MapView 2.0 - Civilization 4 Editor

Please add a warning box when quitting MapView:

"You have unmerged layers, are you sure you want to quit?"

It's been several times now I've saved without merging the layers and after closing MapView, only to find that I have to do everything over again once I've loaded up the map in WorldBuilder.

AveiMil said:

When I try to place a Hill feature by using the option two places to the right of FEATURE_FALLOUT I have to click on the plot perhaps 20 times before the Hill is actually placed where I want it to. The same applies when reversing back to flatland.

Is this a known problem?

Click to expand...

Wow, this is odd. Does any other tool work instantly? Are bonuses, terrain etc. working properly? Does "hill" or "flatland" behave different compared to "peak" or "below sea level"?

Edit: The "How this tile will be saved" element on the right side of the application, does it show a change when you place the hill? Or when you just place the hill and then change the view (move the camera), does that update the view? Mayb it's just a visual thing. Would be great to know. Thx

AveiMil said:

Please add a warning box when quitting MapView:

"You have unmerged layers, are you sure you want to quit?"

It's been several times now I've saved without merging the layers and after closing MapView, only to find that I have to do everything over again once I've loaded up the map in WorldBuilder.

Click to expand...

Nice idea!

Gr3yHound said:

Wow, this is odd. Does any other tool work instantly? Are bonuses, terrain etc. working properly? Does "hill" or "flatland" behave different compared to "peak" or "below sea level"?

Edit: The "How this tile will be saved" element on the right side of the application, does it show a change when you place the hill? Or when you just place the hill and then change the view (move the camera), does that update the view? Mayb it's just a visual thing. Would be great to know. Thx

Click to expand...

I never tested "below sea level" but as far as I remember (at work now) "peak" behaved the same way.

The odd thing was that sometimes placing a Hill would register immediatly (or within one or two clicks) but then maybe after placing 2 or three Hills suddently it would not seem to respond. But if I kept clicking with my mouse repeadtly eventually (sometimes spamming the left click 20-30 times) a Hill would be placed. It seemed that it was always easiest to use the Hill tool the first time.

The "How this tile will be saved" element on the right side did not appear to change either, so it was not just a graphical clitch in the rendered area.

I also have further suggestions for improvement for MapView:

1. In the "How this tile will be saved" element, enable direct editing, so that if I wish I can set the Plot type to 1 or 3 manually or edit any element as I please (copy pasting plots would then be easy).

2. I've created a Map with MapView where I want starting positions, so after creating the map in MapView I open it up in notepad and set the starting location to for example x=31,y=8 for each player ID (since MapView does not support it). The problem then if I find a "bug" I want to correct or simply want to add some new land after opening the map up again in MapView and making my changes, once I save MapView will overwrite all those settings even though I never changed anything in that regard in MapView. I wish MapView would leave these settings that I never modified alone.

I was forced to keep a backup of the original and then I just copied/pasted all the information in the top where the TEAM and PLAYER items are (and options) back into the MapView edited version with notepad.

3. *BUG* This is related to #2, in one of my map files I had a MOPTION (multiplayer option) set to "SIMUTANOUS_TURNS" (sic). When editing this file in MapView and saving it, MapView had changed this from MOPTION="SIMUTANOUS_TURNS" to OPTION=SIMUTANOUS_TURNS. When I then open up the map in Civ4 as a new scenario all of the sudden Advanced Start and Advanced Starting points and one other option are enabled! This was throwing me off at first as there's no obvious correlation but I found out by removing OPTION=SIMUTANOUS_TURNS from the map file via notepad.

4. *REQUEST* Rotating the layer 90 degrees clockwise and CCW, can this be added?

5. Add some tool tip or a piece of information that tells the user that he/she has to press and hold the SPACEBAR to navigate! First starting this application without ANY knowledge about map editing I seriously used a good 15 minutes trying to figure out how to move around and slamming my head in the desk in frustrating wondering if the application was just utterly broken.

Thanks for your effort!

AveiMil said:

I never tested "below sea level" but as far as I remember (at work now) "peak" behaved the same way.

