TerraForm -- a map editor for CIV dos

Doesn't the mere use of TerraForm take away from the "charm"? The whole point of the software is to dissect the game. Also, it sounds like you misunderstand: ocean rails have no affect on ship movement.
 
No my friend I do not misunderstand, I know that ship movement will not be effected, BUT 'Ocean Rail' sounds unrealistic albeit the entire game, as all simulated strategy/adventure games are extension of reality! Now Terraform, as I understand, is merely an advanced version of Sid Meier's original map. Correct me if I am wrong as I haven't been to install or use it? :)


PEACE!!!
 
Grand_Dad, so you consider the hard labor involved in manually taming the oceans with railroads is charming?

Because that's what any serious gamer is doing. And I doubt I'm the only one hating actually doing it (one can hardly accuse the GUI of being streamlined for this task).
 
Grand_Dad, so you consider the hard labor involved in manually taming the oceans with railroads is charming?

Most people on this board seem to enjoy approximating historical conditions or creating "playarounds" as opposed to "playing to win". Mere mention of leveraging game quirks draws the ire of this crowd, so fast settlers, ocean rails, sentry move, etc. are all "cheating". Don't get me wrong. If that's what floats your boat, fine, but it seems odd dragging the debate into the TerraForm thread, a program specifically designed to leverage the game as much as possible.

And I doubt I'm the only one hating actually doing it
When I get to this point in my games, I need to slate a Saturday afternoon for it because that's how long it takes. It's also frustrating to sentry-move ships all the way back to hit that tile or two I somehow missed.

Edit: "TerraFrom", oops.
 
Why do role-players always want functionality to end where their needs do?

They seem to see power gamers as a big threat to their experience. Why?

And I'm not even a huge power gamer. I'm way too lazy for that. I try to keep cities to a minimum. (When I've built twenty cities it's usually enough. If I have to spread my empire between lots of islands I often settle for even less.)
 
Should be doable in five minutes or so.
Perhaps you underestimate overestimate* my programming skill and speed. With testing, recompile, getting it in a form for distribution, not to mention wading through the code and a user interface, a little longer perhaps. Thanks for the vote of confidence.

Doesn't the mere use of TerraForm take away from the "charm"?
Charm is in the eye of the beholder.

a program specifically designed to leverage the game as much as possible.

The program never met its potential. I was hoping for something that could automatically produce landforms given a list of parameters.

On a sad note it seem the German version produces a SVE file that is slightly different then the English version of CIV DOS making TerraForm useless to those users.

* Edited - wrong word
 
Why do role-players always want functionality to end where their needs do?

They seem to see power gamers as a big threat to their experience. Why?
My favorite treatment on the subject is this 2000 essay:

http://www.sirlin.net/Features/feature_PlayToWinPart1.htm

While I wouldn't go to the length of calling anyone a "scrub" who doesn't play my style, the core argument applies, which is that those who press a game's design wind up playing something entirely different. What makes me play Civilization after all these years is that these exploits and oversights serve to only enhance the strategic depth.
 
Perhaps you underestimate my programming skill and speed. With testing, recompile, getting it in a form for distribution, not to mention wading through the code and a user interface, a little longer perhaps. Thanks for the vote of confidence.


Charm is in the eye of the beholder.



The program never met its potential. I was hoping for something that could automatically produce landforms given a list of parameters.

On a sad note it seem the German version produces a SVE file that is slightly different then the English version of CIV DOS making TerraForm useless to those users.
I thought you developed it in VB6? Recompilation is a piece of cake.

You could just upload "a patch" (ie the new executable in a ZIP file).

I don't really know anything about your programming skills, but I don't doubt them (you've been around for a very long time). I'm merely pointing out that the "too much time" argument is ridiculous (as I'm a programmer myself, if only an amateur). I do doubt the new feature would require more than five minutes of beta testing though, albeit admittedly my sense of time isn't perfect. I also don't think TerraForm is that complicated (unless you made it that way on purpose), the truly complicated part must've been all the time and effort that went into dissecting Civilization's save format (the SVE and MÀP files)(unless you managed to find some documentation on them). Although the GUI looks great (smooth transitions look nice, even though I always disable them - good thing you retained this functionality), it appears to have one great inherent flaw: For some reason you didn't make it scalable. Why is beyond me (so I do doubt your efforts there, I mean, dude...).

Anyway, just because of a few interesting design decisions I don't automatically doubt your ability (you are most likely way beyond me in skill) and I am aware projects often often start out small and fixed for fun and simply expand. If you don't want the feature available just say so.

Personally, if I was you, I'd just make it open source. But I'm not.

As for your terrain generation scripts, I think that's an excellent idea! We could really use more customizable terrain generation: You could probably borrow some algorithms for generating landmasses from Civ4's Python scripts (iirc you don't even need the SDK for this).

Good luck!
 
My remarks were meant as humor. I’m sure that the project would take but a few hours.

krille said it appears to have one great inherent flaw: For some reason you didn't make it scalable. Why is beyond me

Unfortunately in the beginning I chose to treat each square as an individual image. Since the project was written without a specification and everything was trial and error. It was a good choice for the development of knowledge of how the MAP file data was arranged and the inter action of the various fields. But it programmed me into a hole as far as scalability. 23,705 lines of code at present, a rewrite would require too much time.
 
