[TOT] The Test Of Time Patch Project

Uh-oh. I just tested this and it seems that in MGE ship units cannot be used for trade even if they're flagged as 'trade' units in Rules.txt. When you try to trade with a ship, it says "Units such as Settlers, Caravans, and Diplomats, which have a combat strength of 0, are considered non-combat units. They may not initiate combat with enemy units." It seems that whatever parameter triggers this message overrides the designated unit behavior. The question is, can it be altered? If ships cannot be made into trade units, I will most likely have to disable trade in my scenario, which is a major bummer. Maybe you could look into this? Ofc it may be that in ToT this issue is already corrected; in this case ignore my ramblings.

TheNamelessOne said:

This one's interesting. Removing the check is trivial, but because of a technical issue the CD check may run before TOTPP.dll is injected. So you may or may not still see the 'CD not found' dialog. After pressing 'Repeat search' it will have been patched, but I'm holding it back until I've properly fixed it.

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I have been using the Civ2Unlimited patch with TOT for some time and then suddenly
the no cd check facility stopped working and the limit of 32K gold re-appeared.

I am not sure why but I suspect windows vista or norton AV update is at fault;
preventing memory modification.

When I get a spare day, I will try your patch.

Greizer85 said:

When you try to trade with a ship, it says "Units such as Settlers, Caravans, and Diplomats, which have a combat strength of 0, are considered non-combat units. They may not initiate combat with enemy units." It seems that whatever parameter triggers this message overrides the designated unit behavior. The question is, can it be altered? If ships cannot be made into trade units, I will most likely have to disable trade in my scenario, which is a major bummer. Maybe you could look into this? Ofc it may be that in ToT this issue is already corrected; in this case ignore my ramblings.

Click to expand...

It's exactly the same in ToT, since a bunch of checks are only done when the unit's domain is 0, ground. It is for the same reason that you can't have diplomat-ships, for instance. So then the first check that triggers is the non-combat dialog, since a caravan has no attack.

I've been thinking about adding a custom section to RULES.TXT that can be used by TOTPP (kind of like additions to @COSMIC), so that changes don't have to be hardcoded, or specified in the launcher. They would probably consist of key=value pairs, since I can't depend on any specific order. Then something like a "trade science multiplier" and a "trade gold multiplier" could be added, to increase/reduce trade revenue on a per-scenario basis. And that's only one example, other things could be added there as well.

Sounds splendid! I'm curious, btw: the game's been out for 18 years (ToT for how long? Must be at least 10?), and in all that time no one else has corrected these issues. Then you stroll along and seem to have a magical touch that can affect every problem. Not that I doubt it, but is it simply the case that no one as skillful has come along before? Or are there other mods that do similar things that I'm not aware of? The only thing I can think of is that ToT made a lot of these 'exotic' fixes possible, and when it was released, many modders had moved along already. But then the breadth of ToT scenarios would seem to counter this theory. I'm puzzled, 's all.

In actual news, my ToT copy finally arrived today. I will tinker around with it (praying that it works in Windows 7... ), and see what other possible fixes I can think of (and ofc try out ToTPP!).

EDIT: Got it installed and working just fine. First impression: horrible, terrible, incomprehensibly bad graphics! Now to install the original graphics mod...

Btw I also noticed that there's no map editor. Can it be downloaded from somewhere, or can I simply use the MGE editor? I imagined that ToT would have an improved editor, but it seems there's none included?

Greizer85 said:

Sounds splendid! I'm curious, btw: the game's been out for 18 years (ToT for how long? Must be at least 10?), and in all that time no one else has corrected these issues. Then you stroll along and seem to have a magical touch that can affect every problem. Not that I doubt it, but is it simply the case that no one as skillful has come along before? Or are there other mods that do similar things that I'm not aware of? The only thing I can think of is that ToT made a lot of these 'exotic' fixes possible, and when it was released, many modders had moved along already. But then the breadth of ToT scenarios would seem to counter this theory. I'm puzzled, 's all.

Click to expand...

Through memory modification anything is possible. This is not limited to ToT, it can be done for any program. But to make any meaningful changes, you need to figure out where in a multi-megabyte binary file a particular feature is encoded. Solving this is unfortunately infeasible for most modders, who generally use the modification options provided by the game itself. But yes, it's a pity no one managed to do it before, back when more people were playing the game.

Greizer85 said:

Btw I also noticed that there's no map editor. Can it be downloaded from somewhere, or can I simply use the MGE editor? I imagined that ToT would have an improved editor, but it seems there's none included?

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You can use the MGE editor, there's no difference in the map format between both games.

Thank you for the infos. I haven't been able to play with ToT a lot so far, but I noticed three fairly annoying issues.

