[Religion and Revolution]: Feedback and Questions

Under the assumption that the above proposal would work, there will be the need to change the unit's appearance to help the human player (think of continuing a saved game).
Typically, you'd expect the Ranger to be invisible. If it's not, you should be enabled to see this by the unit's appearance to avoid exposing it to the enemy's counter action.
Which in turn means the need to change unit display depending on the state of iIsInvisible. I'd guess that one could copy the code from naval units for this (as they change their appearance when damaged).
Nevertheless, you'd need another image to be displayed.
 
Commander Bello said:
Under the assumption that the above proposal would work, there will be the need to change the unit's appearance to help the human player (think of continuing a saved game).
Typically, you'd expect the Ranger to be invisible. If it's not, you should be enabled to see this by the unit's appearance to avoid exposing it to the enemy's counter action.
Which in turn means the need to change unit display depending on the state of iIsInvisible. I'd guess that one could copy the code from naval units for this (as they change their appearance when damaged).
Nevertheless, you'd need another image to be displayed.
Click to expand...


We can just give them another color. The graphics for that can be done in a minute.
 
First of all, I am really happy to see that Schmiddie is still working on RaR and enjoys modding.
I am also happy to see, that there are still a lot of players and several mod-modders around.

Thus I feel, that I can be proud of what was achieved with the Religion and Revolution mod. :)

Spoiler :

But I am also still a bit sad when I take a look at all the great concepts that were not realized.
(In some cases I had even already created first protoypes. In other cases work from other Civ4/Civ4Col modders existed that could have been used as a base for implementation.)

-------

Over the years I had created an incredible amout of concepts like "Large Rivers", "Improved Diplomacy", "Colonial Satisfaction (Happiness)" ...
But my top 4 of "concepts I have failed to create" are:

1. Rebuild of Artillery Units

- work like "real" artillery by bombarind enemies, instead of fighting like all other units
- being a Profession (Units being equipped), instead of a Unit (that is built)
- inflicting "Collateral Damage"

While the basic functional implementation is pretty simple, implementing AI is not.
Implementing this Rebuild without very thoroughly implementing AI would probably have completely ruined the mod.

2. "Advances / Native Knowledge" (Technology Concept) and "Constitution" (Civic Concept)

- Basically Unlocking and Improving Units, Buildings, Improvments, Game Features, ... by "Knowledge" a new Yield produced by a new Profession.
- Some "Advances" being found in Goodies, some "Advances" reveived as presents by Natives, some "Advances" traded with other Civs.

Well, I guess everybody knows how Technologies and Civics work in Civ4. This would have been an adaption to Civ4Col, with some changes / additions.
A lot of code was already there, but the amount of effort for defining all the "Advances", doing XML-Balancing, writing Colopedias ... is really incredible and our small team could not have handled it.

3. Further Improvments to War of Independence

- King attacking with 2 types of ships (transports and war ships)
- Concept of "Loyalty to the King" (Colonies / Troops might also switch sides)
- Other European Nations and Kings joining the WOI (either on your side or on the side of your King)
- Changing "Victory Condition Independence" (even if deactivate, you could still declared Independence, the game simply would not end by winning but give the player benefits instead)
...

Basically I had several small (and medium size) features in mind to improve the "Showdown" of the game.
However, this simply never had high enough priority to start serious implementation.

4. Competing Religions "Catholics and Protestants"

Basically the concept involved several features (including splitting of Profession "Preacher" and Yield "Crosses") that would

A. Allow the player to either develop his nation to a Catholic one or a Protestant one.
(Both having advantages and disadvantages.)

and at the same time

B. Making it necessary for the player to balanced and fulfill the religious desires of his colonists.
(Some Colonist being Catholic and some being Protestant.)

While I had even started prototyping some aspects of this feature, I was never 100% satisfied with the result.
(There were still several problems considering conceptual aspects, historical accuracy and game play mechanisms.)

-------

Well, I have not succeeded implementing those concepts myself while I was an active modder and thus they will probably never be created.
Simply because those concepts are an incredibly amount of work and would require a strong team of really skilled modders like in the days of TAC or in the beginning of RaR.
Maybe most of those ideas are even completely boring to other modders.

But there are days, when I am hopping for a new team of skilled modders joining forces, that might take RaR as a base for an ever bigger mod and maybe pick up at least some of my ideas ...


