Dune Wars Mod

hey guys...

i cant keep up with all the posts..

i pretty busy with life right now, have exam in a month,

but on the week end ill devote some time to work all you opatches in to one, with some of the stuff you guys suggested here along with better economy.

good work guys ))


***
david,

if the ai wont found cities - make sure the land terrain gives food - other wise the ai wont colonize - i had this in one of my early versions.

also i know that featrues make unpassable terrain passable - you need to limit by what you said with feature unpaasble - or make the feature it self not passable , but thats not a good idea.
so try not to have features on costs...



i feel like im not doing enough compared to you guys...

Here is unofficial patch 1.1.4. The main point is to totally revise the bonus/improvement benefits, and help early game expansion. You can install this over 1.1, or any of the earlier patches; it includes all the changed files above 1.1.

Major changes

* Completely revised the effects of the bonuses and improvements. I renamed two of them, all the graphics are the same. But practically every single bonus works differently now. I have compared the bonus benefits, varieties, improvement benefits, and buildings against vanilla, and made something which is statistically similar. There is a similar amount of food, hammer and commerce bonuses.

* Scout, Settler and Soldier can now cross desert waste with Desert Exploration tech, and can cross deep desert with Desert Suits tech. This allows early game expansion. There is a bug; without Desert Suits, these units can cross deep desert by stepping on spice. I do not know how to fix this.

* The AI should no longer build a huge number of Hover Escorts. Thanks to Koma13 for pointing out the reason. Storms and spice blows are now "defend only". Sandworms are now strength 20 initially, but as the game progresses their strength increases. If you see hover spam or worms getting killed, it means we need to tune this relationship better.

* A lot more spice appears, 3x the previous version; spice corporations now have no maintenance cost and provide 5 commerce per resource per turn instead of 2 commerce and 2 gold. Between these two, you should be able to get quite a lot of commerce. Build deep harvesters and put them on automate, and they will build what you need.

Minor changes

* Added Badlands to terrain types in Desert Passage tech; Desert Passage has many icons in the tech screen, so moved Underground Tunnels wonder and Roller unit to next tech down, Desert Deposits.

* Deep Harvester can now move 2, can now be built in landlocked city

* Integrated minor sandworm sound/graphics update from Deliverator; fixes transient message about "unable to find sound id"

* Integrated new spice resource and sandstorm effect from Deliverator.

* Tech buttons: Off World Trade, Castes, Holy Jihad, Desert Passage

* Leaderheads: Crisper graphics for Leto 2; replaced 1984 Stilgar with old Stilgar from Children Of Dune; added adult Alia and Ghanima (added Ghanima as a copy of Leto 2, no changes to attributes or anything.)

You can get it from here:

http://jendaveallen.com/fury-road/dune-wars-patch-1-1-4.zip (13 MB)

I am a lot happier with the revised bonus/improvements. Here are some discussion questions for new things to do.

Chopping. I don't really like "spice plants" and "spice tubers", but I suppose the hammer bonus from chopping is important. I have not tried to mix together the new bonus/improvements into the forest and jungle, and there seems to be enough room for the bonuses. The only control over how much forest/jungle we have is from editing the mapscripts, which seems painful. We could just get rid of the forest/jungle. Any thoughts?

New units. I believe koma13 is thinking about this. I tried one set, without changing the tech tree very much, but I was not able to get much improvement. As Deliverator has pointed out, we need a more dune-like approach, with thopters and melee fighters.

The buttons are now one of the things that bother me the most graphically. The resource buttons don't really match what they are for. The build buttons, especially the pasture, camp and village ones, break the "mood". Does anybody care to take a crack at more of them? I have added a few, based on screen captures from the movies, but I do not think they are much better.

Related to buttons, I have not even tried to do anything with gamefonts. At a minimum, we should go through and coordinate which font character appears for the resources in the city screen. The hover text is always right, but an unrelated font character shows up.

Early game expansion seems "better", based on the stats that I am seeing. Some civs get stuck at a small size, but most of them get up to total commerce in the 100-200 range. In vanilla revolution dcm archipelago at the same settings, values like 200-300 are more typical. It seems that civs rarely (but sometimes) found colonies on other islands. Can anybody suggest what we need, to tune this up? I'd like to see about the same total civ population as a vanilla archipelago game.

One thing to keep an eye on is that your income can change a lot. Because spice is random, and a lot of your commerce comes from that, your income can go down later in the game if you hit a low spot of spice availability. Having a couple of deep harvesters on automate is fine for automatically building when it's available; but I have dropped from first place, to third, back to first as the result of spice variations. I don't know if it is fatal, just different from vanilla.

