to load on Windows.

However, even though the Mac version may load the mod OK, it may not work as expected, as the data does not match what the software wants. So this is not really a case where you can assume the Mac is more tolerant than Windows. The error will probably just show up at runtime instead of at load time. You should still try to keep the XML data format in step with the schema.

I'm not clear on why the Mac version doesn't check against schemas. The OS X APIs certainly allow you to program to validate incoming XML in this way. Maybe those APIs were not available when Civ4 was first ported, or it was ported using the Carbon toolchain and didn't have access to all the Cocoa goodness.

I think character encoding issues are mainly one-way. Windows seems to be more tolerant of illegal character codes than the Mac. And it allows Windows-specific "code pages", which have no direct equivalent in the Mac world. The safest bet is to use ISO-8859-1 with code for extended characters, as that seems to work pretty universally. I really haven't got to the bottom of the UTF-8 support in the two platforms - it *ought* to be the best way to do it, but I've never fully explored it. It you want me to test files with UTF-8 encoding then let me know. I run both suits of Civ4 software, using Parallels/WinXP for the dark side.

UTF8 with BOM means the file must start with a BOM (Byte Order Marker) byte sequence that tells the parser whether the encoding is big-endian or little-endian. I think UTF8 (No BOM) should be fine.

 

[Xyth]

Thanks for this info.

Sounds like it would be best for me to go with ISO-8859-1. Given I don't have support for languages other than English I'm not using all that many extended characters anyway.

I'm pretty sure I've not strayed at all from the way the schema lists things so hopefully that won't be an issue at all. However, I've not included any schema files in the mod at all so I might ask over in the C&C forums if they strictly need to be there or if it's only necessary in the presence of a custom DLL.

I think the schema are ignored because the DLL is ignored, being all built into the executable on Mac. My theory is that Aspyr did this to make it easier/lazier to support both PPC and Intel. It makes me optimistic that by the time Civ5 arrives (late no doubt) on the Mac it could be a feature-complete port with support for custom DLL (assuming they're still used). All Macs can be expected to be Intel based these days. DirectX 11 conversion is going to suck though.

Regardless, I hope someone else other than Aspyr gets the job this time around. Making us wait so ridiculously long for BTS was inexcusable.

 

[AlanH]

If you are going to create your own new XML file format, that would require you to provide code to parse it. As you say, that might be a custom DLL, but you *could* do it in Python. If you do so, then there's no requirement to provide a schema for it. The schema is a validation tool that protects you from building a well-formed XML file that doesn't match what your code is expecting.

If you are modding an existing file for use in your mod, then it may well contain a reference to an existing Firaxis schema. You should conform to that schema in any case for the reasons I gave above, and if you do then there's no harm in leaving the reference in place. You will not need to supply the schema yourself, as it should already exist in the standard Assets.

 

[Flintlock1415]

Thanks for posting this Alan. I've never really got why mods are being hosted here rather than at the c&c forum. I know I tried to expand the base for my mod as much as possible, but I suppose Xyth has more reason to only support Mac than me purely based on competition.

Anyway, I think Alan hit the nail on the head as far as the schema goes with the Mac version; my errors were just the result of lazy copy/pasting.

Also I agree with watching the credits; personally I don't care about copyright issues as far modding is concerned, but I still love to see my name in the credits!

I can't wait to try some of the new mods around here when I find the time this summer!