Saturday 3 January 2009

Civilization IV Beyond the Sword in Ubuntu with CrossOver Games

I recently tried to install and run Civilization IV Beyond the Sword in Ubuntu. And it worked flawlessly!

* Civilization IV by Firaxis and its range of games has always in been a favorite of mine.
* Beyond the Sword is a recent extention to this game.
* Ubuntu is a linux distrobution that I use.
* For this to work I used CodeWeaver's CrossOver Games. CrossOver is based on Wine, with some not-yet-in-Wine code and some proprietary code.
* And I installed this on Dell D820 laptop PC.

There was nothing complicated in installing it either. And from CDs.

* I simple installed Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex.
* then installed CrossOver Games 7.1.0
* then inside CrossOver installed Civilization IV.
* then installed Beyond the sword. It automatically updated my Civ4 and installed DirectX which I presume CrossOver intercepted.
* then I downloaded the most recent patch of BTS. 3.17. Installed it inside CrossOver.
* Then ran the game.
* Sound did not work 1st time, but specifying ALSA as sound in CrossOver fixed it.

Video introduction, etc everything seems to work. In fullscreen and as a windowed version.

The only think I noticied was that city production bar did not change colour, but changing that to a number in the options solved that. There may be other missing graphics, but I have not seen any. May need to run in side by side of a windows version to notice these things. Certainly nothing game playwise is missing. However I did notice one MOD did not work.

Civilization IV is only marked with a Bronse on CodeWeavers site, however I would say Gold, as 99.5% work.

If you do have problems, many of the forums recommend in Civ's ini files to disable intro videos etc. I have not needed to touch those files.

* Ubuntu thread on Civ4 BTS
* Ubuntu howto on Civ4 BTS
* CodeWeavers page on Civ IV compatability
* WineHQ page on Civ IV

4 comments:

flurdy said...

Ok. I have come across some problems, so it is not without bugs. The main problem has been running out of video memory thus exiting the game. Auto saving saves the day.

flurdy said...

This does not happend too often, but perhaps once a good game night.

flurdy said...

Ok. An update with my latest setup.

* Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx
* CrossOver Games v9.2
* Civilization IV Beyond the Sword v3.19

And it works very well.

Here are my steps:

* Install CrossOver Games
* Install Civilization IV by
** Creating new Win XP Bottle
** Choose DVD as install medium.
* Install Beyond the Sword
** Choose previous Civ bottle
** Choose DVD as install medium
** This will automatically patch Civ IV first
* Patch Beyond the Sword
** Download v3.19
** Choose previous Civ bottle
** Choose downloaded exe as installer
* CrossOver should then have installed its DirectX and MSXML components.

Game is now launchable via the menues. :)

This latest patch includes a nocd feature which is handy.

Further tips at the WineHQ.

flurdy said...

CodeWeavers Civ IV compatibility centre.