As I moved around the bonuses and resources, I moved aside the desert compound, sandtrout, and little maker. They are still there but I did not count them in any of the stats. It seems to me that there is a section of the game involving these that we are missing so far. There is the whole ecological cycle of sandtrout, little makers, water of life and so forth. There are some techs for this, but they do not really link to the bonuses. How should we capture this?

I have not played into the late game yet. I used to get bored around turn 200-250 due to my economy going negative; hopefully that is better now. So I have not really seen any of the mid-late game techs, units or resources. I don't usually do advanced start, or starting in a higher era, but if somebody had spare time, it might give us a different direction of feedback.

Dune-o-pedia text. I have messed up the text keys a little. But there is no text lost. I have just tried to get rid of most of the vanilla text, and I didn't keep it up to date when units were renamed. If somebody were to contribute text, especially tech quotes, I can easily enter it into the right places.

There are some weirdnesses about the all-terrain transports. You have to be a little careful while they are on land, because you can accidentally select the wrong units from inside the transport, and make it walk instead of riding. Also, supppose you have a DOMAIN_SEA unit selected, and you right click on a ground unit which it can attack, to find the odds. No odds are displayed. I guess the game does not realize the all-terrain unit can attack. You actually can attack, you just have to guess the odds. And if you double-click a mixed unloaded stack to select all of them, only one domain gets selected. So instead of selecting all the units, you get just the all-terrain ones. None of these are big deals, just unexpected side effects.

excellent work david !!!

1.1.4 looks really good david.

The buttons are now one of the things that bother me the most graphically. The resource buttons don't really match what they are for. The build buttons, especially the pasture, camp and village ones, break the "mood". Does anybody care to take a crack at more of them? I have added a few, based on screen captures from the movies, but I do not think they are much better.

Click to expand...

I've thought this too, the buttons could use some improvement. It probably has to be something you chip away at because there are a lot of them. You could rummage through the Emperor TGA pack I uploaded to see it there's anything...

As I moved around the bonuses and resources, I moved aside the desert compound, sandtrout, and little maker. They are still there but I did not count them in any of the stats. It seems to me that there is a section of the game involving these that we are missing so far. There is the whole ecological cycle of sandtrout, little makers, water of life and so forth. There are some techs for this, but they do not really link to the bonuses. How should we capture this?

Click to expand...

I've thought about this too. Building a model of the ecology of Dune is not really worth it unless there it makes the game richer or more fun in some way. You're model for spice creation seems good enough without having little makers making the pre-spice mass which turns into spice...

I noticed one of the optional mod components is called Terraforming. Perhaps terraforming could improve the fertility of the terrain but be damaging to the ecology and the amount of spice created - mirroring what happens between Children of Dune and God Emperor.

The Leto II - worm-human-hybrid - could be an amazing late game unit - maybe call it God Emperor. Could we have World Units like in FfH so that there are some hero units which there is a race on to build like wonders? Also, I've thought before that it would be interesting to have a Civ mod where your leader actually appears as a unit in the game - spice extends life so you have an excuse for long lifespans. Maybe there could be a range of Leader unit promotions to add a sort of role playing element. Having Paul Muad'Dib as a unit with special powers would be cool. A cool thing about the original 1992 Dune game was that your Fremen would be more powerful if Paul was in the battle and even more powerful if he was riding a worm. That game is worth a play if you didn't get it first time around.

I've got a idea on how to get the spice looking much better. My next two tasks are better spice and the FfH2 blizzard style sandstorm. After that back to units with Ornithopter, then Fremen/Fedaykin and Sardukaar, perhaps mixed with some bread and butter reskins.

I am completely out of loop now. Tons of post in this thread. I began to add some new bonus buttons a while back, but really do not see a point till it is really finished. I mean the bonus resource art is changing and would be better to match the buttons to something that players can see is the resource. Well anyway I think there are plenty of people now that can do them. If you guys need any help from me let me know.

I am buried in work trying to make units, promotions, and buildings for rapture now. Only 94 religions to work with, but I can give a hand if really is something that no one knows how to do.

hey guys,

deliverator, im excited on what you plan for the mod !

as for world units:

that is defently on my list!
in my overlord2 mod - i had super units combo units that surved a strategic power unit,

once we get over most of the balance issues and such,
we will get on enlarging the mod with more of everything - of course with taste.

waiting on the new spice - if you gonna make it as a blend with the terrain it should be awesome!

johny,
hey brow,
well im like you, i cant keep up with the updates here..hehe....
david and deliverator took control hehe...

i guess they can ask for help from you if needed...
thanks alot - im sure you have tons on your mind huh...