The odd thing was that sometimes placing a Hill would register immediatly (or within one or two clicks) but then maybe after placing 2 or three Hills suddently it would not seem to respond. But if I kept clicking with my mouse repeadtly eventually (sometimes spamming the left click 20-30 times) a Hill would be placed. It seemed that it was always easiest to use the Hill tool the first time.

The "How this tile will be saved" element on the right side did not appear to change either, so it was not just a graphical clitch in the rendered area.

Click to expand...

This is really weird, i looked into the code and have no idea what could possible cause this. I will try to remember and see if i can get this fixed.

AveiMil said:

1. In the "How this tile will be saved" element, enable direct editing, so that if I wish I can set the Plot type to 1 or 3 manually or edit any element as I please (copy pasting plots would then be easy).

Click to expand...

Yeah, that would be cool, i know, but currently my parsing algorythm isn't really set up to re-parse certain tiles, but this feature is on my personal wishlist too.

AveiMil said:

2. I've created a Map with MapView where I want starting positions, so after creating the map in MapView I open it up in notepad and set the starting location to for example x=31,y=8 for each player ID (since MapView does not support it). The problem then if I find a "bug" I want to correct or simply want to add some new land after opening the map up again in MapView and making my changes, once I save MapView will overwrite all those settings even though I never changed anything in that regard in MapView. I wish MapView would leave these settings that I never modified alone.

Click to expand...

I already started something i call "Unknown Lines" which will basicly allow you to keep lines inside a map that aren't actually supported by the data structure used by MapView. If i get this done, MapView will not forget those things anymore.

I was forced to keep a backup of the original and then I just copied/pasted all the information in the top where the TEAM and PLAYER items are (and options) back into the MapView edited version with notepad.

AveiMil said:

3. *BUG* This is related to #2, in one of my map files I had a MOPTION (multiplayer option) set to "SIMUTANOUS_TURNS" (sic). When editing this file in MapView and saving it, MapView had changed this from MOPTION="SIMUTANOUS_TURNS" to OPTION=SIMUTANOUS_TURNS. When I then open up the map in Civ4 as a new scenario all of the sudden Advanced Start and Advanced Starting points and one other option are enabled! This was throwing me off at first as there's no obvious correlation but I found out by removing OPTION=SIMUTANOUS_TURNS from the map file via notepad.

Click to expand...

I'm aware about that.

AveiMil said:

4. *REQUEST* Rotating the layer 90 degrees clockwise and CCW, can this be added?

Click to expand...

Should be easily possible, noted!

AveiMil said:

5. Add some tool tip or a piece of information that tells the user that he/she has to press and hold the SPACEBAR to navigate! First starting this application without ANY knowledge about map editing I seriously used a good 15 minutes trying to figure out how to move around and slamming my head in the desk in frustrating wondering if the application was just utterly broken.

Click to expand...

Yeah, i want a help system too. ;D

My best regards for your superb toll, Gr3yHound!

Just finished designing my first map. I have to admit, I was quite shocked at first when BTS crashed attempting to load the scenario, but thx to all you people I now at least know, how to circumvent it!

Keep on coding!

Edit: The map now works fine, but all tiles that should be hills, are instead "below sealevel" Not a hard thing to fix, but just weird...

I attached a screenshot taken from inside the worldbuilder.

chriscobain said:

My best regards for your superb toll, Gr3yHound!

Just finished designing my first map. I have to admit, I was quite shocked at first when BTS crashed attempting to load the scenario, but thx to all you people I now at least know, how to circumvent it!

Keep on coding!

Edit: The map now works fine, but all tiles that should be hills, are instead "below sealevel" Not a hard thing to fix, but just weird...

I attached a screenshot taken from inside the worldbuilder.

Click to expand...

At first, thanks for your kind words, and i'm glad you are happy with the tool. My gfx card is broken so i cannot really work at it now.

Hills and "below sea" level is really twisted? Noone has ever complained about that. I even think someone said this a few months ago, so i changed it.

I follow the rules from Dales indepth look at the WBS file

Dale said:

PlotType= the setting which determines the height of the plot. This basically determines if the plot is below sea level, a hill, a mountain, or flat terrain. Valid values are 0=mountain, 1=hilly, 2=flat, 3=below sea level.

