Thanks for posting! I know ppl are busy playing (hopefully, lol), but I do greatly appreciate hearing what you all think!
although I would opt for K-Mod's AI and not better bts (but perhaps it was a time issue with different release dates of both mods and not a question of personal taste)
Pretty much. Please understand I've been working on this since the beginning (2006), and BBAI was out (and actively being updated) for several years before K-Mod existed at all (as far as I know anyway, hehe). In fact from 2008 to 2010 I was often out with a MM update incorporating the latest BBAI version before any other big mods had it yet, and I was very proud of that! (Incidentally, this is also the core reason why my 3-series versions were smaller and more frequent than my 4.0, 4.1, and 4.2 massive monolithic releases, heh.)
I spent a fair amount of time early in 4.2 development working on merging in the K-Mod code btw, but the problem is I have a lot of custom code of my own that's evolved over the years to both support MM's custom features and to fix or improve vanilla mechanics and implement my own custom rules changes. 2/3's of it is separate from K-Mod's custom code, but in the remaining areas I have to rewrite a lot of stuff to make them work together properly, and that can be very hard in some cases. Additionally, he has a LARGE amount of code that's different from the vanilla base now as well, and while I figured out what most of it was and how most of it works during my earlier merge attempt, there were still a few things I didn't figure out yet, and it's risky to copy those in without knowing what they're for, or if they might cause problems with any of my MM code anywhere.
I was originally planning to include the merge in version 4.2, but it took forever just to get done everything I DID get done, and I really REALLY want/need a finished, stable, happy baseline copy that no one is experiencing much crashing or OOS'ing with, and that everyone is generally very satisfied with. This is both because 4.1 DID have issues and I need to redeem myself lol, but also because I need it in a safe place, with all the high-level content finished and polished off that I want to add too, so I can begin tearing up and rewriting the DLL engine underneath KNOWING that I can focus exclusively on that for a while, AND that everything above it is working correctly now. I didn't have that assurance until now, and I do still need to hear back from people (and my RL friend EnormousD especially, heh) that 4.2 really IS where I think it is, before I proceed.
Plus, I'm pretty freaking exhausted at the moment from 2-3 months of frantic 24/7 workmode finishing out my endless to-do lists to get 4.2 launched, and I'm taking a little time off heh. If all goes well and I get caught up on all the non-Civ stuff in my life, and 4.2 does indeed prove stable, I'm hoping to start over again on the K-Mod code merge project within a few weeks to a few months. (Starting over will be easier because Karadoc is now 3+ versions ahead of where he was when I was doing it before. My previous attempt did still help me a LOT though getting familiarized with his code, so I won't be going in blind this time.)
But no, to answer your question lol, it was not a deliberate choice between BBAI and K-Mod; more like a choice between BBAI and nothing, ie vanilla (which is horrible), that then grew quite entangled. (I, erm, did mention my intent to work on this as the very next major thing both on the CivFanatics download page, and in the small orange text in the center of the mod's in-game titlescreen.
)
as far as art goes this is also the best texture mod for terrain (great water contrast), I think safe to use with any mod, also not exaggerated (i.e. too sharp) good quality texture similar to vanilla,
the only thing I would do is to have the water animations from ROM (they are great) while preserving the coast vs deep ocean contrast that is fantastic and the realism invictus mountains/snow, snow has great alpha channels
I am now playing K-mod with terrain art from your mod (music is also excellent) but I really miss your features in that mod (extended tech tree et cetera).
If you mean my title-screen music track, thanks!
And thanks for the compliments on my terrain graphics! The land ones are all copied directly from other mods, but with the water ones I basically took the best water and blend textures, and alpha masks, I could find that other people had made, combined them in a little different way, and then worked REALLY hard (I remember this very clearly too! lol) for several days in early Dec 2012 as part of version 4.1 making custom texture variants for all the new temperature and depth zones. I love it when they're appreciated, as I feel like those water graphics are one of the best things I've ever done.
I will make a note to look at those Snowy Peaks when I have time - thanks! I can't be sure, but I probably did miss them.
As far as "water animation" goes though, it's a bit complicated, heh. It's been a while and I'm a little hazy on the details at the moment so don't hold me to this, but basically, the game engine has a single hardcoded "animation" it does to create the illusion of waves, and it's made entirely from combining the base and blend textures. To modify the waves you may have to change the base graphics themselves too, or maybe it's just a matter of using a different blend file, I'm not sure. I may have done it the way I did b/c I had to, or it may have been b/c I just liked these waves the best - I'd have to check lol.
Well if you can post your savefile somewhere or PM it to me I can try my usual approach where I just gradually disable stuff in the turnover processing until it finally gets through to see where the crash is, and if it's something stupid or simple with the high-level code I can fix it easily, but most of the crashes D reported in 4.1 were much deeper which is why I turned off my RiverLinkFix component, which really SHOULD have taken care of everything, sigh. The good news is vanilla is known to have some issues that can't be solved without switching to K-Mod, but they're supposed to be pretty rare, so it's probably still something to do with the mod, grr. Or it could be those K-Mod event fixes I added at the last minute, wouldn't that just be perfect lol.
