Feedback and Suggestions

Lib.Spi't said:

to be honest 2-3 turns with a full roster of experts doesn't seem wrong to me, you are talking about an expert workforce completing a 'town' in around 10-20 years, that seems adequate for a medieval simulation.

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Well, for the basic manufacturing buildings, such as Weaver's House, Shop, etc, we are just using the default values in Vanilla. It was set to 30 Hammer's, with the next level at 90 Hammers, 50 Tools. But, the first tier was always free. If we up the Hammer cost that would just increase the problem of having to build up a town from scratch in late game.

Anyway, on a different note, but somewhat related, and thinking on Nightinggale's reference to Master of Orion, we could add some kind of benefit to Building extra unused buildings in a Town. Like if you found a settlement that is just going to be for Tanning and Ale making, you can still benefit from building the other structure types even though you want use them. Perhaps they increase population max, or some other benefit.

Lib.Spi't said:

My problem is I am just rubbish at remembering at what stage of a 'plan' I am at when playing, and forget what goal I was working toward... which is why I just end up spending the gold when I have it. Also because the Pope keeps stealing it if I don't!

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Yeah, I have that same problem sometimes. I forget what tasks I was planning to do, or what my plans were for a certain city or Unit. Especially if returning from a save after a long time. This makes me think about what can we do to make the GUI more helpful in such areas. Like having reminders or the ability to make post it notes some how. Something to think about as we are playing.

Yes, any helpful reminders is great for me.

One that Doane has is on their immigration screen they have a window that shows how many experts you could potentially be employing. It takes each tiles highest output resource. I found it particularly helpful for fisherman, as they only have 1 resource on water tiles.

Lib.Spi't said:

Yes, any helpful reminders is great for me.

One that Doane has is on their immigration screen they have a window that shows how many experts you could potentially be employing. It takes each tiles highest output resource. I found it particularly helpful for fisherman, as they only have 1 resource on water tiles.

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That's a good idea. I did add Unit help text that tells you how many Units you already have, so that while looking over what Units you can Summon it will tell you how many you have and what you still need.

yes I saw that!

I thought it was quite interesting.

One thing I was thinking of was maybe some kind of economic page that takes all your yield numbers from empire wide and +/- them together so you get a 'net' empire wide production, as at one point I discovered I was not producing any ore, when I thought I was.

So you could quickly see, a deficit of ore and expand ore making, or an excess of grapes so you expand wine making.

I think something like that could definately become helpful as you move towards the idea of rural and industrial production being seperate from each other in different towns.

Lib.Spi't said:

One that Doane has is on their immigration screen they have a window that shows how many experts you could potentially be employing.

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I have been planning to do something like that since I started RaRE, except I planned to do it in the domestic advisor. I have been thinking something like detection units, which aren't in their ideal profession and then for each profession, it will say number of vacant slots and number of slots where you can put a better unit.

You mentioned displaying this in the trade screen. Maybe the real answer is to keep a cache in CvCity and CvPlayer where all python files have read access. Keeping such a cache could be beneficial to the AI as well.

yeah I mean the way doane has it is just a pic of the master type with say x3 next to it if you have 3 available slots for that mastr type, so you can work out what you need to order right there on the immigration screen.

I remember you beginning to work on that idea you mention, when there were a couple of windows that hasd the same button, has tht disappeared from the latest release or am I just not looking in the right place in game?

Lib.Spi't said:

I remember you beginning to work on that idea you mention, when there were a couple of windows that hasd the same button, has tht disappeared from the latest release or am I just not looking in the right place in game?

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It should be there in the domestic advisor (F6). It reveals units working in a profession where they do not get a bonus. It doesn't tell how many can have of each type. Say you need a carpenter somewhere, you can open that screen and see if any city has a carpenter, which isn't working as a carpenter.

Nightinggale said:

It should be there in the domestic advisor (F6). It reveals units working in a profession where they do not get a bonus. It doesn't tell how many can have of each type. Say you need a carpenter somewhere, you can open that screen and see if any city has a carpenter, which isn't working as a carpenter.

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F6... this reminds me you wanted to change the shortcut keys at one point. With F1 being the Domestic Adviser. You've added so much help info there that it only makes since as F1 is general the help short cut.

I added an engine to generate new pages. We can add way more with ease. In fact the engine scales to any screen size meaning we have virtually no upper limit for what we can add to this advisor. The display engine will make sure there is room for everything without any extra code.

Useful ideas are welcome

Feedback:

In the meanwhile I actually launched the mod and played a couple of turns (okay, a couple of dozens actually). Awesome (the start screen TES theme is fascinating), but still plenty of work to polish it up - like Ray pointed out. I did not encounter any crashes or notice any bugs though, bit the "medieval-o-pedia" is almost none with many entries absent (like who is Samo of the Slavs) or left from Vanilla (like Huntsman description).

