@Eunomiac - Wow, you're hired!
I decided to sit down this morning, take a break from the game.
And here I was the past two days taking a short break from coding to actually play the game. Before Tuesday, I think I had played two full moves in the previous two weeks.
</woe-is-me>
How about the ability to right-click on a specialist icon to prioritize it.
While I have very little experience looking through the SDK, I have read most all of the Python code. AFAIK, CvCity_AI or CvPlayer_AI in the SDK take care of assigning specialists. There are no Python events to even be told about it.
Looking at the Python API for CyCity, there are plenty of methods for examining the currently assigned specialists, but there are only two methods for setting specialists: setForceSpecialistCount() and setFreeSpecialistCount(). They both take a specialist type and count, but I'm not entirely sure what a forced specialists is.
So this may be possible.
This is actually in the stock game at least since BTS release (maybe even earlier...)
Can you please explain further? I know you can arrange the specialists, but when your population increases, there's no way to control
ahead of time how that new citizen will be put to work.
A most awesome idea, and totally doable using the existing tech screen code. I wonder if all those different faces would get confusing. We could have all the faces in a line (think MA deployment tab) that you can select to limit the view to that one (or multiple) AI.
I would also remove/gray-out techs that everyone knows since they offer no trade possibilities; the same for techs that no one knows nor can research yet. This would trim down the tree to just the techs that you can do something with at that time.
Also, if both you and an AI know tech A, there's no point in showing your pics on it since you can't trade either way for it. In fact, I'd color the tech cards based on whether or not you knew it, or if there was a trade possibility, or something similar, instead of showing your pic anywhere. Anything to reduce the number of leader pics and trim down the information. Colors are a great visual indicator (as you suggested with the outlines), more so than icons. The icons will be small and tough to discern if there are too many.
Further, I'd expect only the techs that appear somewhere on the Tech Trade tab to have information in this list. If there's no trade possibility, it should be gray/empty. You pointed out the desire to plan future research, so maybe there's a way to call out techs . . .
Ah, how about this:
- Techs you know - Show the AIs that don't know it. Outline color for: researching (espionage), can research, and can't research (you can't trade it to them yet b/c they don't have the prereqs).
- Techs you don't know - Show the AIs that know it. Outline color for: will trade, won't trade, can't trade.
As long as the tech card backgrounds are different colors, the difference should be clear. Normally I wouldn't want icons to have different meanings on the same page, but actually the icon always means "possible trade opportunity", so I think it works.
Did I say how much I like this idea?
Something as simple as "Will Trade" vs. "Wants" would clear this up.
Yes, I agree. I keep it straight by memorizing the columns, but after a few weeks off from playing, I have to think about it again.
A Repeat Feature: A second incremental counter next to the current one, set by default to zero (no repeat), could be set to recur the same message every few turns.
I proposed something similar, but this is great. What I suggested was more of a SG player support tool: when you start your turnset, it automatically sets a reminder for X turns ahead to stop playing. I think a combination of these would be great.
Minimize Reminder Pop-Up: I play the game with all notifications minimized to the right side of my screen, where they stay until the end of my turn.
I started playing with this a few weeks back, but I'm having a heck of a time working it out. There are two types of popups in Civ, and I need the features of both.
One can be minimized, and the other is functional. I may have to turn these into Python screens.
I may start a thread on this, but I had been hoping to spring it on the players as I think it would be very, very cool. Alerum and I worked out some cool ideas for Civ4lerts especially . . .
The Reminders mod doesn't let you do this, so I often forget to do what the reminder says by the time I'm finished other things.
Do you use the SVN version of BUG or the 3.0 (or BAT 1.0) release? IIRC, I made some alterations after the release that help here. Instead of the "show next turn" option when a reminder pops up, it asks "show again at end of turn?" and if you say yes, it appears again and then you can have it show next turn too.
Even if you tell it not to show the reminder again, all reminders that fired this turn are shown instead of "Hit Enter to end turn" at the bottom of the screen.
However, minimized popups would be vastly superior to all this gobbledygook, so I'll focus my efforts there after 3.1 comes out.
I also have a few bug reports that I'll put up in the next little bit. Thanks a ton for all the work you guys put into this, it has absolutely redefined my Civ IV experience! I hope you find my suggestions helpful!
Glad to have bug reports as well as new features, so thanks! And it feels great to hear from users that like the mod so much. So thanks again!
I don't think we can do a 'dialog box at the end of the turn' because we cannot tell when that is (I think).
I got this to work, and it should be in the SVN version. When I added the new "BeginActivePlayerTurn" event, I also added code to call the existing -- but not called by the SDK -- "EndTurnReady" event.
And it was such a neat and simple idea too...
And now I see you made the same suggestion in that topic. It all makes sense now.
