[TOT] The Test Of Time Patch Project

This is the most wonderful Civ related thing I've seen for years!

One question/suggestion: Would it be possible at all to add a flag for city improvements, so that improvements cannot be sold, and won't be destroyed upon city capture?

This would be highly useful in many circumstances.

Either way, amazing job! Your work is beyond amazing.
 
It does when you click on the text first - then the mouse wheel messages get posted to the text control (this already worked before the patch by virtue of it being a standard windows control). I could forward the messages to the text control I guess, but it's just one click. ;)
No, it's my mouse. I have a Microsoft Comfort Optical Mouse 3000 which employs smooth (partial) wheel scrolling. There are compatibility issues with many applications. For specific applications (those for which scrolling is erratic or non-functional), I use X-Mouse Button Control to translate the wheel messages into something the software can interpret correctly; presumably by sending delta 120 instead of 30. The MS IntelliPoint driver software has something similar, but I've found it to be unreliable. Most attempts at ToTPP mouse wheel scrolling failed until I created an XMBC profile for Civ2.exe. However, I noticed later that something had caused the XMouseButtonControl.exe process to become suspended while ToT was running. You can figure out the rest. In short: disregard my comment. ;)

The python script also initializes the resource block with 0's (no resource), so I'm not quite sure how that's different. But you mean copy the seeded resources instead of clearing the map?
I must have remembered incorrectly, but yes, that's what I mean. When a scenario's cities have been optimised for an existing seed, it's often easier to make incremental changes, as opposed to clearing the entire map and starting over, eg, removing resources may send cities into starvation or economies into debt.

There are some strange interdependencies between the folders, so it could well be a bug. I've seen something similar while working on the extra terrain types patch. I'll look into it.
And speaking of larger mountains, here are a couple of 64x48-pixel mountain graphics. I found that 64x64 was a little large for regular terrain maps. They tend to obscure resources (which I've had to lift) and tile improvements; rivers look a little disjointed when they cut through them. Got a preference?
Spoiler :

Also, does the new max of 16 terrain types include hills, mountains and forests in it (so the real number of new terrains is 5), or does it not (so there's 8 new terrain types)?
Maybe the presence of a Terrain2.bmp overlay could be set in the @TERRAIN data in rules.txt via a flag. Then you simply add extra rows to Terrain2.bmp.
 

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Wait -- so the extra terrain types are not yet enabled? Not that it's in a hurry, since I'm just starting to prepare a new world map (enticed by the fact that resources are now placeable in-game! ).

It's right on track for release 0.8. Map rendering, tile yields and resources now seem to be working, as is multi-map support. Though there's still a lot to check and fix (civilopedia is completely broken for instance).

Also, how does the new fertility value thing work? How do I implement it, and does it mean that the AI can be totally restricted from settling certain terrain types, or is it merely a 'soft instruction' that it will sometimes follow and sometimes not?

The AI won't settle any terrain type not in the @FERTILITY section. Take a look at the patch description in the launcher, there's even a nice example there. ;)

Also, does the new max of 16 terrain types include hills, mountains and forests in it (so the real number of new terrains is 5)

Maybe the presence of a Terrain2.bmp overlay could be set in the @TERRAIN data in rules.txt via a flag. Then you simply add extra rows to Terrain2.bmp.

Yes, that's 5 new terrains. The terrain2 overlays are on the agenda, but not for 0.8 just yet.

One question/suggestion: Would it be possible at all to add a flag for city improvements, so that improvements cannot be sold, and won't be destroyed upon city capture?

^ Speaking of that, would a similar flag to disable city improvements' invincibility to nuclear attacks be possible?

You mean being able to set this for individual improvements? There's room for 8 flags for city improvements without breaking things, so it wouldn't be that hard. Or a global flag for a scenario? That would be even simpler.

I have a Microsoft Comfort Optical Mouse 3000 which employs smooth (partial) wheel scrolling [...] by sending delta 120 instead of 30.