Whatever features all the remaining modders will create, I wish them a lot of fun doing so. :thumbsup:

Best regards,
ray
 
It is possible to open Fall From Heaven (for Civ4) directly from desktop without going into Civ4 and loading the mod from there.

Is it possible to do the same with RaR?
 
Yes, there is. You just need to add the mod= option in your shortcut.
I don't know the exact syntax but I'll post it when I get home.
 
TheIanOakley said:
It is possible to open Fall From Heaven (for Civ4) directly from desktop without going into Civ4 and loading the mod from there.

Is it possible to do the same with RaR?
Click to expand...

I did write about it a long time ago elsewhere. Here it is:

myself more than a year ago said:
Create desktop shortcut
Goto Colonization.exe in program files.
Drag Colonization.exe to the desktop while holding down ALT.
Right click and select properties.
Add at the end of target
Code: 
 mod="[B]Religion_and_Revolution[/B]"
Notice the first character is a space. It must have at least one space after the " already in the end of Target.
Click "change icon" button.
Browse
Select RaR_desktop_icon.ico in MODS/Religion_and_Revolution
ok
ok
Now Colonization will open directly in Religion and Revolution Extended when this shortcut is double clicked. This approach works with all mods and the icon is optional.
Click to expand...
It is important that the bold part fits the folder name precisely. You can use this to create shortcuts for any mod, though it might be confusing if you use the RaR icon for all of them :lol:
 
Hi folks,

first of all a lot of praise for this mod. For me its the best colonization I have ever played, even better than the original colonization.
So I decided to take a deeper look into the mod ...

Now my question. I tried to compile the sources shipped with the installer (\DLL_Sources) and was able to create the dll (Visual Studio 2012 + makefile from Nightinggale)
without any problem. But when I use the new created dll colonization crashes after loading the mod (The splash screen shows Init-XML ...)
I checked the dependences from my new created dll and the original dll, but everything seems to be ok.
The new created dll was a little bit smaler in size, so I extracted the function signatures from the original dll and my new created dll and noticed that there are some functions missing in the new dll.
So my conclusion is that the source code shipped with the installer is not up to date or incomplete.

How can I get the up to date sources? Getting it from https://subversion.assembla.com/svn/rays_space/ is not possible, due to password protection.
 
Actually I am almost sure, that the sources in the download are up to date.
(Our SVN was the only way we used to share our sources with modmodders and partners.)

But I will check that again.
(Won't be home before the week end though.)

If our sources are outdate, we will reupload the mod.

By the way:

- It is totally normal that 2 DLLs created from the same sources but on different environments vary in size - often even significantly.

- Our SVN has never been public. It was for team members, partners and modmodders only.
Currently it is not used anymore though. (I will probably completely delete the space soon.)
 
The released DLL is compiled with the old makefile (not mine). My design goal was to produce the very same DLL file for debug and release. However minor differences like altered order of arguments and similar might cause the compiler to work differently even though order aren't supposed to matter. Also you are using vs2012 while most of us still use 2010. In theory that shouldn't matter, but again it might result in a DLL file, which isn't 100% identical. However differences shouldn't affect functionality and certainly shouldn't be able to crash the game.

Raubwuerger said:
The new created dll was a little bit smaler in size, so I extracted the function signatures from the original dll and my new created dll and noticed that there are some functions missing in the new dll.
So my conclusion is that the source code shipped with the installer is not up to date or incomplete.
Click to expand...
An incomplete source is likely to complain about missing symbols, which will cause linking to fail. I too would really suspect that you have an outdated source code. However according to the download link, the last release was revision 967. Using that revision, svn can't detect any differences when replacing the source code with the one from the release meaning they should be identical, at least from the perspective of the compiler.

I would love to test compilation, but some computer issues have left me temporally without a compiler.

It would seem that there is something odd going on here. I guess the best option right now is to make a debug dll and see if it asserts. If you know how to use a debugger, you can attach it to the game and see which line it crashes in. VS2010 needs to be put into expert mode to attach to an existing process and I assume vs2012 would need expert mode as well.
 
Hi raystuttgart,

thank you for your quick response and yes you are right, the sources are up to date.
I stupidly mixed up your sources with the default sources from colonization ...:crazyeye:

Now everything is fine ...
 
