- What does Civ5 do differently with modular design than Civ4 BtS?
Everything. It sets up a ton of obstacles that make it harder to do anything at all, and allow you to run multiple mods at once. Is this a good trade off? *** no!
- What does Civ5 do differently with modular design than Civ4 BtS?
The draws of moving to Civ5 to mod are:
* Hex map
* ??????????
Anyway, to take us back on topic:
In summary it seems the consensus of Civ4 modders is they may start modding Civ5 if:
* Steam is not required to play or use a mod,
* Modbuddy is not required to to make a mod,
* Firaxis releases their long promised SDK,
* Modders can mod the DLL or I/O
* Modders can change rules like 1UPT, change city management, code events
* Civ5 can be adapted to be like Civ4 core gameplay.
Just to stop some misinformation: The bold parts are already possible/have already happened.
Wait, they removed Steam DRM?
I think by 'SDK', they meant the source code. That's what Civ4 modders generally mean by that term, even though SDK really means 'Software Development Kit'
Now these are good reasons. The fact that Civ4 doesn't scale with multicore CPUs is a major problem. Just being able to use OpenMP would already help a ton.
- A 64 bit engine, so no practical memory limits
- Multi-threading
As does Civ4 since Warlords.1 thing for CivV, they use decimal math instead of integer math.
Only for very, very few calculations. Most of the calculations are using integers (sometimes multiplied times 100 or so to allow some decimals without actually using floating point numbers).As does Civ4 since Warlords.
A bit late to this discussion. I was literally crying with excitement when I purchased Civ V. My next versions of Road to War - Historical, was going to be developed on this.
I installed it on my high-spec computer expecting to be blown away by the graphics. Then I saw it. It looked like console-like graphics for representing cities especially. Towns look like a bunch of stacked mushrooms or similar. That was my first disappointment.
Next was the "city-states". Why were there so many of them ? Are we playing "Civilization" (a collection of cities) being developed and competing with other civilizations, but these "city-states" were so important to the game-play that if you did not befriend them soon you were at a disadvantage.
Game-play in general felt so "console-like", I found each time playing less enjoyable. If I don't enjoy playing it, why should bother developing for it.
You are right there are a lot of great Civ IV mods out there and many more being developed. I suspect the reason they still do, is because they enjoy playing Civ IV as well. To this end, I have finally decided to start work in earnest on "The Road to War - Historical 2", and hope to have it fully finished by the end of next year, and being able to use much of my development of my first mod was probably the decider for me.
So you started out crying with anticipation and ended up crying with misery?
He is not alone
I guess it's true for almost all Civ IV modders...
The disappointment about Civ V - and Civ V modding in particular - was huge
I had the advantage of having a comp that couldn't run CiV when it was released, so I never spent any money on that wreck.