The Vault Dev. Canteen (General Discussion)

You can just delete your P-Archid files as the info was either duplicated or unused. I also deleted all the background images for the old OOB Civs from the Art/Interface/Background folder as that was another 12 MB that was never going to be used

Glad that I turned up at a good time. I tend to drift about a bit between different projects and just fancied a bit of time back with Civ4. It's also nice for me to have someone else to work with as 99% of the time I code on my own, which suits me most of the time, but every now and then its good to bounce ideas off other people and have something different to work on.

Well you are always welcome here!

Good point about the specific(Old World) backgrounds, I forgot about those.

I have come so close to having a proper GUI team member so many times it is gutting!

Why does everyone have to keep going and getting lives!!

I do hold out hope that like you, those who left the Vault will one day return, wiser and seeking the betterment of Vault DEV!

I'll have a look at the DynTraits suggestion you have. What I may do is have the flag list the players traits without the effects and have the effects as a second tab on the trait counter screen. I'm no Python guru but I should be able to work that one out.

I also want to make some other changes as I don't like the way that the counter for traits that are in their final level is displayed. I am thinking of capping it in the display by having it state something like 300+/300 rather than 567/300.

I was also toying with the idea of putting an optional hard cap on the counter value of a trait. If the counter value keeps incrementing it can make it difficult for a player to have a change in strategy partway through the game be reflected in their traits. Usually players need to do a bit of warfare at the start of the game, which pushes up their aggressive traits rapidly and then this can define the player for the rest of the game. My thought was if there could be a cap put on a trait counter and a trigger that reduced it each round then the early game strategy would be reflected quicker. I see with your civics you ues the <RemoveTrait> tag so it wouldn't impact those, but for behaviour based traits it could be used to stop rushes of behaviour having an effect that lingers too long.

Yes that all sounds interesting.

I really like the optional hard cap, like a bSetCeiling and bSetFloor tag, with an iCeiling and iFloor number that can be set.

Then you can have deep and shallow traits that are 'long remembered' or 'easily forgotten' allowing you to change the nnumber of 'anti' choices you have to make before it goes away again.`

That would allow for some really nuanced Traits like extreme traits that only last if you keep doing the same extreme thing every few turns.

New dll uploaded that includes the min/max trait counter values. You will also need to download the updated Assets\Xml\Civilizations\CIV4CivilizationsSchema.xml file

The values can be set in either the Trait or TraitTrigger infos to allow for greater flexibility. The more restrictive of the two values will be used in every case, e.g. if you set the Trait to have a max count of 250 and a TraitTrigger to have a value of 300 then when the trigger fires it cannot increase the trait count value over 250 as that is the most restrictive. If the values are reversed with the Trait having a max value of 300 and the trigger having a value of 250, again when the trigger fires it will not increase the count to be above 250, BUT another trigger may be able to increase it further, up to the 300 max defined in the Trait.

The same pair of optional tags are used in both Trait & TraitTrigger infos, with defaults of:
iMaxCounterValue - MAX_INT
iMinCounterValue - MIN_INT
This means that the existing traits and triggers will continue to work as expected without change. The tags go in the following places:

TraitInfo

TraitTriggerInfo in the CounterChanges section

Looking into the GUI changes now

mmmm tasty!

I need to re-gather my thoughts and plans for my civic/trait work and get back to a level of energy and motivation with it, so I will hold off downloading for now. You might be done by the time I get my energy back!

It's all very exciting though!

So apparently blender has an fbx exporter. I never knew that. Why this is interesting is because autodesk softimage modtools is an unholy demon a necessary program in exporting meshes to get them into several games: SWBF2 and some source engine games. I tested it out and the fbx file was able to maintain the mesh, armature, and animation a lot better than I had expected it to. Unfortunately upon exporting the mesh, armature, and animation from autodesk softimage modtools the game had an issue reading the .msh file. It recognized that the texture was there but not mesh itself.

autodesk keeps playing games with my heart.

It just bounced your heart around!

I just checked the social group. Its been 3 years

Yeah I have been off internet for a while. That Vault is a ghost town now!

I am not doing so good at them minute so I have hit pause on the mod for the time being. Along with just about everything else.

Lib.Spi't said:

I am not doing so good at them minute so I have hit pause on the mod for the time being. Along with just about everything else.

Click to expand...

Don't worry about it. We got Mr. House in game. That is a pretty big milestone.

Get better soon.

Cheers, yeah that was you happy ;D

I've taken to messing with Empire at Wars files. Turns out that the Alamo engine, Empire at Wars engine, only has one export/importer. And said importer ONLY works on an extremely old version of Autodesk's 3dsMax, which is far more stable Softimage Mod Tools. However the exporter does not work with the only demo version of Autodesk's 3dsMax that I could find. Autodesk does not provide access to their old releases under ordinary circumstances.

I have to wonder why any would ever make any export/import tools for their software. From my limited contact with it, it appears extremely restrictive.

Doh!

It might have been a security thing, or they simply builot an in house tool to work with their in house setup. Without any thought to anyone using it for any reason.

Yeah they usually seem to be just ports of the export tools that the company uses itself. Unfortunately with older games these tools become much less usable if someone hasn't already converted to work with a more open programs.