[Religion and Revolution]: Mod Development

raystuttgart said:

Great.
Just for safety:
Did you do a merge with the last updated to DLL I made yesterday ?
(I am not sure if it was necessary.)

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Yes I did!

raystuttgart said:

b) Definitely this variant.

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I see. I'll correct this. Could someone check I did not forget something else. Pathfinding seems quite OK, and AI seems good...

And what about the amount of damage (25%)? Is that OK?

What about movement points (4MP) which means it's quite difficult (even highly unlikely) for a slow ship to cross a huge storm zone?

Moreover Kraakstorm from Colonization.fr will probably join Civfanatics and want to join our team (helping us with French translation)

Ok, I agree with that plan. I think this will really be an impressive mod when it's finished!

Maybe you could be searching / working on the buildings for Furniture and Spices until I finished that ?
(I don't think I have good buildings for those Productionlines.)

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Take a look at transfer/buildings/newri/furniture factory I think it could be a great fit for that.
Maybe NewFF/grigori tavern and NewRI/sawmill could be some lower levels of furniture building.

NewFF/Grocer looks like a good small outdoor Spice Market.
newRI/intensive_farming looks like some form of Dye workshop from the Caribbean, but could also be a spices building.
newFF/carnival and newFF/tent2 might also be an outdoor spice market.

I like how NewFF/Tailor looks when loaded in the game, appearing really nice with lanterns flickering; but not sure what to use it for. NewFF/Jeweler is a variation on that.

About Ivory, it seems that a very important source of ivory for the colonists and natives was taken from the teeth and baleen of whales, as well as the Walrus tusks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrimshaw
Perhaps this yield could simply be called Ivory, or Ivory and Bone. Then when including MVP, then we could allow either Whaling Ships or instead Whale Cookers to create a small amount of Ivory yield as well. That would add to the interest and balance of the Whaling feature, because I always see people post to complain about that in TAC.

I'm not sure if a separate Raw Salt is needed but I don't know a lot about salt processing Maybe the raw salt could be called Rock Salt.

A good name for the wine specialist would be Master Vintner.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winemaker
(I see that for the French version of the mod it will be Vigneron! I'd be glad to have Kraakstorm join our team.)

BTW I recently loaded the mod Master of Mana and was very impressed with some of their Terrain graphics, particularly they made a very nice looking nif for a storm or blizzard feature. Could you look at that to see if we could have a use for it?

orlanth said:

Ok, I agree with that plan.

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Great.

orlanth said:

I think this will really be an impressive mod when it's finished!

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We were never aiming for anything else.
And it already is a very impressive mod.

About graphics:

I am really busy already, with the work packages I do.
Thus I simply implement the graphics I have already prepared as first suggestion.
Then I leave it to Schmiddie (as our specialist for graphics) to improve it or exchange it.
(Of course, everybody is free to make suggestions and comments.)

About Ivory:

If we follow the plan I suggested, our list of yields is full.
Thus no more tradable yields for Release 1, sorry.
(We should really keep a small buffer for later releases.)

Also, Ivory was critical anyways, since it would be available only on special bonus resources.

orlanth said:

I'm not sure if a separate Raw Salt is needed but I don't know a lot about salt processing Maybe the raw salt could be called Rock Salt.

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(Mined) Salt does need to be processed.
The purity of "Stone / Rock Salt" is usually only between 20% to 35%.

Also Productionlines are much more interesting to my opinion, than simple / single Yields.

orlanth said:

A good name for the wine specialist would be Master Vintner.

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I found "Vintager" to be the most common.

But as usual, I leave these things to the specialists.
(In this case the native English speakers.)

orlanth said:

I'd be glad to have Kraakstorm join our team.

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A (almost complete) French translation would be great.
Thus, if Kraakstorm wants to take care of that, he is very welcome to join our team.

We should really try to release with English, German and French.

@Robert:

Considering balancing of Winds and Storm, simply do what you think is best.
When we have implemented the open todos from our list, we will go into a long testing and balancing phase anyways.
Then we can also really play with the feature and see in game what needs to be changed.

@Schmiddie:

I have taken a look at the building graphics you made and I love it.

Edit:

I have also attached a screenshot of our current CityScreen.

Thank you!

I have updated and uploaded the graphics for the production chains of dyer and weaver.

Hope you like it as well as the other buildings.

For the first time I was able to arrange chimney smoke for one of the buildings (textil mill) brought into game by our mod. This gives me the chance to equip more of our new buildings with chimney smoke (lile the vanilla buildings) in the future (more atmosphere)!

Schmiddie said:

Hope you like it as well as the other buildings.

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Yes I do.

Schmiddie said:

For the first time I was able to arrange chimney smoke for one of the buildings (textil mill) brought into game by our mod. This gives me the chance to equip more of our new buildings with chimney smoke (lile the vanilla buildings) in the future (more atmosphere)!

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Hi guys,

I have implemented and uploaded the Grand Cathedral.
(Level 4 of SpecialBuilding_Crosses)

The graphics were made by Schmiddie.

For comparison, I have attached screenshots of Cathedral and Grand Cathedral.

@team:

I just did a clean up (special characters) and improvement of German texts, so please get current revision,
if you are working on XML files related to texts.

I have updated the armory chain (armory, magazine, arsenal and great arsenal). Hope you like and find the "easter eggs"...

@Schmiddie:

I have taken a look at the other existing graphics.

There are 2 buildings that have graphics I do not like:

1. The "Large Stable":
This simply does not look like a stable at all.
(The normal "Stable" looks ok. Maybe those graphics could be used to build the larger second level.)

