A few editor related questions (best editor, building order, background images)

Hello,

I have found the answer to most of my Civ III editing questions already by searching through the forums. I still however have a few questions that I'm struggling with:


1) What is the best editor for modding Civ 3 Conquests? The default one feels a bit limited sometimes. - Found the answer, I can't install Steph'sExpanded, but Quintillus cross platform editor does the trick.


2) Is there a way to reorganize the order buildings appear in a city? I thought they appeared in alphabetical order, but it turns out after modifying some building names I end up with an illogical random mess. To clarify: when asked what to build in a city in my mod, let's say Granary appears before Aqueduct and I want Aqueduct to appear first, both are improvements and not small wonders or wonders, how can I make it happen?


3) How can I edit the background image that appears in the scientific adviser tech chooser? After shuffling techs, the arrows are obviously not in the right place anymore, and I'd like to make them right.


Thanks in advance to anyone who can provide help !

- Bad

Hi Bad and welcome here!

1/ you found the answer

2/ not sure what you did. Could you provide more infos ?

3/ you have to edit the background pcx that can be found in something like Conquests/Art/Advisors. The files are named "science_ancient", "science_middle" and so on.
You'll have to learn a bit about palettes and such in order to get a working file. If you need any help, there are a lot of people here who can help, and a lot of threads with a lot of valuable info in them.

Hey, thanks for the reply !

The info you gave me in reply to 3) is enough, searched a bit and I found what i wanted. Thanks !


As for the 2)...

T-mun said:

2/ not sure what you did. Could you provide more infos ?

Click to expand...

To make it more clear, here's an example picture from the current build I'm working on:



I added some random numbers next to improvement names to see if that was a possible way to reorder them, but it didn't change anything. If you ignore the numbers, you will notice that in the example picture « Counselor » is after « Forge », and I'd want them switched around to have alphebetical order.

How can I make this happen? I'm a bit desperate, tried every way to switch the order in which improvements appear in the city menu, but I couldn't get anything to work. Those random numbers near the improvements in this screenshot is a proof enough of how desperate I am in my attempts

Bad said:

2) Is there a way to reorganize the order buildings appear in a city? I thought they appeared in alphabetical order, but it turns out after modifying some building names I end up with an illogical random mess. To clarify: when asked what to build in a city in my mod, let's say Granary appears before Aqueduct and I want Aqueduct to appear first, both are improvements and not small wonders or wonders, how can I make it happen?

Click to expand...

I think that the order that they are in is based on the order that they are entered into the editor.

Balam-Agab said:

I think that the order that they are in is based on the order that they are entered into the editor.

Click to expand...

That's what I gathered, but is there any way to alter that order?

I think the community editors have some abilities for reordering, but not in the default editor. Wonders are always below the improvements. I havent tried the community editors myself so I dont know too much about them apart from the general information given in the thread.

Bad said:

I'm a bit desperate, tried every way to switch the order in which improvements appear in the city menu, but I couldn't get anything to work. Those random numbers near the improvements in this screenshot is a proof enough of how desperate I am in my attempts

Click to expand...

I never reflected about your question before.

A) In the build-queue for buildings it seems, that the sequence they are listed are:

1. Normal buildings, 2. Great Wonders, 3. Small Wonders

B) The sequence the buildings in their categories appear, seems to be determined by the numbers these buildings have in the pediaicons file.

The naming of the buildings is - as you found out yourself- completely irrelevant.

When looking on your screenshot, it seems, you mod RAR (as the building worker housing has no image). The creators of RAR set their buildings in an alphabetical order by using the buildingnumbers in the pediaicons-file to number the buildings in an alphabetical order.

So the important fact for modding these buildings is not the alphabetical order as it is done in the pediaicons-file of standard C3C or RAR. The list should be by the numbers of the buildings in the pediaicons-file. In the next step you should assign the correct number of the pediaicons file to the correct place of the name of that building in the alphabet (if you want an alphabetical list of the buildings in the categories I named under A). In my epic mods CCM and RARR (Rise and Rule Revisited) you can find the buildings in the pediaicons file listed by their numbers and not by their names.

You can easily proof this by looking at the city in the Debug-Mode, how the list for buildings will appear in the building queue. BTW: If you would use RARR the building worker housing would have an image and the counselor comes before the forge in the list.

I temporary attache a screenshot taken out from RARR in Debug-Mode. The graphics for the buildings are era 2:



Things become much more complicated, if you try to give the buildings the correct entry for the city view (that is disabled for scenarios and conquests in C3C) in a sequence that the image for the city walls in the city view isn´t destroyed at once. It seems this was even too complicated for Firaxis.

Thanks Civinator, very interesting !

I was using the default RAR only as a way to test and learn some things, I'm basing my mod off the standard civ 3 conquests


As for those pediaicons, how exactly can I change them? I went into Conquests' pediaicons.txt, noticed the number below each improvement, but obviously this doesn't include the improvements that I add myself so I couldn't reorder those. Do I need to unpack my .biq file somehow and edit a pediaicons.txt inside it? Is there a tool for that? I searched and found the name SAVExpand but it seems to not be downloadable anywhere anymore. Also found a guide to editing the contents of a biq, but I can't open it with a text or hex editor.