1) The unit you have selected no longer blinks; instead, the yellowish rectangle-thingy beneath him does. I find this an offense to all mankind. How do I revert to the blinking ways of days past?

2) Similarly, even though I've disabled all animations (by deleting the associated files), there's still a delay when a unit moves from one square to another. How do I disable this and make units move instantly again?

3) The units are slightly elongated in the original graphics mod, making them appear goofy. I suppose it can't be helped..? It's an issue with the image sizes as I understand it; in MGE the unit icons are 4x x 4x (can't remember the exact number), while in ToT it's 6x x 4x. If this can't be helped, it is a *major* negative point to using ToT.

EDIT: Ah -- it seems that something's gone awry in a big way. I installed the 'original menus' mod by Catfish, and then when I loaded up a saved game, this happened:

Seems like I've entered Bizarro World accidentally. Your mod was also in use when I saved and loaded the game; could it have conflicted with the UI mod somehow? Whatever this is, it seems to have totally mangled the terrain graphics... All those Game resources in one big cluster like that! I just checked and they don't actually exist, being mere graphical artefacts. And the black city names and random resource tags on the terrain... Made my day, this bug, whatever it is!

EDIT2: If I start a new game and then try to load the saved game, Civ II stops working. If I pick 'Load Game' straight from the start-up menu, then I get the scrambled graphics. I hope the issue is with the UI mod and not your mod, because without your mod I can't found any cities (it will crash the game). I didn't keep the original menu files though... Bleh. I guess I should re-install the game and try again. I'm tempted to just stick with MGE though. In a way, working around its limitations was fun, even if frustrating at times. It may be just a first impression, but ToT seems cluttered and unnecessary next to MGE's spare elegance. I'm sure if I learned all the modding possibilities, I'd think differently, though.

Greizer85 said:

Btw I also noticed that there's no map editor. Can it be downloaded from somewhere, or can I simply use the MGE editor?

Click to expand...

Use Mercator's modified editor. It supports larger maps (to 32767 tiles). The editor also suffers from the Edit Box bug, so you should run MastermindX's 64-bit patcher on civ2map.exe if you're running 64-bit Windows.

Greizer85 said:

I haven't been able to play with ToT a lot so far, but I noticed three fairly annoying issues.

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1. You can't, well not unless TNO adds it to his list. You can change the style and colour of the tile marker in icons.bmp.
   
2. Do you have fast piece slide enabled under Game Options?
   
3. In MGE and earlier, the unit size is 64x48. In ToT it's 64x64. The icons are stretched vertically because the mod author stretched them to fit the icon box. Here's a classic graphics mod I put together a few years ago, sans stretched units.

Greizer85 said:

Your mod was also in use when I saved and loaded the game; could it have conflicted with the UI mod somehow? Whatever this is, it seems to have totally mangled the terrain graphics...

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See here.

While I'm here:

Tot Bugs

• Fix orientation of AI units. Unlike the human controlled units, they don't flip when moving in a westerly direction; only when attacking.

Feature Requests

• More terrain types. All scenario designers want this. A pain to implement, I imagine.
• Restore x3 city objectives as per Fantastic Worlds (absent in MGE & ToT). Or better, multiple multipliers.

@Catfish: Praise be to you, you magical person! All but one of my problems got solved in one fell swoop. They could use someone like you in our current government.

Catfish said:

Use Mercator's modified editor. It supports larger maps (to 32767 tiles). The editor also suffers from the Edit Box bug, so you should run MastermindX's 64-bit patcher on civ2map.exe if you're running 64-bit Windows.

Click to expand...

Thanks; I have the standard MGE editor though, and I won't ever make monster-sized maps, since I heavily dislike them. But it's good to know that something like this exists.

Catfish said:

1. You can't, well not unless TNO adds it to his list. You can change the style and colour of the tile marker in icons.bmp. This is the one problem that remains unsolved. I'd really appreciate it, TheNamelessOne, if the 'original blink' could be restored. There's something off with the speed of the blink as well. It blinks just a *tad* too slow, compared to just right in MGE. It won't make or break the game for me, but it sure is annoying.
   
2. Do you have fast piece slide enabled under Game Options? No, I did not! Now I do, though, and it will stay that way until the dinosaurs come back (which is to say, forever). Thank you!
   
3. In MGE and earlier, the unit size is 64x48. In ToT it's 64x64. The icons are stretched vertically because the mod author stretched them to fit the icon box. Here's a classic graphics mod I put together a few years ago, sans stretched units. Thanks again, marvellous work. Btw I like how you 'cleaned up' all the non-working bits from the Terrain1 file and others. I knew most of it is unneeded, but I didn't dare to fiddle with it myself, for fear of breaking the file(s).

Click to expand...

Catfish said:

See here.

Click to expand...

Solved as well! This makes perfect sense, unlike my head at the best of times.

