Civilization IV Forum

Hey there,

Some persons are not entirely visible whilst doing diplomacy. You can only see some parts of their models like e.g. just the teeth and the eyes. I'm not sure if this is really caused by crossover games but i thought i'd mention it.

When zooming out to get to the globe view there is a black clouds layer (white clouds on a black planet). Normally you are supposed to see the whole landscape underneath. Afair, icons (like resource symbols) on the globe view are visible though.

Edit: Ah, by the way: Why is civ 4 in Games->Roleplaying? Should be Strategy

I am having the same issues listed here. Otherwise completely functional.

What graphics card and driver do you use? For the globe view we need frame buffer object support, or at least pbuffer support. The open source dri drivers(radeon and intel) do not support that yet. Driver issues could also cause the issues with the models.

the graphics card is the Radeon x1600, driver version 01.00.068

Same issues here, using Crossover Games for Mac. I've got an ATI Radeon x1600 video card. Other than the leaders looking like the invisible man with dentures and no globe view, the game is quite playable.

It'll be hard to start a discussion with the bugmenot account, but I'll still answer 😊

The leaders use some advanced vertex shaders, and there might be a bug in our implementation that generates GL shaders that are accepted by the Nvidia Linux driver, but not by the MacOS ones. It could be a bug in the Mac drivers too, but in this case I think the issue is on our side. You can try to set the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Wine/Direct3D/UseGLSL to something other than "disabled". This may work around the issue(but provoke others).

The globe view is tricky as well. How does it look? Completely broken, or only partially working? It might work better if you set the globe view detail to lowest, and set your game's resolution to something higher than 512x512. If you set it to medium, the res has to be > 1024x1024, and for high it should be > 2048x2048. There's another registry key involved here, I think it is HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Wine/AppDefaults/Civilization4.exe/Direct3D/OffscreenRenderingMode. Try to set it to "fbo" or "backbuffer" and see which one works better. I think I set it to "fbo" by default, which makes the globe view resolution independent, but might trigger some other bugs in crossover or the driver.

(Earlier Bugmenot user here)

If it helps any, the leader portraits from the Beyond the Sword expansion appear fine, but ones from earlier packs only show teeth and other small things. The globe view "works" in that it doesn't crash the game or really hinder play or anything, it's just that the globe turns completely black and then reappears when you zoom back in.

I'll try the registry tips, but in use I recently discovered a rather serious bug. The window occasionally loses focus completely. I can see the animation in the game's window, so I know it hasn't frozen, but the game doesn't respond to mouse clicks or keyboard input. When this happens, I can't even click on the X11 window bar at the top to return focus to the window. The only ways to regain focus are to use Command+M to minimize and then click the minimized dock icon, or to right click the Crossover Games dock icon and choose "hide" and then "show." The same thing happens if I play in full screen, and I can't figure out how to reliably reproduce it, it just seems to happen every several minutes regardless of what I have running. I am using the Logitech Control Center for my MX510 mouse if there could be any problems with that. Again, Crossover Games on 10.5.2 with a Radeon x1600.

puppetjobe wrote:

(Earlier Bugmenot user here)

Decided I'd register if I'm actually going to hold any sort of meaningful conversation on this topic.

EDIT: I just noticed that when the problem of losing focus that I described above occurs, a "wineloader" process shows up as unresponsive in Activity Monitor. Killing it closes the window and quits the game. Also, the Civ 4 process is not the only thing affected when this happens. All Crossover windows become un-focusable.

EDIT 2: Upon further testing, it looks like my windows losing focus isn't specific to Civ 4. It seems to be a generalized problem with Crossover that I'll have to post about on another area of the forum.

EDIT 3: Running Crossover as a virtual desktop fixes the window focus issue.

I have no idea about the windows focus issue unfortunately.

The Leader portrait issues sound like the bug I supposedly fixed, but maybe the fix wasn't good enough for macos. But since CIV4 has a native mac version, I did not care too much about it(as far as I know, it has to be bought separately though).

The globe view sounds like an fbo breakage to me. Maybe the OffscreenRenderingMode set to "backbuffer" helps.

Changing UseGLSL to "enabled" prevents me from starting a game. I can use the main menu, but as soon as I launch a game, it hangs. Changing OffscreenRenderingMode didn't seem to fix the globe, but as per your earlier suggestion, I lowered the globe detail level to medium (I'm playing at 1280x800) and the globe view seemed to work fine after that.

You are correct that there is a Mac version of Civ 4, but Aspyr has no plans to port the "Beyond the Sword" expansion pack that adds a lot of new content to the game. As a result, I think more and more Mac users are looking for ways to run the PC version on their Macs.

To answer peep's question about the window focus, I've found that problem occurs for me if I have the Steam window minimized. If I keep the Steam window open behind the Civ window, focus comes back.

Getting the models and globe view to work would be great. I know a lot of people in the "CivFanatics" community who have Macs and want to play Beyond the Sword, as the new Games of the Month and Hall of Fame games require it; however, they are reluctant to spend the money on crossover because it doesn't work 100%.