RevolutionDCM for BTS

The good news is that stack attack has now been re-enabled and is working with IDW in this version It's too much fun and coolness not to include.

The bad news is that during testing I switched map styles from standard continents to terra and found the dreaded CTD make a come back. The problem appears to be due to the barbarian civ component of Revolutions as they spawn on uninhabited land masses. The problem is not nearly as bad in the presense of other civs. Turn off barbarian civ if you are having an issue with CTD's again. Possibly help me by exploring whether it is some configuration option in barbarian civ that is the problem.

So far it appears the barbarian civ issue is isolated to RevolutionDCM and not Revolution 1.5. I don't know what is going on with that and will need time to track it down.

Once the barbarian civ issue is sorted (perhaps with a fresh build of a new Revolutions base), I will return to the issue of adding configurability to this mod again.

See the readme for more details.

Cheers.

ah the barbs. that makes sense. I play terra all the time and the crashes do seem to be occuring with the barbs.

glad to see SA back!

Why on terra maps I don't know. Pretty much a crash around 500BC every 2nd time. Turn off barb civ and the CTD goes. On pangea or continents I do not see this crash at all with barb civs. However I must say that pangaea maps on toirodal natural are as cool if not cooler than terra in the interim as far as I am concerned

Hmmmmm. There always have to be some problem or other otherwise it would prove that this game is too simple

Cheers.

Ekmek said:

glad to see SA back!

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Yeah it's kinda fun. The thing to remember about stack attacks are that they are optional. If you attack unit by unit instead of in a group, you get exactly standard non stack attack behaviour. So if you want to avoid the occasional CTD or UI problem, just don't attack by stack. As far as the AI goes, it's business as usual with stack attack on or not. I do recommend turning on auto-save every turn though just in case the dreaded lurgy bites you.

Cheers.

BarbarianCiv treats the new world as a special case. New World only exists in Terra maps. It is actually normal that a CTD when playing a Terra map is connected to BarbarianCiv.

Revolution 1.5 has changes related to handling barbarian civ spawning in the new world. One may guess that these changes are behind the CTDs. If no CTDs are reported on Revolution's bug reports thread this doesn't mean the problem is only in RevolutionDCM. It can only mean that not enough people have played the new version on Terra maps yet. Also you use AI Autoplay so you actually experiment with many more games.

Kalimakhus said:

Revolution 1.5 has changes related to handling barbarian civ spawning in the new world. One may guess that these changes are behind the CTDs.

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I think there is at least a 50/50 chance that you are right, that the CTD issue has been barb civ all along. It's really hard to judge because it might not be one issue or the other issue but both issues interacting. I may have been fooled by the nature of civ's spawning at unpredictable times looking like a random CTD that I thought related to other issues.

The thing is that I did initially test the stability of Rev 1.5 first before the 0.8 build of RevDCM with 1.5. It was rock solid even on terra maps. So having built RevDCM on the foundation of 1.5 and then getting increased CTD's, it put me on the trail of input/output file handling issues as possibly the cause of CTD's. Then in a series of twenty re-runs, the hard coding on standard continents meant absolute stability.

Now I have gotton a bit smarter during testing, I watch the python logs a lot more closely....Your points are excellent regarding the CTD issue Kalimakhus. Unfortunately a train of events is now unfolding in RevDCM. That is to leave it hard coded for a little while longer, get barb civ going with the next Rev release, then if there is 95% confidence that the CTD's are gone, re-examine soft coding RevDCM and test such a build again.

The preferred "soft coding" technique would be to emulate Jdog with his ini file structure and pre game settings but it simply may not be necessary if I was barking up the wrong tree with respect to CTD's all along.

On another aside, because of the barb civ bug, I've started playing on pangaea toriodal. It's actually a heap of fun. The best setting for pangaea is a natural coastline and balanced resources on a low sea level temperate pangaea continent. That means that there is still a good fragmented coastline with islands and even the ocassional break away small continent.

The AI knows how to deploy it's navy north and south across the poles on toroidal. So if you can live with the unreality of it (global warming future aside), travel across the poles gives the AI more war declaration options and counter intuitively, navies are still relevant! Interestingly, the AI often will create a north south land connection between both coasts and then operate a navy shuttle across the poles.