***
ok according to glider and jdog,

revdcm 2.5 for patch 3.19 will be released tomorrow night,
so reviewing my time schedule , ill work on the merge on friday,
and hopefully we will have version 1.2 later that day with everything you guys added, along with some of my tweaks.

good luck to us )

Deliverator said:

I've got a idea on how to get the spice looking much better. My next two tasks are better spice and the FfH2 blizzard style sandstorm. After that back to units with Ornithopter, then Fremen/Fedaykin and Sardukaar, perhaps mixed with some bread and butter reskins.

Click to expand...

Here is a crazy idea. We have mentioned that it would be nice if spice blended better. Actually, forest and jungle features automatically redraw with a smooth shape. Put two forest tiles next to each other in WB, and you get an oval, not two rectangles. This is the behavior we would "like" for spice. It is done with a number of different nif files with all the different possible quadrant variations.

I know it is possible to *reskin* forest. You could make it cinnamon color. But is it possible to edit the shapes? Suppose you made it much much flatter, and lowered it so the trees are partly underground. Then it would look like a bunch of different small circles on the ground. I don't know if that would look right or not. But having it automatically redraw with a smooth shape would be cool.

I am not sure how much the different densities of spice really adds. I can easily remove that, so there is only one feature, or reduce it to two if that helps.

I've thought this too, the buttons could use some improvement. It probably has to be something you chip away at because there are a lot of them. You could rummage through the Emperor TGA pack I uploaded to see it there's anything...

Click to expand...

Good suggestion. There are thousands of little files in there with eight character names. It would take a while to browse and find anything useful.

johny smith said:

I began to add some new bonus buttons a while back, but really do not see a point till it is really finished. I mean the bonus resource art is changing and would be better to match the buttons to something that players can see is the resource.

Click to expand...

I did not actually change any of the bonus graphics, and I do not see that happening anytime soon. Except for Deliverator, nobody is making new art for Dune. All I did was change the game mechanics for the bonuses. If you have some finished buttons around, or if you had the time to make some new ones, I can add them.

Spice graphics update.

One problem was that to get a natural blend using fades wasn't really working. I had the idea to make alpha masks by throwing chilli powder onto paper in various patterns and take a photo, so that you get edges that look powdery rather than fake. It seems to work well - see attachments. I have lots of other bizarre chilli powder art I can use for variations.

Also, I've moved the colour to orange. The only colour reference Herbert actually makes is that the colour of the gas is orange. I tried reddish spice producing orange gas and it looked wrong so I think moving the colour to orange is better. There is a general issue with colour. The desert colours are very desaturated browns which is what makes them look nice. Having anything too saturated looks out of place. There is a very fine line between desaturated red/orange and brown. Also, I want the spice to be slightly more saturated that the environment to highlight its special magical qualities.

There was another issue in that the tiles were floating at land level quite a long distance above the sea. I've moved them down but now since they are bigger than a tile they tuck under the coastal cliffs.

I can take a look how forest graphics work. Given that my spice oil nif is basically a square tile, with a couple of extra bits it is very simple. It shouldn't be to hard to make a flat tile forest. The only issue is forest is a Feature and isn't the spice implemented as a Bonus?

Deliverator said:

It shouldn't be to hard to make a flat tile forest. The only issue is forest is a Feature and not a Bonus.

Click to expand...

Looks cool! Actually, the graphic you made *is* for features; each plot with such a feature also has a bonus. This is so we can have three different density levels (different features) without screwing up the tech tree with three different bonuses.

Salt pans instead of spice plant?

I am not sure if I completely like it, but here is something we could do graphically instead of those pink "spice plants" for jungle. I was thinking about what terrain features you would find on Dune, and one which we are missing is "salt pan" or "salt flat". Basically a big white patch. It could be a straight up replacement for jungle; it would appear more often around the equator where it is hottest; it could have a move 2 (deeper, less traction); it could have a health penalty. Instead of "chop down a jungle", the action would be called "reclaim a salt flat".

I simply replaced the jungle graphic with the original icepack, and recolorized a tiny bit to get rid of the blue. By accident, the icepack altitude is almost the same as the rest of the land, so it only sticks out in places. That was not really what I was aiming for, but it still seems better than pink wheat. What do you think?

