Chrischn89
Chieftain
- Joined
- Jul 21, 2025
- Messages
- 7
Hi there,
first of all HAPPY 20TH BIRTHDAY to Civilization IV and HAPPY 25TH BIRTHDAY to CivFanatics
It's crazy how fast the years have passed..!
But you know what else is crazy? How many people still enjoy Civilization IV after two decades! It's constantly mentioned whenever people talk about the Civilization series and a lot of people have said, that they'd wished for a remaster.
For me personally, Civ IV is still the best Civilization game to date. It's just the perfect mix of strategy and roleplay and just like many of you I've dreamt of Civ IV running on a modern engine to fix the long loading and turn times and the constant CTDs when playing with large mods. In fact it is those exact mods that in my opinion make Civilization IV the 'superior' game to the rest of the series, as I feel like the biggest super mods were made for Civ IV because it was the 'easiest' to mod and by god, are there some amazing mods out there! (shoutout to Rise of Mankind: A New Dawn 2!)
If you've been active in these parts of the forums for a while you may have noticed @Blake00's thread, where a discussion about a 64-bit Civ4 with multithreading started that in turn, influenced the development and now the release of @snowern's Mini-Engine project, where he's built a, well, 'mini-engine' that uses a recompiled CvGameCoreDLL that supports 64-bit, which he has been working for quite some time. There are probably even way more threads about this topic spanning back years...
So, what is this thread all about then?
Well, as we all know there never was an official plan for a remaster of Civilization IV by Firaxis and even today, on the 20th anniversary, this doesn't seem to have changed. So, inspired by all the bright minds that converged in those aforementioned threads and the lack of an official effort to do something about the mentioned issues for two decades, I decided to start things off by working on a prototype of what a modern implementation could look like.
I present to you:
LINK: Project Tessera - GitHub
Screenshots:
Now I won't pretend that this is an acutal fully-fledged game or anything of the sort at this point, but it is an attempt to get the ball rolling on the development of an actual 64-bit capable implementation of an 'engine' that can load and play mods of the original game.
I've written quite a bit about this in the GitHub Readme, so check this out if you're interested!
To summarize a few things:
What's next?
Well, this is just the start. It's going to take quite a long time to finish this, especially at the rate it's going (I'm working alone) and even more so, as I'm possibly not even qualified enough to start such a big undertaking but that's why I'm open to any sort of help! If you're an experienced game or software developer who wants to take a leading role in this, I'm all for it! If you're just a hobby programmer like I am, why not try to increase those skills while working on something that's fun, instead of getting stuck in tutorial hell? If someone wants to just clone the repo and do their own thing with it, feel free (as long as, if it's released, it is under GPL-3.0+ aswell of course!)
My goal up until now was to get .nif files loaded in a 3D world, to prove that it's possible and I managed to do that, despite my last coding class being 12+ years ago, so I'm sure just about anyone can meaningfully contribute with enough determination!
So with all that being said, let me know what you guys think!
first of all HAPPY 20TH BIRTHDAY to Civilization IV and HAPPY 25TH BIRTHDAY to CivFanatics
It's crazy how fast the years have passed..!But you know what else is crazy? How many people still enjoy Civilization IV after two decades! It's constantly mentioned whenever people talk about the Civilization series and a lot of people have said, that they'd wished for a remaster.
For me personally, Civ IV is still the best Civilization game to date. It's just the perfect mix of strategy and roleplay and just like many of you I've dreamt of Civ IV running on a modern engine to fix the long loading and turn times and the constant CTDs when playing with large mods. In fact it is those exact mods that in my opinion make Civilization IV the 'superior' game to the rest of the series, as I feel like the biggest super mods were made for Civ IV because it was the 'easiest' to mod and by god, are there some amazing mods out there! (shoutout to Rise of Mankind: A New Dawn 2!)
If you've been active in these parts of the forums for a while you may have noticed @Blake00's thread, where a discussion about a 64-bit Civ4 with multithreading started that in turn, influenced the development and now the release of @snowern's Mini-Engine project, where he's built a, well, 'mini-engine' that uses a recompiled CvGameCoreDLL that supports 64-bit, which he has been working for quite some time. There are probably even way more threads about this topic spanning back years...
So, what is this thread all about then?
Well, as we all know there never was an official plan for a remaster of Civilization IV by Firaxis and even today, on the 20th anniversary, this doesn't seem to have changed. So, inspired by all the bright minds that converged in those aforementioned threads and the lack of an official effort to do something about the mentioned issues for two decades, I decided to start things off by working on a prototype of what a modern implementation could look like.
I present to you:
LINK: Project Tessera - GitHub
Screenshots:
Now I won't pretend that this is an acutal fully-fledged game or anything of the sort at this point, but it is an attempt to get the ball rolling on the development of an actual 64-bit capable implementation of an 'engine' that can load and play mods of the original game.
I've written quite a bit about this in the GitHub Readme, so check this out if you're interested!
To summarize a few things:
- This is NOT an official project by Firaxis or 2K or any other related party. This is a fan-project!
- This is NOT a reverse-engineering of the original .exe kind of project. Clean-Room!
- This project does NOT distribute any copyrighted files. In fact, it even checks for a valid Civ4BeyondSword.exe upon start or else it won't load.
- This project is based on the Godot game engine. It's free, open-source and licensed under the MIT license, so free to modify (if needed in the first place) at your hearts content!
- This project is open-source and licensed under GPL-3.0 and will remain free and at no cost permanently!
What's next?
Well, this is just the start. It's going to take quite a long time to finish this, especially at the rate it's going (I'm working alone) and even more so, as I'm possibly not even qualified enough to start such a big undertaking but that's why I'm open to any sort of help! If you're an experienced game or software developer who wants to take a leading role in this, I'm all for it! If you're just a hobby programmer like I am, why not try to increase those skills while working on something that's fun, instead of getting stuck in tutorial hell? If someone wants to just clone the repo and do their own thing with it, feel free (as long as, if it's released, it is under GPL-3.0+ aswell of course!)
My goal up until now was to get .nif files loaded in a 3D world, to prove that it's possible and I managed to do that, despite my last coding class being 12+ years ago, so I'm sure just about anyone can meaningfully contribute with enough determination!
So with all that being said, let me know what you guys think!