2. The "Custom House":
This building could be everything and nothing.
There is simply something missing.
(Maybe another building part that looks like the Warehouse or simply some goods on the sides.)

Would you like to take a look at these graphics ?

Custom House updated

Schmiddie said:

Custom House updated

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I love the new graphics.

I have updated the stable and the ranch and made some other minor graphic modifications(armory for example ).

I gave them paddocks and changed the buildings.

Schmiddie said:

I have updated the stable and the ranch and made some other minor graphic modifications(armory for example ).

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I really like it.

@team:

Currently the prices of European players are totally decoupled.
(The price changes in one European Mother Country do not affect prices in other European Mother Countries.)

I am thinking about changing that.

Meaning:

Price increases and decreases for one European have a 25% chance of also being applied to another European.

Thus reflecting a common European Market.

There would also be a message, that your prices changed because of price changes in another European Country.
(Naming the country of course.)

All variables for balancing in XML of course.

Feedback ?

Yes, I agree its a good idea to have some correlation between markets. That would automatically help a bit with balancing in general, since if there's some yield on a map that's too easy to get it's price will drift down as others exploit it. (BTW there is EUROPE_MARKET_CORRELATION_PERCENT in the vanilla Globaldefines.XML that can be used, but I'm guessing you already know about that.) Also, the number of frequent messages about price changes in various places can already get quite annoying and detracts from the more interesting and informative messages. Can there be a way to limit that?

Actually, I think the vanilla system of having a lot of frequent price changes happening only in whole units is something we might improve on. So let me know what you think about this idea:

It seems unrealistic for prices to change by significant amounts during any particular sale, and to have no change the rest of the time. (For example, it would get frustrating for players to receive a message that because the 25% chance was triggered, a Fur sale in Spain suddenly caused their price for their main export to drop from 4 to 3, creating a large sudden drop in income.)

Instead, it could be realistic for prices to have a gradual small change with each transaction in a more consistent way using a formula. For example, something like (units_sold / iPriceChangeThreshold) * (iPriceCorrectionPercent * current_price) , where these variables are already configuarable for each yield in the vanilla Yields xml. You would see the effect of your sale while on the Europe screen, but otherwise would not need to receive constant messages about price changes happening every turn, since they would occur gradually in a consistent way.

However, this could probably work best if prices were not limited to only whole numbers but could include one decimal digit (e.g. a typical sale could move Fur price from 4 to 3.9, instead of a chance to go from 4 to 3. The amount of gold from sales could be rounded of course.) I'm not sure if it's possible to do this, maybe it would be too difficult. Ray and others what are your thoughts about this?

I've updated SVN server. Dynamic feature generation is almost done... (Well I hope so!). I've had a small problem with doTurn() function in CvPlot.cpp. Game crashed to desktop when I pressed "next turn button".
I'll probably find the problem soon... If not I'll ask for help.

It is good idea, but there should be something that would make Amsterdam bit special (or whoever has the trait). Other ways it makes playing Dutch bit pointless.

orlanth said:

Yes, I agree its a good idea to have some correlation between markets. That would automatically help a bit with balancing in general, since if there's some yield on a map that's too easy to get it's price will drift down as others exploit it.

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I was also thinking a little into the future.
If we had access to several European Ports, it would be quite bad if prices would drift away too extremely from each other.
(With this feature there would be differences, but on a moderate level.)

orlanth said:

BTW there is EUROPE_MARKET_CORRELATION_PERCENT in the vanilla Globaldefines.XML that can be used, but I'm guessing you already know about that.

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No, I did not know.
When I have some more time, I will check its funtionality.

orlanth said:

It seems unrealistic for prices to change by significant amounts during any particular sale, and to have no change the rest of the time. (For example, it would get frustrating for players to receive a message that because the 25% chance was triggered, a Fur sale in Spain suddenly caused their price for their main export to drop from 4 to 3, creating a large sudden drop in income.)

Instead, it could be realistic for prices to have a gradual small change with each transaction in a more consistent way using a formula. For example, something like (units_sold / iPriceChangeThreshold) * (iPriceCorrectionPercent * current_price) , where these variables are already configuarable for each yield in the vanilla Yields xml. You would see the effect of your sale while on the Europe screen, but otherwise would not need to receive constant messages about price changes happening every turn, since they would occur gradually in a consistent way.

However, this could probably work best if prices were not limited to only whole numbers but could include one decimal digit (e.g. a typical sale could move Fur price from 4 to 3.9, instead of a chance to go from 4 to 3. The amount of gold from sales could be rounded of course.) I'm not sure if it's possible to do this, maybe it would be too difficult. Ray and others what are your thoughts about this?

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It would be much easier if we would simply multiply all costs, gold amounts and prices by 10.
Thus you would also get gradual increases / decreases and much less effort for implementation.
(Other balancing variables would need to be changed too, of course.)

And yes, we could then limit messages about price changes to:
X % 10 = 0 (with % I mean the rest function.)

But detailled discussion about that is probably going a little too far now.
(This would be too much work to also realize it in Release 1.)

Colonel_Zation said:

It is good idea, but there should be something that would make Amsterdam bit special (or whoever has the trait). Other ways it makes playing Dutch bit pointless.

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Good point.
But it would be pretty easy to give Nations / Players with a certain trait lower chances for this feature.

Hi guys,

I am not completely done with my work for the 5 new Productionlines.
(Salt, Spices, Beer, Wine and Furniture.)

However, I thought I could present you some screenshots of the 7 new Specialists for those.

Screenshot 1: Expert Grapes Picker and Expert Salt Miner
Screenshot 2: Expert Red Pepper Planter and Master Spice Trader
Screenshot 3: Master Cabinet Maker, Master Brewer, Master Vintager