Development Thread

Excuse me to intrude your dev thread but I read in the initial post you wanted to get a different installer. I suggest Inno Setup. It's easy to use and above all free. The examples are enough to get you started with copying in different folders and reading/writing in the registry. I hope this helps and thanks for the great work.
 
Thanks Xebeth! I'll take a look at this, with another two I was thinking about, and seeing which is easiest for future releases.
 
Alright I was playing around with the Hints & Tipss mod some more, and I got it to load on all but some of the early autosaves I have in my directory. (I keep all 750 saves til the game is done... don't ask.)

So I took the files out, and reloaded the autosave that was causing problems and it crashed too. So I took all of BUG out, and got the same crash. I'm guessing it's because the save was from a period when the EDU was half in, and those early saves are stuck in limbo. Anyway, the Hints & Tips MOD is working.

Also I've found that all the hints in the strategy file are not resizing properly while the ones in the file I modded are being resized to show the full tip, including ones I've added. So I'm thinking that just moving these files from the Strategy file of CIV to the BTS file will cause them all to be reloaded. I'll be trying this out later tonight, and doing some more play testing.

If it works like planned, expect the working hint mod, with resizing, on SVN tonight, with a list of the Hints & Tips added in the thread so we have something to build from.
 
As Alerum has just described the Archeology mod (no gameplay changes -- just a message), I think it's great for the Flavorful version.

@Ruff - Cammagno covered exactly what I was getting at (requiring slightly more complicated calculations). Still workable, just gotta think it through. In many cases (one major GP producing city, several minor cities) the next X cities to produce a GP will be the same city.

I'll have to look in the C++ code to figure out how it calculates the next thresholds as it's not a straight "add X" each time. The Civ API doesn't provide any future-looking functions. For that reason, I had to implement the C++ whipping code in Python for the Whip Assist bar.
 
hehehehehe... I don't know what I was thinking. The probably is something else. When a hint pops up, the program resizes it to fix just the hint. The problem comes when the next hint loads and the window retains it's same size. The only thing I can think to fix it would be to add four or 5 [NEWLINE] to each hint. That will ensure each one is loaded, and if a long one is cut off, only the blank lines will be cut off. That's alot of Ctrl + V's though. Will work on it tonight, but won't get the list put up until tomorrow.

I'm going to post it, as is now, on SVN.
 
I was thinking more about the multi-city GP bar concept and had a question. First, it may be that Cammagno and myself misunderstood Ruff's point (please clarify).

For example, you have three cities of concern.

City 1: 10 GP/turn, @90 (1 turn)
City 2: 1 GP/turn, @98 (2 turns)
City 3: 20 GP/turn, @40 (3 turns)

You currently need 100 GP points, and will need 200 for the next level. These numbers are contrived to make it easy to see the numbers. Don't get caught up with them being unrealistic.

Option A: Show Next GP Birth Only

This would show the 3 cities in the order they appear above with the number of turns each would take to bear a GP if all other cities were ignored.

Option B: Show Future GP Births

(the one Cammagno described)

This would show the second city that will actually create a GP assuming you change nothing. Since the threshold jumps to 200 in 1 turn, city 2 drops out of the race. Here's how the list would be displayed (cycling bars, whatever):

City 1: 1 turn (100)
City 3: 8 turns (200)
City 3: 23 turns (300)
City 1: 41 turns (400)
City 3: 48 turns (500)

One reason to use Option A is so you can see that you should slow cities 1 and 3 to allow city 2 to pop because otherwise it will never get a chance to pop in the foreseeable future -- its GPPs are wasted otherwise. I currently use the CDA to determine this.

Frankly, I don't really know that Option B would be as useful. We could make yet another option to switch between the two, but I only want to do that if it's truly helpful. I suppose knowing when the next 4 GP will be born could be helpful as well.
 
One reason to use Option A is so you can see that you should slow cities 1 and 3 to allow city 2 to pop because otherwise it will never get a chance to pop in the foreseeable future -- its GPPs are wasted otherwise. I currently use the CDA to determine this.

Frankly, I don't really know that Option B would be as useful. We could make yet another option to switch between the two, but I only want to do that if it's truly helpful. I suppose knowing when the next 4 GP will be born could be helpful as well.

About option B uses: consider that the cities will produce different types of GP (normally they are optimized for one type), so it can be useful to know which type of GP will be generated (and even tell you which city you have to alter to change the order, without doing complex calculations).


the thing is that I fear both type of information are useful... so an option to choose the right one will be ok IMHO, and even better will be to have a switch button or something like it near the bar, but I fear that it's not possible...
 
Option A: Show Next GP Birth Only

This would show the 3 cities in the order they appear above with the number of turns each would take to bear a GP if all other cities were ignored.

Option B: Show Future GP Births

(the one Cammagno described)

This would show the second city that will actually create a GP assuming you change nothing. Since the threshold jumps to 200 in 1 turn, city 2 drops out of the race.
Good points all. I would punt for Option A as it is easiest (even thou slightly misleading). But then again, a build message like 'STONEHENGE (178 TURNS)' is also misleading but you know it is wrong because the city will grow. If you are too dumb to realize that the future cities could change over time then you should uninstall your copy of Civ4 and give it away :D.
 
Alright, I'm irked now. They still haven't fixed the waiting for other players bug, even though I found about another 20 people who posted the same problem, and now I'm trying to make a colony, but because I played with all 18 civs, they won't let me, even though I killed off 3 so far.

Anyway, I found a MOD that increases the max number of civs in a game to 40... all 34 in BTS, and 6 spots for dead Civs to reappear as Colonies. The only problem is that it's compiled in the .DLL. You think this can be done with Python? I know it can't be done with XML.