I think salt pans/flats are a good idea. My chilli powder alpha mask technique can easily be used on some salt images (rather than the cinnamon I used for the spice) for graphics. The only issue I can think of is that our terrain might become a bit bland and flat. I'm wondering if we can add some graphical only rocky outcrops that serve no purpose other than making the terrain less flat.

I've been thinking about the forest thing for spice and I think it is worth a try. If we replace the trees with tiles fixed at ground level and get the textures right, we could get the natural looking patches we are looking for.

Now all we need is some dune-theme replacement for forests. The challenge is that they add health, slow movement, and provide a chop bonus. I cannot think of anything you might find in the desert, which would do that. Any thoughts?

hey guys,

nice looking salt, i like this instead of the red grass,

though i kinda gotten usedto the mushrooms and to the spice plant, but salts bettet.

how about instead of the mushrooms we will have another mineral ?



*****
good news!
revdcm 2.5 was released! yeeee

today i will start to convert the mod to it and patch 3.19 along with stuff i wrote, hopefully by mid sutterday will have version 1.2.

I won't put this as a patch, but I spent a little time moving the text around. Please include the attached files in 1.2. For civilizationinfos and leaderheadinfos, I moved all the text into DuneWarsText.xml. For unitinfos and techinfos, I corrected the text keys after you and I both renamed units.

Please keep DuneWarsText.txt and DuneWarsText.tcl in assets/xml/text. The txt file has just the English language text, and the tcl script converts it into all five languages. This way anybody who wants to add civilopedia text can add it in just one language, and I can keep the other languages in sync.

I have also added saltpan/icepack_1024.dds, which is the small recolorization I did of the icepack to get saltpans. Please copy vanilla art/terrain/features/icepack into a new directory art/terrain/features/saltpan, and then copy this file into that directory. This, along with civ4artdefines_feature.xml, should enable you to get the jungle replacement I showed in my screenshot. Let me know if these instructions were not clear.

davidlallen said:

Now all we need is some dune-theme replacement for forests. The challenge is that they add health, slow movement, and provide a chop bonus. I cannot think of anything you might find in the desert, which would do that. Any thoughts?

Click to expand...

Do you have to place forests? I know that there is an argument for some map diversity, but this is Dune we are talking about. Diversity is great, but should definately be subtle. If you don't need it for gameplay, and it's not in the books, just don't put it on the map.

I haven't tried the latest version, but I will when I get home from work. It looks like you guys are doing great!

cephalo said:

Do you have to place forests? I know that there is an argument for some map diversity, but this is Dune we are talking about.

Click to expand...

I have a feeling there would be an outcry if the health and chop bonus of forest was removed, and not replaced with anything. I would love to come up with a Dune-ish thing we could do instead. Any suggestions? Or do you think the health/chop is not so important?

How about an area strewn with small to medium blocks of rock? Horrible to walk in, a nightmare to drive in. Could feasibly add a production and chop bonus. If you realy want health from it too, mayby there are some lichens or something in among the rocks.

Rocks with lichen. That would work. Now to find graphics! Thanks.

One other itme for possible inclusion in 1.2 which I forgot to mention. In the DuneWarsText.xml I sent previously, there are hints for Dune Wars. These are the popups that come while the game is loading. We can use these to highlight things which are different about Dune Wars, which may not be obvious from the civilopedia. Locally, I have *removed* all the hints from vanilla and rev dcm, many of which refer to units that don't exist in Dune Wars. So the *only* hints that come are the Dune Wars ones. Please find attached assets/xml/gameinfo/civ4hints.xml which does this.

The hints are:

You can expand across the desert by researching Desert Exploration. This allows scouts, settlers and soldiers to cross the edges of the deep desert.

When you research Desert Suits, scouts can cross any terrain, including deep desert.

Sandstorms can destroy improvements and troops. They gain strength traveling across the deep desert, and lose strength crossing hills and peaks.

Sandworms are too strong to attack, and will destroy improvements. Use the thumper promotion to drop a thumper, which will draw the sandworm’s attention away from your units.

Spice blows look like tornadoes which last several turns. They explode and spread different densities of spice in the adjacent plots.

Deep harvesters can build a spice harvester improvement on spice bonuses. Put several deep harvesters on automation to keep the improvements built.

As soon as you build your first spice harvester improvement, found your spice corporation. This will give you a lot of commerce income for each improvement you control.

He who controls the spice, controls the universe.