Click to expand...

Another bug I've noticed:

Once you've placed down a Feature_Ice, you can't undo this, you cannot replace it with Ocean agian for instance.

chriscobain said:

Just finished designing my first map. I have to admit, I was quite shocked at first when BTS crashed attempting to load the scenario, but thx to all you people I now at least know, how to circumvent it!

Click to expand...

I'm having this problem now, can you please tell me what you did to circumvent it?

Adding these settings to the map solved the immediate crash:

world size=WORLDSIZE_SMALL
climate=CLIMATE_TEMPERATE
sealevel=SEALEVEL_MEDIUM

However, I'm unable to make my map WRAP. Got any ideas?

BeginMap
grid width=84
grid height=52
top latitude=90
bottom latitude=90
wrap X=1
wrap Y=0


EDIT: Figured it out, bottom latitude needs to be -90.

Another bug:

Flip Vertical and Flip Horizontal are reversed.

oh, thx for all your help. I write all the stuff down and get it fixed hopefully, just don't know when i can release all the updates.

Gr3yHound said:

oh, thx for all your help. I write all the stuff down and get it fixed hopefully, just don't know when i can release all the updates.

Click to expand...

Hey! Good to see you're still here and working on it. Any chance of you finding some time soon to give us an update?

Hmm, good stuff

This is great! Any idea when we can be expecting the next version? I can't wait to be able to change the map sizes for pic2 map!

Shqype said:

Hey! Good to see you're still here and working on it. Any chance of you finding some time soon to give us an update?

Click to expand...

The mayor problem is my defected gfx card which doesn't allow me to run the app atm, my 3d is not working at all. I will need to get that fixed to ensure the proper functionality.

Silverfang said:

[...] I can't wait to be able to change the map sizes for pic2 map!

Click to expand...

I fixed that already, i finished the variable size definition for pic2map but i'm not capable of compiling the the plugin for the current release version atm. ;(

Have you read the wiki article? It gives hints about a way how you can "trick" pic2map (using image resizing, image canvas resizing and copy paste etc.)

I found that method to be really confusing, and I still couldn't get a map big enough for what I'm trying to do. But that's okay, I'm not in any rush really.

Did you understand the mechanism of the trick?

If not, try this to understand what i mean:

Step 1:
- Create a picture of size: 300x150 and let mapview generate a map.
---> MapView would generate a 130x65 map from it.

Lesson learned: MapView will always create a fixed width from whatever input has been specified.

Step 2: (the trick)
- Create a picture of size 600x300 (that's the double size) and place the content from Step 1 into the upper left corner
- then let mapview generate a map. (Relativly to the map, the things your want to be used will only be 50% as large)
---> MapView would generate a 130x65 map from it.
... but the actual map content will just be in the left upper corner consuming 65x32. You now can now copy paste that left upper part in a newly created 65x32 map.

I know this is akward but i have this issue fixed, i just need to get a new release out which will hopefully happen quite soon.

Hey, I have a weird problem.

I saved a scenario with mapview and now whenever I try to open the map I noticed a small lock on the file picture. I'd always wondered what that meant, until I went to go and test the scenario. Turns out, nothing can see the file. If I try to look at the directory with the file browser, the file isn't there. Beyond the sword can't see the file, and can't load it, but in mapview I can see it and load it into mapview. How do I solve this?

Edit: Sorry, I found out I was saving it directly to the program files directory without administrator permission. Saving into my documents solved the problem. Still a little weird how it could save it there as an invisible file.

f35acepilot said:

Hey, I have a weird problem.

I saved a scenario with mapview and now whenever I try to open the map I noticed a small lock on the file picture. I'd always wondered what that meant, until I went to go and test the scenario. Turns out, nothing can see the file. If I try to look at the directory with the file browser, the file isn't there. Beyond the sword can't see the file, and can't load it, but in mapview I can see it and load it into mapview. How do I solve this?

Click to expand...

This is a little bit weird, MapView doesn't have more or less rights on your system as you do. I'm really surprised right now. What OS do you use?