If you start on the default 24 civs on a large toroidal pangaea map, you get a very "explosive" situation emerge with fragmentations of civs rising the numbers up to near 30 civs for a while then they consolidate to less than 24 civs late game including good naval warfare a bit like on a continents map. Very cool and without barb civ, it appears to be rock solid.

If you want to stretch out the middle ages considerably, it appears that sticking pangaea on tropical is the way to go. If you want a quick run into the modern age, temperate is the way to go. I guess that's because all that jungle in the middle of the map is useless for construction.

Cheers.

How do you turn off specific parts of dale's mod?

phungus420 said:

How do you turn off specific parts of dale's mod?

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You can't in the current version. This mod is still in beta. It is going through a phase of examining the CTD rate and improving that. Next release coming soon will become configurable. If you want to download a configurable version, then go to the RevolutionDCM front page and grab the Inquisition version of this mod. That (older) version is configurable but is combined with Rev1.42 only. If you want a good reduction in CTD's turn off barbarian civ in the meantime.

@glider

I see the change log of Rev1.51 quite promising. I think we may hope for a more stable build this time. I'd like to suggest that you try merging the new Rev1.51 with a normal DCM (i.e. one with options configurable through GlobalDefinesAlt.xml). I don't say that such a merge will be CTD free. I actually believe that DCM will continue to raise random CTDs no matter what. What is good about configurable components is that it allows you to fine tune the mod so that you can go past some repeatable CTD in some cases.

I know that you want this merge to be free of bugs and issues but sometimes you need to accept something that is not perfect but still enjoyable enough. You may continue experimenting and hunting for the exact causes of issues but it is better that you do that while keeping a public copy that is enjoyable and configurable.

@Kalimakhus
The reasoning in my little mind goes like this. Barbarian civ was causing repeatable and observable crashes even when I didn't know it was that component that was faulty initially. The crash rate on Rev1.5 went through the roof to the point where it could not really be released at all. The logic is not telling me that file I/O is a likely cause of the CTD's as you have patiently explained to me (I have one more test to do on that see below). So I concur that I will return in GlobalDefinesAlt on a Rev1.51 build and see how we go. Thanks for your commonsense argument. You are right.

I'm not sure that I will be able to resist my natural urge to want to include Inquisitions as a default (cannot upload two different versions because of upload capacity limitations). I have tested it and modified the logic a little and it's stable, non-intrusive and does not unbalance the game. With time, Revolution Inquisitions will become even better as more ideas come through. It's not all bad because Inquisitions is entirely implemented in Python and XML.

See how it goes.
Cheers

PS) There is one more caviet or twist to the file I/O wild goose chase. I'm going to test changing XML options in game to see whether the XML is being read only once or on the fly. DCM probably only reads it once but IDW may not. However your commonsense is good and I agree that it would be logical if XML is only read once on game load in all cases.

PSS) How cool is Pangaea-natural-balanced-toiroidal? Finally there is a map that makes the other corporations like creative inc and mining inc more competitive with Sushi inc. The natural coastline and toirodal shape is making me have to think about a navy despite the massive land area. It's pretty darn cool over here.

I plye continents on 0.6 with barbarian civ off (and DCM on, except battle effects) and it was very stable. actually the only crashes occured i think because of graphic stuff I added. so I'd say the barb civ stuff is the culprit. maybe changing the code so that a civ breaks off from the barb civ instead of changing it to a full civ would be more stable?

In order not to jinx this version I will simply shut up and state the facts about what has changed from previous version and wish all you good people the best of luck:

1) DCM options can now be configured via /assets/GlobalDefinesAlt.xml as per usual.

2) Revolution 1.51 is the base.

3) Revolution Inquisition 1.02 added by default and exists only as python and xml and can be changed and/or removed although it is fine and stable.

4) Completely hardcoded DLL has been included for those interested in reducing CTD's.

5) IDW options cannot be configured until the method for accessing XML is changed.

