I have completed the code for my program I call "Civ 3 City Placement Utility". Here is a list of features:

-runs as a seperate program, in no way hooks into and civ 3 executables(alt+tab to display it over your civ game)
-allows placement, removal and relocation of a capital
-upon placement or movement of a capital the program calculates the distance from the capital of every displayed tile and displays it on the window
-allows placement and removal of cities
-capital is filled with a red color, cities with a purple color
-display's the "21" tiles use by a city in pink...any tiles being used by more than one city(overlapping) are displayed in a darker pink
-highlights (in yellow) and given distance from the capital to easily pick out all possible city locations for that distance
-allows user to increase/decrease the opacity of the overlay form

here is a screen shot: http://members.rogers.com/egrweb/3.jpg

I will make this available for download after further testing

Looks great! I'll definitely try it out once you make it available! :goodjob:

Wow, that really looks cool. I can't wait to get my hands on it. Way to go assanine !! I'm curious, what program did u use to write it? And how many hours of coding was it?

Thanks all.
The program was coded in VB.NET(2003). I personally hate VB 6 now that I have made the switch to managed code.
Anyone running WIN XP and keeps it updated should be able to run it by just opening the executable(no registry entries).

As far as how long it took. I would say between 6-8 hours. Part of the reason for doing this was to work with the drawing namespace in .NET. I had some learning to do wich ate up a chunk of time. Also diffucult was figuring out the calculation Firaxis used. Like the isometric grid generation and distance calculation based on x,y pixel coordinates. An hour was spent on "refactoring" which is a method of optimizing code. I Always do this.

Another thing I forgot to mention is that there are no images used to make this program. Everything displayed on the screen is drawn completely with code. This makes the program one file with no installation needed.

If there is anyone out there learning VB.NET or wants the calculations I used let me know. I will send u the source files or just the source code in text format. There is nothing revolutionary here so I don't mind sharing.

I'm making a city calc (designed to show production and growth over a given time) myself, and just figured out how to do isometric grids without DirectX - also using DirectX. I have VB6.0 for Win98SE, BTW. Looks good. I know I use Paint Shop Pro and just paste layers over it. :)

It looks good; I can't wait to try it out.

Great Idea, Looks Good but when can we expect the real thing.

assanine: It would be a great help to have a screenshot of just your overlay without the civ map in the background. That way, we could use it as overlay for screenshots, even while you are still working on the program
for us Macintosh players.
Thanks in advance!

assanine, any news on this? When do you think it might be finished? It sounds really good and I'd love to try.

Looks cool from the screen shot. I would like to be able to see the city footprint will be when deciding where a new city goes.
What is the release date.

This thing still coming out or is it dead?
BTW: the link to the screenshot is broken.