@Nightinggale

It shouldn't matter if I use VS2010 or VS2012 because the hole compilation and linking is done by the Microsoft Visual C++ Toolkit 2003 referenced in the makefile. In this case VS2012 is actually just a GUI-Editor ...

But thanks for your help ...
 
Hi. I'm new to R&R and very much intrigued, among other things by the combo of extended city radius with the health mechanic, but I've got a question. Why can't I found new colonies within three steps of existing ones?
 
Raubwuerger said:
It shouldn't matter if I use VS2010 or VS2012
Click to expand...
I know that (wrote the makefile, remember ;)), but I recall something about not having the GUI and compiler 100% isolated. If I were to take a guess without investigating, it would likely be related to the debugger. Either way the GUI version likely doesn't matter, but in strange cases stuff might still happen.

Zholef said:
Why can't I found new colonies within three steps of existing ones?
Click to expand...
That can be answered with just one word: AI

The issue is that settlements now claim 5x5 plots. If they were allowed to place settlements every 2nd like in vanilla and 3rd plot like in TAC, the map would be so full of settlements, that Europeans would have nowhere to colonize. Also if the settlement density increase, so does the brave production. In short: the min distance is really a native vs European balance issue.
 
Nightinggale said:
That can be answered with just one word: AI

The issue is that settlements now claim 5x5 plots. If they were allowed to place settlements every 2nd like in vanilla and 3rd plot like in TAC, the map would be so full of settlements, that Europeans would have nowhere to colonize. Also if the settlement density increase, so does the brave production. In short: the min distance is really a native vs European balance issue.
Click to expand...

Okay, you've probably come to this view after extensively playtesting different values, but speaking strictly theoretically, that doesn't make sense at all. In vanilla and TAC the native settlements were closer together and the Europeans needed even more settlements, but they fit nonetheless. And if excessive brave production is such a problem, wouldn't it be a better solution to, you know, increase their cost? What's more, in what little of the mod I've seen so far (played only a few partial games on Revolutionary), the natives always seem to be getting pushed over quite easily by the colonists.

Anyway, thanks for the quick reply.
 
Zholef said:
Okay, you've probably come to this view after extensively playtesting different values, but speaking strictly theoretically, that doesn't make sense at all. In vanilla and TAC the native settlements were closer together and the Europeans needed even more settlements, but they fit nonetheless. And if excessive brave production is such a problem, wouldn't it be a better solution to, you know, increase their cost? What's more, in what little of the mod I've seen so far (played only a few partial games on Revolutionary), the natives always seem to be getting pushed over quite easily by the colonists.

Anyway, thanks for the quick reply.
Click to expand...
All the scales defined in RAR have been thought for gigantic maps. To give you and idea, I would say a single tile in Vanilla would be of about the same importance as 4 tiles in RAR. This explains why cities are meant to be more "distant" in RAR than they are in Vanilla game.

Now this being said, it's really easy to change that feature if you want cities to be closer of one another. You can modify the min city range by yourself in opening that file with your notepad :
...\MODS\Religion_and_Revolution\Assets\XML\GlobalDefinesAlt.xml

Just find "<DefineName>MIN_CITY_RANGE</DefineName>" and change the value by the figure you want.


I agree with you though that the Natives aren't really a challenge in RAR. Regularly playing with the French, they are essentially training expert producers which gladly disappear by themselves when I'm growing bigger.
 
A settlement claims 3x3=9 plots in TAC. In RaR it's 5x5=25. In other words TAC needs 3 settlements to claim the same number of plots as one does in RaR. If the distance between them remain unchanged, the AI is free to place the same number of settlements as in TAC, which will make it hard to find vacant spots, partly because vacant spots needs to be even bigger. Alternatively you can anger the natives, which most of the time results in attacks, at least for me.

Marla_Singer said:
I agree with you though that the Natives aren't really a challenge in RAR.
Click to expand...
That is partly due to the increased distance as well as the french native bonus. The natives have a really powerful potential if not kept down with settings like this. If you like, do try to reduce distance and play a non-french nation. You seriously risk being attacked by natives and being outnumbered 10 to 1, if not worse.

Part of the problem is that natives starts with all the settlements and do not gain advanced units unless they steal from the Europeans. This makes them strong in the beginning and easy later on. This makes it a challenge to make the game difficult enough to make it fun at the same time as not killing all Europeans early on.
 
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