See the readme for complete details.
Cheers

Well, I'm pretty happy with the last version you released. I had no CTDs and it's a pretty heavily moded version I'm using. The only thing was I find the game isn't balanced with ranged bombardment in mind, so I really wanted to disable that part of Dale's mod. So is the current version able to do that, and they are tags in in globaldefines.xml?

phungus420 said:

Well, I'm pretty happy with the last version you released.

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Yeah the last version was good so long as you had barbarian civ turned off. This latest version is broken. Espionage data is not being saved to disk. It's ok while you are in your current session but load from a save game and you'll see what I mean.

I'm currently trying to track it down as well speak.

Cheers.

EDIT: posting problem to the Revolutions forum as it exists in Revolutions 1.51

This new version does this:
1) Updates 0.85 to Revolution 1.52 and thus fixes the 1.51 bug.
2) Makes the installation of Revolution Inquisition optional (see readme)
3) DCM is configurable but IDW is not as per version 0.85

To install Revolution Inquisition (highly recommended) there is a zip inside 0.87 that should be extracted as per any other mod. See the readme. This was done to give players the option of not playing Inquisition and that RevolutionDCM remains compatible with RoM. Inquisitions is good and I have tested it. It is highly recommended that it be installed and needs play testing so that it can be made even better.

Cheers.

glider,

how do i change the mod's folder. By default its revolutionDCM. I changed it one time and the mod wouldn't read any of the ini's so it disabled everything (and i did have modular loading on) so i assume the path is specified somewhere.

I want it so i can have a revDCM pure mod and then my modified one

Ekmek said:

glider,
how do i change the mod's folder.

Click to expand...

Yeah that one got me early on as well. You have to change the name in the python file /mod/assets/python/CvModName.py to match the folder name. I think that will make the mod pick up the ini files again.

Cheers.

phungus420 said:

Well, I'm pretty happy with the last version you released. I had no CTDs and it's a pretty heavily moded version I'm using. The only thing was I find the game isn't balanced with ranged bombardment in mind, so I really wanted to disable that part of Dale's mod. So is the current version able to do that, and they are tags in in globaldefines.xml?

Click to expand...

To disable Dales mod go to /mod/assets/xml/GlobalDefinesAlt.xml and put zero's where all the one's are, save and you should be right to go.

Thanks for the feedback on whatever version you were using. Try the latest build 0.87. Should be good.

Just out of interest, why do you think ranged bombardment is too unbalanced? Just interesting to get opinions.

Cheers.

Hello, good mod, I really like! It's cool having all the empires around you fall into civil-wars or split into other factions, but while I was playing (oh, yeah! I never faced a civil war or up rising )
I came up with a small idea. Hope you like

Abandoned: I was going to post this in the Revolution thread but decided I’ll post it here, and maybe there too. When marching through friendly lands, your troops are at risk of deflecting from your army and joining the locals. Also, when at war, your troops are at risk of flipping to the enemy side.
The first one would happen if, the friendly lands your troops are going through are not at war with your enemy or the enemy or your enemy, also, only if your empire as at unrest due to the war. So, if your troops are walking through an empire that has never gone to war and is not at war at the moment, then your troops are at risk, and even more so if there is any unrest in your empire due to the war. However, when this happens, it effects the local empire as well, your culture spreads in their land, also, local cities and towns(Improvements) get small pop booms after two turns. The local empire however, can get rid of that foreign culture, and the pop boom that comes with it, by sending troops to the area where the passing army men have deflected and ordering them to get rid of deserters.
The second one would happen if, your troops are overwhelmed by enemy troops, or you are the attacker and your empire is at unrest due to the war, and the enemy is within your lands. National loyalty reduces the chance of this happening, happiness, good culture, and religion. When overwhelmed, your troops are likely to flip to the enemy to avoid death, when this happens those units that flip are weak at 25% or less of their unit health.
When flipping because of unrest and invaders, your units near any enemy unit are at risk of flipping to the invaders, when this happens, the unit is never at more then 25% of it’s health, this can also cause cities to riot or town improvements to give defense to the invaders.

Just my two cents. Good mod!

@Grishnash
Interesting ideas. The Revolutions forum is definetly the place to talk about it and get an intelligent reply from the creator of Revolutions himself. This forum is more for discussing how Revolutions inter-relates with Dales Combat Mod and Influence Driven War.

Cheers.