Getting the editor to work without installing Civ3

[foo12]

Unfortunately there is currently no editor for the Mac edition of Civ3. MacSoft has been promising a port for months, but very little (ie, no) info has appeared about timeline or status. (Firaxians? Any info on this from your colleagues?)

I tried to get the PC editor running under emulation (VirtualPC 5 with Win2K, all service packs up to date) but it checks to see if Civ3 is installed. Does anyone know exactly what the editor looks for? If it's something simple like a directory hierarchy with the BIC correctly named and in the right place, it would be no problem for me to copy the neccessary files from the Mac version to get it working. But if it's looking for the executable and registry entries, I may have to wait on MacSoft

Would someone be willing to help me out by giving me a directory listing off the PC version?

tia

[Gramphos]

It looks for all the terrain PCX-flies and some other files as well

[foo12]

Originally posted by Gramphos
It looks for all the terrain PCX-flies and some other files as well

Other files? Are they game data or is it the engine itself? If it's just terrain and game files, which are pressumably universal between the two versions, it should be easy to get it working.

Here's my Civ3 Mac directory

drwx------  15 nteske  unknown      466 Apr 11 19:18 .
drwx------  30 nteske  unknown      976 Apr 11 19:18 ..
-rw-rw-rw-   1 nteske  unknown     8196 Apr 11 19:18 .DS_Store
drwx------  51 nteske  unknown     1690 Mar 17 23:53 Art
-rwx--x--x   1 nteske  unknown  2945557 Mar  5 14:31 Civilization III
drwx------   4 nteske  unknown      264 Oct 21 17:24 Fonts
drwx------   2 nteske  unknown      264 Oct 10  2001 Maps
drwxrwxrwx   5 nteske  unknown      264 Apr  5 18:37 Saves
drwxrwxrwx   8 nteske  unknown      264 Mar 23 17:02 Scenarios
drwx------  57 nteske  unknown     1894 Jan 24 11:11 Sounds
drwxrwxrwx   2 nteske  unknown      264 Mar 13 15:40 TempUndo
drwx------  20 nteske  unknown      636 Mar  9 05:33 Text
-rwx--x--x   1 nteske  unknown   108792 Dec  8 03:35 civ3mod.bic
-rwx--x--x   1 nteske  unknown     4098 Dec  8 03:35 jackal.pcx
-rwx--x--x   1 nteske  unknown     5893 Oct 10  2001 jackal.txt

The directories obviously have contents, but I'm not sure that it would fit in one post (.ds_store is a Mac OS X metadata store. it's not Civ related)

[foo12]

aha! never mind!

Got it working---solution: reinstall Windows. Strange, strange. It still complains about not having Civ3 installed but instead of quitting when you click ignore, it now launches the editor as expected.

Now off to confirm that it truly does work with a Mac install...

[foo12]

Re: aha! never mind!

The Mac BIC seems to be identical to the PC BIC --- the editor doesn't complain at all about it, so I presume they're identical.

One problem: I need a copy of 'Civ3Edit.HLP' as it's not included with the Mac version. Could someone put a zip'd copy up somewhere?

[Gramphos]

That would be against the copyright, I'm affraid, why don't you just grab it from the PCpatch?

[foo12]

Originally posted by Gramphos
That would be against the copyright, I'm affraid, why don't you just grab it from the PCpatch?

True --- are the PC patches an executable installer or just a zip'd directory? I can only presume that an installer would fail if it looks for a binary to update.

[Gramphos]

They are installers... But I think you can install them without having the game installed...