Suggestion:

I think that while working on the translation I could contribute to the "medieval-o-pedia" texts as well. However, this will sometimes require that I ask dumb questions like, "what is the Unit/Profession/Building/Feature supposed to do?" because no description is available.

Daw said:

Suggestion:

I think that while working on the translation I could contribute to the "medieval-o-pedia" texts as well. However, this will sometimes require that I ask dumb questions like, "what is the Unit/Profession/Building/Feature supposed to do?" because no description is available.

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Sounds good to me.

Another thing about translating. Some lazy people wrote English text directly into XML descriptions instead of using the text system, which mean those strings can't be translated. I have planned to clean that up for a while and I guess I better do it now. My plan is to write a script to go through an XML file and replace all text with TVT_KEY_ something and then generate a new text XML for that file. This will also organize the text XML files somewhat better as it will introduce a file for each XML file, meaning one for units, one for buildings and so on.

Nightinggale said:

I have planned to clean that up for a while and I guess I better do it now.

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Good, though there's no rush as there are still lots of text available to work on.

In the meanwhile I think I'm done with the GIT setup. The thing reported it sucked something in successfully. When you have time, please check if it also uploads things back. If it does, '...-RUS.xml' files will start to appear in the '.../Assets/XML/Text' directory.

I am not sure about where to store them though, because as the game can't read Cyrillics so far, it stumbles upon those weird symbols of mine at startup and generates error messages although still launches after all.

@Daw:

You need to encode special characters.
Not doing so, will cause problems for sure.

It has to be done for German or French or Spanish special characters as well.
For Russian (Cyrillics) that means you have to encode every single letter.

Unencoded special characters at the wrong place can result in Worldbuildersaves being broken or even CTDs !
(e.g. in City names.)

Other aspects to eventually consider with Russian:

GameFonts do not have Cyrillic characters by default.
They are Latin and do include special characters for the default Central European languages.

Edit:
Actually I am pretty confused that something like "Russian translation with Cyrillic" letters is even considered.
But maybe you will get around all the potential problems.

@Ray

I'm really sorry we've messed up forum threads completely making things impossible to find But there is a promising solution there as we are not the first ones to encounter this problem. Games are routinely localized for the Russian market, and Vanilla is not an exclusion at that.

EDIT: BTW, the problem you describe is exactly why I create '...-RUS.xml' file versions instead of just editing old ones. I want to keep the thing playable with the old files until the "rusification patch" is implemented and my new files can be used.

Daw said:

Feedback:

In the meanwhile I actually launched the mod and played a couple of turns (okay, a couple of dozens actually). Awesome (the start screen TES theme is fascinating), but still plenty of work to polish it up - like Ray pointed out. I did not encounter any crashes or notice any bugs though, bit the "medieval-o-pedia" is almost none with many entries absent (like who is Samo of the Slavs) or left from Vanilla (like Huntsman description).

Suggestion:

I think that while working on the translation I could contribute to the "medieval-o-pedia" texts as well. However, this will sometimes require that I ask dumb questions like, "what is the Unit/Profession/Building/Feature supposed to do?" because no description is available.

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That would be totally Awesome , Daw! Yes, working on the medieval pedia would be wonderful work. You can use this thread here http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=522833 to post your question about the pedia. Everything takes time, and if I spend time writing pedia entries, I take time away from coding or play testing. So, the help is very much appreciated. Also, there is a limit to how much Pedia info you can add for like a Civ. I am a history buff myself and love all the info but use the examples given to approximate text length.

Nightinggale said:

Another thing about translating. Some lazy people wrote English text directly into XML descriptions instead of using the text system, which mean those strings can't be translated.

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I am at least one of those lazy people. I didn't plan on having help, especially Russian help. I wonder if I went back in time and added the text xml entries each time would the mod be just as far along

Daw said:

In the meanwhile I think I'm done with the GIT setup. The thing reported it sucked something in successfully. When you have time, please check if it also uploads things back. If it does, '...-RUS.xml' files will start to appear in the '.../Assets/XML/Text' directory.

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Did Nightinggale explain about creating a new branch as we should make a new branch for your work? You just right click the branches box and "add a new branch". It makes a copy of the current code for that branch. Then you can right click branches to swap to or "checkout" (as Smartgit calls it) another branch.

Kailric said:

You can use this thread here http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=522833 to post your question about the pedia.

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Noted.

Kailric said:

Did Nightinggale explain about creating a new branch as we should make a new branch for your work? You just right click the branches box and "add a new branch". It makes a copy of the current code for that branch. Then you can right click branches to swap to or "checkout" (as Smartgit calls it) another branch.