Good practice is to accumulate delta's till they sum up to 120, which I didn't do. ;)

Should be an easy addition.

When a scenario's cities have been optimised for an existing seed, it's often easier to make incremental changes, as opposed to clearing the entire map and starting over, eg, removing resources may send cities into starvation or economies into debt.

Done, I've added the option.

And speaking of larger mountains, here are a couple of 64x48-pixel mountain graphics. I found that 64x64 was a little large for regular terrain maps. They tend to obscure resources (which I've had to lift) and tile improvements; rivers look a little disjointed when they cut through them. Got a preference?

I like the snow cover. :)
 
I think a specific flag would be nice, since even though a scenario maker wants to make sure that city walls, and perhaps a few chosen other improvements are never wiped out upon city capture, it may not be optimal for all buildings to be invincible. Furthermore, I donðt see how that works out if selling improvements is also prohibited. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding you when you speak of a global function?
 
I think a specific flag would be nice, since even though a scenario maker wants to make sure that city walls, and perhaps a few chosen other improvements are never wiped out upon city capture, it may not be optimal for all buildings to be invincible. Furthermore, I donðt see how that works out if selling improvements is also prohibited. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding you when you speak of a global function?

What I meant with a global setting was that either all improvements are affected or none of them are, but with separate settings for selling, city capture etc. But having individual control is better anyway, so let's go for that.

I think a global flag for the improvements part would be better. :)

Then there should be some kind of probability to determine whether an improvement is destroyed or not?
 
I'm still having a large number issues regarding global warming, polluted tiles, and Game scoring regarding polluted tiles, almost all somehow related to saved game saving and reloading:

Resetting of terrain change cycles, where in some instances, even after three stripes of terrain have changed, the cycles go all the way back to the first stripe, to go through the entire four stripes all over again, after quitting certain games, and/or exiting the program, and then restarting/reloading.

The sun icon will grow, but after quitting and reloading a saved game, the sun icon will shrink, even as the amount of polluted tiles skyrockets.

Missing check for terrain change when Settler/Engineer units are making terrain improvements, when a tile changes to a terrain not meant for certain terrain improvements. Example: Irrigate-able tile changes to non-irrigate-able swamp tile, resulting in irrigation tile appearing on top of swamp tile.

Under @COSMIC, the cost to civ score for polluted tiles is badly borked, again related to saving and reloading .sav games. A value of -10 in rules.txt is inverted into +10 in the game, therefore increasing score instead of reducing. Sometimes, pollution scoring is ignored and simply doesn't show up in the scoring window.


Spoiler Also, some feature requests (I might have posted some of them before) :

I heard that there's an additional barbarian difficulty level after "Raging Hordes" accessible only via hex editing. Making it accessible in game would be great. :D

You know how toggling the subarine flag for naval units gives it sub abilities, including being harder to find and automatically able to carry missile units? Does it work at all for land units, because I was thinking of using the submarine flag for land units that would be used as mobile land-based missile launchers, much like the ones Russia and numerous other nations use IRL. Of course if the game already allows this then take no heed. :)

Probably been brought up before, but when using the create unit cheat, defaulting to NONE for the home city would make scenario building a lot less burdensome.

Options for customizing which terrain types are changed by the AGW cycles?

Options for setting a scenario to allow some tribes to switch Gov'ts, but not others?

Additional, customizable government types?

Deletion and/or replacement of existing map levels?

Have the Apollo Program wonder track terrain improvement changes as well as city and terrain changes?
 

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The terrain2 overlays are on the agenda, but not for 0.8 just yet.
Nice. I have an immediate use for that.

Good practice is to accumulate delta's till they sum up to 120, which I didn't do. ;)

Should be an easy addition.
I wasn't expecting a fix. :D

Done, I've added the option.
Thanks.

I like the snow cover. :)
It's looking like snow-capped mountains for the next version of the Original Game Graphics Modpack, which, naturally, will be ToTPP-only.