Edit: My 2 cents on the GP bar... it's clickable right? Why not make on bar, that when you click will cycle through the top 3 cities which are about to pop a GP. If this was alright in the works, I'll apologize now for not reading the whole concept.
 
I found a MOD that increases the max number of civs in a game to 40... all 34 in BTS, and 6 spots for dead Civs to reappear as Colonies. The only problem is that it's compiled in the .DLL. You think this can be done with Python?

Can't be done with Python or XML, sorry. The main problem is that there are constants defined in the C++ DLL called MAX_NUM_PLAYERS. How they chose 18 I have no idea. Not entirely true; my guess is that there were 18 (or 17 to allow for barbs) civs in vanilla Civ4.
 
Hey guys,

Just wondering how everything is going and if we'll be ready for 1.00 this weekend, or need to delay another week?

The only things I can see, besides minor tweaks, are PLE, Cam's translations of the GP Mod and it's inclusion, and some variant of Top Score. Ruff's naming is done, Nik has all the units in, and Ket's gone AWOL, so I don't know if he he's working on anything or not.

Let me know by tonight if you can guys. Either way I'll put out a release this weekend, either 0.16 or 1.00. I'm going to keep the ReadMes for 0.16 labeled as 1.00 just because I don't think it'll be an issue, and would feel bad to have Cam do it after he did it once and I went and changed it all to 1.00, and I just don't feel like going through the trouble of something so small.
 
There are is a bug report in the unit naming that I will be looking at this week end. I would not suggest releasing 1.0 yet. I think that we can release a beta version and get some more user testing it. It would make sense getting it mentioned on the MOD update.
 
Hey guys,

Just wondering how everything is going and if we'll be ready for 1.00 this weekend, or need to delay another week?

The only things I can see, besides minor tweaks, are PLE, Cam's translations of the GP Mod and it's inclusion, and some variant of Top Score. Ruff's naming is done, Nik has all the units in, and Ket's gone AWOL, so I don't know if he he's working on anything or not.

Let me know by tonight if you can guys. Either way I'll put out a release this weekend, either 0.16 or 1.00. I'm going to keep the ReadMes for 0.16 labeled as 1.00 just because I don't think it'll be an issue, and would feel bad to have Cam do it after he did it once and I went and changed it all to 1.00, and I just don't feel like going through the trouble of something so small.

Well, my opinion is to wait one more week, because the unit naming is in but not working yet, PLE isn'in in (but it can wait), the CDA pages are missing (waiting for building icons), and I think that some more work is needed for docs (features and changes files).
About Italian translation, the GP mod is translated yet, but I'll have more work to do with the ActualQuotes translation (in this week-end, if my girlfriend agrees :D ).
About releasing 0.16... My humble opinion is "yes, no problem, but only with a working unit rename"... I don't care at all if we don't have some features yet, but the features included are supposed to work... so I'll wait for ruff to fix it... furthermore, it is a great component :)
 
I have a few things left to do still.

Bugs
  • Switch Power Ratio to us-vs-them.
  • Scrolling scoreboard
  • Fix Civ4lert delay
Features
  • Whatever we want to do for showing multiple GP bars.
  • XP counter
  • City Arrows (see Main Interface Mod)
  • PLE
  • Specialist Stacker
  • Whip Assist Bar
Perhaps we should cut all the features for a 2.0 release in a few weeks. PLE will be big. The others I can probably do in a night each. I am finding I have much less time now.

I am all for another beta release so people can do some more playtesting and setting a feature freeze for a week to squash bugs. We would then release 1.0 next week. Don't worry about changing the readme version numbers as this is a 1.0 beta.
 
I have a few things left to do still.

Bugs
  • Switch Power Ratio to us-vs-them.
  • Scrolling scoreboard
  • Fix Civ4lert delay
Features
  • Whatever we want to do for showing multiple GP bars.
  • XP counter
  • City Arrows (see Main Interface Mod)
  • PLE
  • Specialist Stacker
  • Whip Assist Bar
Perhaps we should cut all the features for a 2.0 release in a few weeks. PLE will be big. The others I can probably do in a night each. I am finding I have much less time now.

I am all for another beta release so people can do some more playtesting and setting a feature freeze for a week to squash bugs. We would then release 1.0 next week. Don't worry about changing the readme version numbers as this is a 1.0 beta.

I agree with you, also on delaying features to next release.
If it is possible, can you add the famous :d building icon headers in the week-end, so that I can work on the pages on sunday? If it isn't possible no problem, I'll work on the translation instead and on those pages when it will be possible. :crazyeye:
 
If it is possible, can you add the famous :d building icon headers in the week-end, so that I can work on the pages on sunday?

Sorry, I forgot to add that to the list of bugs. Yes, I can do that this weekend, but I don't think you need to wait. I posted above that I will make sure that however I add the icons will not affect the pages you create. The columns you'll be defining will all be much wider than needed for the icons, so that shouldn't be a problem.

We still have the question of whether or not to swap out "actual building" for "civ-specifc building". I can see the need for both.

Example: Mint (replaces Forge)

The Forge (generic building) should show on the "Production Buildings" and "Happiness Buildings" pages since it provides +25% :hammers: and +1 :) for fur,
ivory and whale.

In addition to this, the Mint -- not the Forge -- should show on the "Gold Buildings" because it provides +10% :gold:.

What are your thoughts on this wrinkle? Maybe you answered before, but I don't have time to look right now.
 
alright the nay's have it. We'll take care of the bugs over this weekend and next week, and put out 1.0. I'll make a 0.16, still in beta form, with the current features we have. As for the Power Rating being us-vs-them or visa-versa, how about we make it optional? I really like the format now, but understand that others like the other way.

Another thing we need to add to taht list is moving the domadvisor.txt file to the root BTS directory in My Docs instead of the actual game directory.
 
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