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No, he did not. I believe he thought it was quite self-explanatory. Though it was not, so thanks for the tip. Now it's done, a 'Russian_translation' branch has been created in 'Local Branches' section. I hope I didn't fail to do it properly.

Could you check if you see it?
How do I add files there? As, like I said, I am creating '...-RUS.xml' files instead of editing old ones for "safety" reasons.

Daw said:

Games are routinely localized for the Russian market, and Vanilla is not an exclusion at that.

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I know.
(I had been in contact with Russian modders as well in the past.)

But you don't consider, that this mod (like all others here) has been built on the US/European version.
Gamefonts for example are not compatible to my knowledge. (That is why I mentioned them.)

If you have a tool for encoding the Cyrillic characters, that is fine.
But the text inside XML will definitely not be readable anymore when simply editing the file.
(Since everything will be encoded. This will make it a lot harder to maintain.)

Well, you have been warned.
Maybe you will figure out practicable solutions for the problems.

I definitely wish you good luck.

Daw said:

In the meanwhile I think I'm done with the GIT setup. The thing reported it sucked something in successfully. When you have time, please check if it also uploads things back. If it does, '...-RUS.xml' files will start to appear in the '.../Assets/XML/Text' directory.

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There is no need to use different files. Each string has a number of languages and the game will only read ONE of them when reading the strings. The one to read is the one for the language chosen in the ingame options. If it is't present, it will use English instead. If English isn't present, then the game will complain as I decided to assume English to always be present.

This mean that if people select English as language, then any line starting with <Russian> will be ignored. We can write all the broken text in it we like and not break anything ingame. If it causes problems to have broken text in Russian when the game is set to English, then it is something I will have to look into.

Also order of languages doesn't matter. This is my addition as vanilla has no concept of languages and language selection is based on selecting the 3rd language in the menu will give you the 3rd language from XML, regardless of what it is called.

Russian will have to be added to CIV4LanguageInfos.xml to turn up in the menu. However I think it would be best to postpone doing that until the text displays correctly ingame.

raystuttgart said:

You need to encode special characters.
Not doing so, will cause problems for sure.

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Correct and wrong at the same time. I found a tool to help a whole lot with that issue.
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=527371
At first I just wanted to use this tool, but I am who I am and less than 24 hours after I found it I have contributed with code and ideas for further development for this tool. If it doesn't completely fulfill our needs, it would appear that it can be modified to do so.

Kailric said:

I am at least one of those lazy people. I didn't plan on having help, especially Russian help. I wonder if I went back in time and added the text xml entries each time would the mod be just as far along

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It was fine at the time and it presumably saved you some time. Now I just need to script making new XML files. That's no big deal and we will get the TEXT XML files better organized in the process.

Kailric said:

Did Nightinggale explain about creating a new branch as we should make a new branch for your work? You just right click the branches box and "add a new branch". It makes a copy of the current code for that branch. Then you can right click branches to swap to or "checkout" (as Smartgit calls it) another branch.

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No, but if <Russian> is truly ignored when Russian isn't selected, then I see no reason why it would need its own branch. On the other hand it might be better for the log.

Now that I think about it, I think it is best to make a branch for it based on release-2.5. It can then be translated independently from what else goes on and when it is done, it can be released as the next 2.5.x stable release. If we happen to move on from 2.5 and make a new release branch, we can always merge/rebase Russian to use that one instead with minimal workload.

@Daw: you will need an account on SourceForge to get write permission. Since you are already writing to the files, I guess it would be best to just make the branch to make a place where you can share what you have written.

So you want to make your mod compatible for 2 versions of the game at the same time ?
(US / European version and Russian Localization)

How are you going to handle other problematic aspects like Gamefonts then ?
(Because to my knowledge a lot of aspects considering Gamefonts are handled inside of the exe.)

Or are you planning to develop 2 version of the Mod with branches ?
(US / European M:C and Russian M:C, both having their own Gamefonts)

I would strongly suggest to get in contact with some Russian modders.
(Civ4 or Civ4:Col doesn't really matter. Problems should be the same.)

I can't remember exactly but I believe to remember that there were more problems than only Gamefonts
when trying to use mods built on US / European version with Russian (or other) Localizations of the game.

There is definitely more to consider though, than just the XML for texts.

raystuttgart said:

How are you going to handle other problematic aspects like Gamefonts then ?

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My plan is to make one GameFont.tna to contain everything. We have a tool to convert and this tool maps one letter to one icon. Controlling this conversion to make the Russian text point to specific locations in GameFont should do the trick. Sure the Russian text would end up as a series of [bullet] or whatever to the game engine internals, but if it displays correctly, then I see no reason not to do it.

Sure there could be issues with keyboard reason and stuff like that, but we will look at it if that happens.