I've been working on a mod for about a month now and I've reached the stage where my programing skills crumble as I face the seemingly impossible task of needing new art files.

My mod is based on the idea of adding more parametres to cities so that there is more work involved in creating a prosperous and efficient city, click herehttp://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=319084 for the development thread. What I need help with now is to create new terrain improvements to serve as upgrades (or downgrades of the existing ones).

What I had in mind is the following:
Grange - A more primitive version of a farm. Perhaps a granary or barn like structure in the middle of irrigated terrain like the current farm building, but a little smaller.
Farm - Use the existing farm graphics.
Estate - A large and prosperous farm. Perhaps the existing farm graphics but replacing the farm house with a manor or small palace of some type.

Opencast Mine - A basic version of a mine. I'm trying to use the graphics for the quarry but I can only get the crane to appear and not the pit which you can see when you build a quarry on stone or marble.
Drift Mine - Use the existing mine graphics.
Shaft Mine - A more advanced mine which goes a lot deeper and has a near vertical entrance. Perhaps something a little like this (http://www.solar-world.com/images/GoldMine.jpg).

The idea is that the improvements will evolve from one to another in the same way as a cottage evolves to a hamlet and then a village. As such, it would be absolutely superb if there where different ancient and modern graphics for these improvements, but I dont really care.



And now onto my question. I'v used the <iUpgradeTime> and the <ImprovementUpgrade> tags in Civ4ImprovementInfo.XML in the same way as it is used for cottages but instead of it working I get wierd scroll over messages (see below). Opencast mines should upgrade to drift mines after 20 turns, and drift mines should upgrade to shaft mines after 40 turns. Is there any known fix for this because as far as I can see my XML entries are perfectly correct.


EDIT: All this on BtS 3.17, havent swapped to the latest patch yet.

The reason for why you get weird scroll over messages is because you have, in the ImprovementInfos.xml, linked to a text that doesn't exist in your text info file.

I think he means the upgrading times.
Maybe you've just linked the improvements not right, but can't say anything without the file.

I've managed to solve it and put it down to one of two things. Either my commets crashed it even though they were the standard <!-- Some Text Here -->, or the order matters. I think its the latter as I added my improvements at the bottom of the file and it didn't work, but when I rearranged it so that the improvements that didn't upgrade where at the bottom and the others at the top it worked. Still very strange...

Some help with the art would still be very gladly recieved. In particular if someone can explain to me the farm graphics, when I like other improvements to ART_DEF_IMPROVEMENT_FARM, the building appears fine but without the irrigation/farmland graphic that you normally see, and I have no idea why. Also, what controls how improvements graphics change with era? Is it just adding _mod or _anc at the end of the file name?

Probably the comments. Civ's XML is notorious for getting messed up by comments.

Thats really strange, how hard can it be to parse out comments properly?

In particular if someone can explain to me the farm graphics, when I like other improvements to ART_DEF_IMPROVEMENT_FARM, the building appears fine but without the irrigation/farmland graphic that you normally see, and I have no idea why. Also, what controls how improvements graphics change with era? Is it just adding _mod or _anc at the end of the file name?

Civ4PlotLSystem.xml :scared:.