Update: Nevermind the above, I found out the trick. In the default editor's options, you can uncheck a setting that's called « Compress BIC files ».

Okay, I now have an uncompressed .biq file. Issue is, the text inside is really messy, doesn't seem to follow any proper line breaks, be it read through any text editor in ANSI or DOS or through a hex editor. But there's progress.


Here's the best I could get from a text editor:





And from a hex editor:





At least it's something, I guess. That's better than nothing, right?


Does anyone know of an editor that would let me edit my .biq file directly? I searched and found the name SAVExpand but it seems to not be downloadable anywhere anymore.

Or maybe I'm misdirecting myself and should edit a pediaicons.txt that is not packaged within my biq?

I'm getting really desperate about reordering the buildings in my mod, I entered 100+ buildings by hand without knowing Ishould have entered them in a specific order, and now I feel trapped.

Firaxis, why must you do this to me

Bad said:

Thanks Civinator, very interesting !

I was using the default RAR only as a way to test and learn some things, I'm basing my mod off the standard civ 3 conquests


As for those pediaicons, how exactly can I change them? I went into Conquests' pediaicons.txt, noticed the number below each improvement, but obviously this doesn't include the improvements that I add myself so I couldn't reorder those. Do I need to unpack my .biq file somehow and edit a pediaicons.txt inside it? Is there a tool for that? I searched and found the name SAVExpand but it seems to not be downloadable anywhere anymore. Also found a guide to editing the contents of a biq, but I can't open it with a text or hex editor.

Update: Nevermind the above, I found out the trick. In the default editor's options, you can uncheck a setting that's called « Compress BIC files ».

Okay, I now have an uncompressed .biq file. Issue is, the text inside is really messy, doesn't seem to follow any proper line breaks, be it read through any text editor in ANSI or DOS or through a hex editor. But there's progress.


Here's the best I could get from a text editor: ...

At least it's something, I guess. That's better than nothing, right?

Does anyone know of an editor that would let me edit my .biq file directly? I searched and found the name SAVExpand but it seems to not be downloadable anywhere anymore.

Or maybe I'm misdirecting myself and should edit a pediaicons.txt that is not packaged within my biq?

I'm getting really desperate about reordering the buildings in my mod, I entered 100+ buildings by hand without knowing Ishould have entered them in a specific order, and now I feel trapped.

Firaxis, why must you do this to me

Click to expand...

Bad, you are thinking much too complicated. You can edit the pediaicons file with a simple texteditor like wordpad. Than you can set the buildings in the normal C3C editor with the names you want and can link them to the correct new entry of the pediaicons file offered by a drop down menue in the C3C editor for buildings without any problems. May be it´s a good advise for you to read a tutorial about adding buildings to C3C, as for fixing your problem, you do nothing else than adding all buildings, but now in an order that let them appear in an alphabetical listing.

Civinator said:

Bad, you are thinking much too complicated. You can edit the pediaicons file with a simple texteditor like wordpad. Than you can set the buildings in the normal C3C editor with the names you want and can link them to the correct new entry of the pediaicons file offered by a drop down menue in the C3C editor for buildings without any problems. May be it´s a good advise for you to read a tutorial about adding buildings to C3C, as for fixing your problem, you do nothing else than adding all buildings, but now in an order that let them appear in an alphabetical listing.

Click to expand...

Thanks, guess I am indeed thinking too complicated.


Thread closed, I guess

To illustrate what Civinator mentioned, the PediaIcons file in in the Text directory of your mod. In the below screenshot, I've highlighted the default Conquests one, but if you want to add a modified one to your mod, you can copy it to your mod's Text folder, such as Civilization III\Conquests\Scenarios\My Mod\Text\PediaIcons.txt.



In the next screenshot, you'll see the number for each building; this controls the order they show up in. I must thank Civinator for that knowldege; I didn't know that was how the order was determined previously.



You're correct that the BIQ files aren't editable in text editor's; one of the challenges of writing Civ utilities, including my editor, is making them be able to read and write BIQ files. I've modified them in a hex editor to test my editor, but I wouldn't recommend it in general.

There are indeed many good tutorials on the forums. For question (3), to make the PCX you may want to look at this tutorial by Kyriakos on getting Civ3-compatible PCX files. The menus in GIMP are in a different order after 2.4, but that thread describes the process well. It should allow you to edit the background in your favorite image editor, and then convert it to a Civ-friendly format.

I actually recommend using different editors for different purposes. Steph's has some feature mine doesn't, and vice versa, and there are even a couple features that are still only in Firaxis's editor. To a certain extant, I've decided what to add to my editor over the years by looking at what wasn't already available elsewhere, and not necessarily adding things that could already be done well in Steph's editor.