BTW, do you know if the 2nd and 5th cells in the bottom-left of Terrain1.bmp, labelled Mouse and Mouse 2, respectively, perform any function at all?
 
Is it possible to fix when building a new city the names can get skipped by accidentally by either canceling the build or when something like an advanced tribe is disbanded. Essentially make it like more modern civs where it checks for the newest available name instead of an arbitrary order?

Also is it possible to allow us to disable certain goody hut events? Advanced tribes are annoying. Thanks for all the work you've done it's really nice to come back to Civ II once in awhile and this really makes an improvement.
 
I'm still having a large number issues regarding global warming, polluted tiles, and Game scoring regarding polluted tiles, almost all somehow related to saved game saving and reloading

Indeed. The game resets the pollution counter for map 0 back to 0 when loading in-game. If you go back to the main menu and load from there, it is ok. This would explain most, if not all of your issues, since there's a few hundred pollution tiles on map 0 being ignored. The score increasing can also be explained because the counter for AI-controlled pollution tiles is not reset, these are subtracted from the total pollution counter (which is zero in this case), leading to a large positive number when multiplied by a negative score. I'll see if I can fix this.

I heard that there's an additional barbarian difficulty level after "Raging Hordes" accessible only via hex editing. Making it accessible in game would be great. :D

I think you can just add more levels to @BARBARITY in Game.txt

Probably been brought up before, but when using the create unit cheat, defaulting to NONE for the home city would make scenario building a lot less burdensome.

Maybe adding a hotkey instead would help.

Additional, customizable government types?

This is one of those things that would be very hard, since hard-coded checks for government types are everywhere. There's also a hard-coded ordering on governments, for example, you get an extra trade arrow if your government type >= 5 (Republic). Adding a new government type with a higher id would therefore automatically get the same bonus, whether you wanted it or not.

It's looking like snow-capped mountains for the next version of the Original Game Graphics Modpack, which, naturally, will be ToTPP-only.

With 16 terrain types, I hope? ;)

BTW, do you know if the 2nd and 5th cells in the bottom-left of Terrain1.bmp, labelled Mouse and Mouse 2, respectively, perform any function at all?

They don't, they're leftovers from older versions. In ToT, these are read from HICOLOR.BMP. "Mouse" is used to convert screen coordinates to tile coordinates (e.g. when clicking on a tile), "Mouse2" is used to show the cursor arrows when "Move units w/ mouse" is enabled. I think you can override them by putting HICOLOR.BMP in a subfolder, but there's no real point in that.

Is it possible to fix when building a new city the names can get skipped by accidentally by either canceling the build or when something like an advanced tribe is disbanded. Essentially make it like more modern civs where it checks for the newest available name instead of an arbitrary order?

I changed that the names are reset when starting a new game, but I wasn't aware of names being skipped when canceling a build. When a city is disbanded, then the name is not used anymore, otherwise every name would have to be flagged individually.

Also is it possible to allow us to disable certain goody hut events?

Yup, this has been requested before. It looks like it should be possible.

Some 0.8 news / features:

  • Extra terrain types are pretty much implemented, there's still the odd thing to fix, but it's mostly working now.
  • Keyboard shortcuts for changing terrain, since the map editor won't support the new types, and going through the menu for every tile is pretty much infeasible.
  • Navigable rivers for ships by means of an advanced unit flag
  • The x3 major objective for cities has been restored
  • A system to configure patch settings in-game, for things that are not scenario specific and therefore do not belong in @COSMIC2. For example, default zoom level when starting a new game.
 
Advanced tribes are annoying? How so? That is one of the best outcomes you can get from a hut?

Mess up my future city placement or just end up being way way to far away. I'd rather get any other positive outcome (free settlers is obviously the best).

I changed that the names are reset when starting a new game, but I wasn't aware of names being skipped when canceling a build. When a city is disbanded, then the name is not used anymore, otherwise every name would have to be flagged individually.

Ah OK it seems like it's be a lot more effort for little gain at least the New Game bug is fixed, that's the worst of it.
 
