Loki | Products | Civilization: Call to Power

Loki Software, Inc.

Technical FAQ

Display, Music and Sound

The sound effects work, but why won't the music play from the CD?
You need read permissions for the CD-ROM drive. Usually this is /dev/hdc, but it may be different on your machine. If you aren't sure, look at the link for /dev/cdrom (ls -l /dev/cdrom). Then run the command chmod o+r /dev/hdc (using your device for /dev/hdc). Also, make sure that your cdrom device is listed in /etc/fstab as an iso9660 device. You should see a line something like this when you 'cat /etc/fstab':

/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 user,ro 0 0

If I have a music CD in when I start the game, the music CD will start to play. If I pull up a CD player app and stop it, it keeps restarting. How do I stop this?
You need to turn off music from within the game -- this can be done from the Options menu. Also, if you don't want the game accessing your CD-ROM, you can use the command line option -nocdrom, or set an environment variable "CIV_NOCD" before running your game.

Bash shell syntax: export CIV_NOCD=1; civctp
Csh shell syntax: setenv CIV_NOCD 1; civctp

Why I don't hear any sound?
First be sure that you have sound support compiled into your kernel and that you have installed an OSS supported sound card. Next, make sure that you have read/write permissions to /dev/dsp (chmod a+rw /dev/dsp). If sound still doesn't work, contact your Linux distributor for more assistance. Once sound is properly installed on your system Civ:CTP will use it automatically. There is no need to do any sound configuration within the game itself.

I have multiple CD-ROMs. How do I tell the game which one to use?
You can set the evironment variable SDL_CDROM to the full pathname of the CD device you want the game to use. ('export SDL_CDROM=/dev/hdc', for example)

Is there a workaround for the SoundBlaster Live! crashes?
The game should work just fine with the most recent drivers from Creative's open source page.

Here's the old workaround for historical value:

Many thanks to Wintermute for finding the solution:

Obtain and install Esound (The Enlightened Sound Daemon)
Make sure that only ONE of the /dev/dspX devices is writable by your user profile (otherwise the game will attempt to scan the rest during startup to find a free device other than the one that Esound will be using and this will cause the game to again crash out.)
Run Esound with the following command line:
esd -d /dev/dsp -tcp -port 5001 &
If you hear several tones as esd loads you're ready to go. Now simply run "civctp" at the command line and finally enjoy the glory of Civ:CTP with sound!

Your system requirements mention that Esound works, but I use KDE. Will the game work with the K sound daemon?
CivCTP doesn't wrap sound through Ksound like it will for Esound. Therefore, if you have a sound event set up when the game starts, the KDE sound daemon grabs the sound device, and CivCTP assumes that it's being used. Turning this sound even off should solve the problem.

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