Can I also just point out that the amount of time Dack invested in trying to get even basic functions, such as which space is suitable as a city site and which are not, and the attempt to develop an algorithm for this, took a *huge* amount of time and investigation. I can well understand why he wouldn't want to make his programme open source.
 
Dack, that explains that. It's still a bit weird though, as I personally think drawing on a single picturebox's Hwnd is much easier. Even so, if it's an array you could just load more pictureboxes during runtime, if it's not an array you should apply for a job at Microsoft. j/k :lol:

Can I also just point out that the amount of time Dack invested in trying to get even basic functions, such as which space is suitable as a city site and which are not, and the attempt to develop an algorithm for this, took a *huge* amount of time and investigation. I can well understand why he wouldn't want to make his programme open source.
I've never seen this functionality?

Time is an argument for Open Source, if any. (With Open Source lots of people can add functionality and review code independently and then share it with each other.) I think the main reasons Dack doesn't want to make it Open Source is that he (1) wants to know how many people are using TerraForm and (2) because he's afraid someone might steal it (ie not credit him appropriately). (I doubt any attempt at theft would be successful though.) And possibly (3) he doesn't want anyone else to find out the basic file structure of CivDOS saves (and thus be able to release competing utilities).
 
I've never seen this functionality?

How frequently do you see AI civs building on mountains, hills, or swamps? And how do they choose to select a certain area over other areas (say, a nice valley area with rivers and grasslands, versus a nice grassland square surrounded by mountains)? That's what I'm referring to.
 
How frequently do you see AI civs building on mountains, hills, or swamps? And how do they choose to select a certain area over other areas (say, a nice valley area with rivers and grasslands, versus a nice grassland square surrounded by mountains)? That's what I'm referring to.
Are you thinking about his "Set to 4000 BC" feature?

Well, that shouldn't be too difficult. You just need to define a good starting location. This would include:
* Always starting on either a river, grassland or plains. Preferably the starting square should have at least a production of one and have at the very least five other food-rich squares and two high-production squares (hills and forests) within it's BFC.
* If on a small landmass (island), you should always start next to the ocean.
* If on a large landmass (continent), you should, perhaps, have a 50% chance of starting next to the ocean.
* No players should start closer than, maybe, ten squares from each other, if possible. (You would have to keep the number of continents/islands in mind while doing this.)

It doesn't appear to be very difficult at all. :confused:
 
Are you thinking about his "Set to 4000 BC" feature? :
Not to intrepid simonnomis post.

How frequently do you see AI civs building on mountains, hills, or swamps? And how do they choose to select a certain area over other areas (say, a nice valley area with rivers and grasslands, versus a nice grassland square surrounded by mountains)? That's what I'm referring to.

But. He is talking about how the games civilizations pick a location to build a city. The game seems to have table that is created at the start of a game. That is used through out the game to determine what squares it will build a city on. If the table does not approximate the one that the game creates, cities will be built on unproductive squares or not at all. Who knew how the game evaluates squares for this purpose? So without modification to this data the game can’t find appropriate squares. An example one changes a ocean square to a river without changing the table. The game can’t determine the value of that square in the scheme of should civilization “B” build here or not. Conventional wisdom would think that the game evaluates the land around any square when it moves there but test indicate that it does all the evaluation as it creates the world (game play space) and builds a table with these values.

If you have interest in this problem, you can check post 49 and the few that follow. See post 91 for the resolution to this problem.
 
I just found a very quick way to make rails on water, so I guess it isn't high-priority anymore. I would still love such a feature.

As for your latest post, Dack, I wasn't aware of this. But it made sense, I guess, to save computing power this way (AI turns are essentially instant). Haven't checked out your solution yet, but good job nonetheless.

edit: Or nah, it would still be bloody convenient if you could implement that functionality. It's still too slow to make those darn railroads in TWAYF games. Please? :)
 
Hey Dack and the others, just saying hi. I just re-installed my civ again after a long period of stoppage
 
This is one of those rare games that one never tires of playing again and again, at least for me :)!

PEACE!!!
 
Hey there. I just found this page at apparently the exact same time that the program isn't available. Putting an unit in sentry here to be alerted of v4 activity. Great job creating the editor, even if I haven't seen it yet; I've wanted something like that for, uh, 13 years.
 
Hi dack. I enjoy this editor A LOT. Unfortunately my proggy stopped working and thinks its not registered and I havent done anything to my machine. No HD, no new op system. This is I think the third time this happened.

I hope that your new version of editor will not include a machine specific lock down. I can understand it if the proggy was a pay proggy. But since it is free, how about just letting us install it without needing a PW.

Where else but here is anyone going to go to get it anyhow? Obscure programs just die on the popular download sites.

Well anyway thanks. I look forward to the new release so that I can use the editor again (I was about to disappear some annoying barbarians. LOL)
 
I recently discovered TerraForm died for me as well. I, too, haven't done anything that would like warrant a "machine change" (at least nothing beyond what I've done already that hadn't killed TerraForm).

I agree with noushina; I think anyone actually interested in using TerraForm will make his way here anyhow. It's literally the only place on the WWW to discuss Civ 1.
 
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