Windows 7 and Steam

[Brett Caton]

I used to mod when this game came out, on an old xp box.

Well, this machine uses windows 7 and Steam to boot, and nothing I was doing that used to work... worked!

I became frustrated when even following the tutorials step by step, with the most basic mod imaginable, (one copied xml file on it's own) would generate error messages.

Looking back to the time that ppl modded this game is not easy but I do see a lot of other ppl struggling with weird problems that turned out to be due to the way Steam and Win 7 were handling the game.

I gave up on modding properly and decided to hack the original xml - backed up first, of course.

I found that files I altered seem to be reverted over time, perhaps by Steam? The structure was confusing; it seems the data files are duplicated.



E:\Games\Steam\steamapps\common\Sid Meier's Civilization IV Beyond the Sword\Assets\XML\Buildings

E:\Games\Steam\steamapps\common\Sid Meier's Civilization IV Beyond the Sword\Beyond the Sword\Assets\XML\Buildings

These seem to be the same - why are they there twice? What's the functional reason?

I changed CIV4BuildingInfos.xml as a test, making it so that no buildings became obsolete: <ObsoleteTech>TECH_ASTRONOMY</ObsoleteTech>
=>
<ObsoleteTech>NONE</ObsoleteTech>
For example.

That seemed to work out for a while then change back ... has anyone else seen that before?

 

[Nightinggale]

I use the disc version to avoid all the issues with steam. Personally I haven't had any issues at all with windows 7, so I put the blame on steam.

Steam revert files automatically, which makes modding quite tricky. It's a standard steam issue, not civ specific. There is a trick to not reverting, but I can't remember it offhand. Google it. It's something about disabling updating that game or stay offline entirely while playing or something like that. Perhaps the ability to revert is related to the duplicated files. If file is altered, revert by overwriting with the other one of the same name.

The newest version should have worse mod support. There is a way to get steam to install using the previous patch, though I can't remember that one offhand either.

If the setup is done correctly, the steam version should be as good as the disc version, except that steam doesn't allow the debugger. Unless you are really into modding the DLL, this shouldn't matter at all.

 

[Emperor Ukunaka Kukvlkana]

Death to Steam!