Some 0.8 news / features:

  • Extra terrain types are pretty much implemented, there's still the odd thing to fix, but it's mostly working now.
  • Keyboard shortcuts for changing terrain, since the map editor won't support the new types, and going through the menu for every tile is pretty much infeasible.
  • Navigable rivers for ships by means of an advanced unit flag
  • The x3 major objective for cities has been restored
  • A system to configure patch settings in-game, for things that are not scenario specific and therefore do not belong in @COSMIC2. For example, default zoom level when starting a new game.

Sounds very cool, can't wait to test again. :D

One question about the keyboard shortcuts for changing terrain - is it possible (or perhaps already part of your plan) to make rivers placeable in-game?
 
One question about the keyboard shortcuts for changing terrain - is it possible (or perhaps already part of your plan) to make rivers placeable in-game?

Yup, that's already part of the patch.
 
0.8 is ready. Here's the changelog:

  • Extra terrain types: 16 terrain types available for map-making. Take a close look at the description in the launcher, quite a few changes are needed to use them in a scenario (it's a little long to repeat here).
  • Navigable rivers: Allows ships to sail on rivers by means of an advanced unit flag.
  • Edit terrain hotkeys: Adds keyboard shortcuts for changing terrain.
  • Major objective: Restores the x3 major objective for cities as in Fantastic Worlds.
  • TOTPP configuration: In-game patch configuration.
  • Civilopedia improvement icons: Uses the larger icons from Improvements.bmp for the improvements & wonders sections of the Civilopedia:
    Spoiler Left: Default, 36x20 icons at 3:2 scale; Right: 72x40 icons at 3:4 scale :
  • The Zoom level and Shield colors patch can now be configured through the TOTPP configuration menu.
  • Added smooth scrolling & Shift-scroll to the mouse wheel patch
  • Added an option to preserve seeded resources to the custom resource patch.

As always, detailed information about the patches is available in the launcher. For an overview of all patches, see the included README.txt. Happy gaming! :)
 

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I think you can just add more levels to @BARBARITY in Game.txt
The scenario league says Barbarian Wrath (the secret activity level I'm referring to) is only achievable through hex editing, so I'm unsure if adding it to Game.txt would change anything. :dunno:

EDIT: I went ahead with the suggestion, and adding it to Game.txt did indeed add it, since checking my civ score upon game start showed me the +50 points from that level.

And this just gave me an idea, perhaps for a future feature for ToTPP? Might it be possible, when starting a scenario (.scn file), one would be able to choose the barbarian activity, the same way as when starting a normal game?
 
Okay, I'm not sure what to think of this one.

You know that one patch that fixes the issue with forbidden advances? I think it might have missed something. I was doing my usual stuff, and during the AI's turn, one of them demanded a forbidden tech (Specifically, the "Give us <tech>, or face the consequences" negotiation box). I double-checked the rules.txt, and the tech tree and its allowances were unchanged the whole game, yet it was one of those civs that wasn't allowed to have it. Can anyone confirm or refute?

Also, I changed the map view to check the year, since it was obscured by the science icon due to the city/unit counter, and when I loaded an autosave from a previous turn the same game as above, I got a graphical glitch, in the screenshot below.

Edit: Nvm about the tech issue. Found out the hard way an enable tech action snuck its way into events,txt during a copypasta operation after some bastard shot down my nukes with SDI they were never supposed to have. :wallbash:
 

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Also, I changed the map view to check the year, since it was obscured by the science icon due to the city/unit counter, and when I loaded an autosave from a previous turn the same game as above, I got a graphical glitch, in the screenshot below.

Indeed, that's a bug. Another one for the list.

Speaking of graphical glitches, rendering for disabled buttons (e.g. the "description" button in the Civilopedia for items lacking a description) contains no less than 3 bugs (green border, left edge, magenta pixels):
Spoiler Above: vanilla rendering; Below: TOTPP v0.9 rendering :


 

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