Catfish said:

While I'm here:

Tot Bugs

• Fix orientation of AI units. Unlike the human controlled units, they don't flip when moving in a westerly direction; only when attacking.

Feature Requests

• More terrain types. All scenario designers want this. A pain to implement, I imagine.
• Restore x3 city objectives as per Fantastic Worlds (absent in MGE & ToT). Or better, multiple multipliers.

Click to expand...

I second the bolded (and the rest couldn't hurt, either). I'd need just *one* terrain type to make my Finland map perfect for the scenario... It hurts my brain to think of which one I will have to scrap in order to fit all essential ones in. If I could place the resources where I wanted, this problem would be greatly mitigated, but it'd still be very nice to have.

Btw I have two additional questions:

1) How do you disable ice caps on a map (the ones that appear automatically)? Only now do I notice that you can also do this in MGE... I will have to update my world map, too, once I learn how to do this.

2) Specifically for ToT: I notice that the units now have a small shield to the left of their health bar, instead of a large one under it, as in standard Civ II and MGE. To the tune of my earlier questions, how do I revert to the old ways of larger and shinier shields? (I seem to recall a mention in some thread that it can't be done... A pity if this is the case; it's not essential, but the little things like this do add up. One rock in your shoe is not that bad, but 5 rocks can be murder! )

Greizer85 said:

The unit you have selected no longer blinks; instead, the yellowish rectangle-thingy beneath him does. I find this an offense to all mankind. How do I revert to the blinking ways of days past?

Click to expand...

I'll put it on the list, but unless the code is still there from MGE and it's just a matter of switching it back on, I'll consider it low priority. It just takes some getting used to the new unit selection, I suppose.

Catfish said:

Tot Bugs

• Fix orientation of AI units. Unlike the human controlled units, they don't flip when moving in a westerly direction; only when attacking.

Feature Requests

• More terrain types. All scenario designers want this. A pain to implement, I imagine.
• Restore x3 city objectives as per Fantastic Worlds (absent in MGE & ToT). Or better, multiple multipliers.

Click to expand...

I'll put these on the list as well. More terrain types is something that's already pretty high on my personal list. The limit will be 16 terrain types though, since only the lower 4 bits can be used for terrain type in some structures. So that means 5 new ones, I'll just have to do a little more investigation on this one to make sure it's doable.

Greizer85 said:

Btw I have two additional questions:

1) How do you disable ice caps on a map (the ones that appear automatically)? Only now do I notice that you can also do this in MGE... I will have to update my world map, too, once I learn how to do this.

Click to expand...

If the game generates a round map it will always generate ice caps. Use a flat map, or export the map and remove the ice caps in the editor.

Greizer85 said:

2) Specifically for ToT: I notice that the units now have a small shield to the left of their health bar, instead of a large one under it, as in standard Civ II and MGE. To the tune of my earlier questions, how do I revert to the old ways of larger and shinier shields? (I seem to recall a mention in some thread that it can't be done... A pity if this is the case; it's not essential, but the little things like this do add up. One rock in your shoe is not that bad, but 5 rocks can be murder! )

Click to expand...

Same answer as the unit blinking. Trust me, after a while you don't even notice little things like this anymore

TheNamelessOne said:

I'll put these on the list as well. More terrain types is something that's already pretty high on my personal list. The limit will be 16 terrain types though, since only the lower 4 bits can be used for terrain type in some structures. So that means 5 new ones, I'll just have to do a little more investigation on this one to make sure it's doable.

Click to expand...

Cool, 5 would be more than enough! In a similar vein, more city styles would be great as well. The default 4 can be crippling for many scenarios, especially ones where all civs are meant to eventually transition to the Industrial and Modern ages (as in mine).

TheNamelessOne said:

If the game generates a round map it will always generate ice caps. Use a flat map, or export the map and remove the ice caps in the editor.

Click to expand...

This may be a dumb question, but how do I go about 'exporting' a map? I tried starting a game, saving it and then opening the save file with the map editor... But once I save it as xxx.mp, the ice caps will return again (once I start a new game on the map). Is it a different procedure altogether?

TheNamelessOne said:

Same answer as the unit blinking. Trust me, after a while you don't even notice little things like this anymore

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I guess you may be right. It might just be that all these changes at once are causing my brain to react aversely to the ToT graphics. Anyway the main issues (bad default graphics, animations, elongated units) have been dealt with, so the rest is just flavor and convenience. Low priority, as you say.

Greizer85 said:

I tried starting a game, saving it and then opening the save file with the map editor... But once I save it as xxx.mp, the ice caps will return again (once I start a new game on the map)

Click to expand...

You're right, the game adds ice caps for existing maps as well. I didn't realize that. That leaves changing the terrain through the cheat menu, or editing the save/scenario file directly.

In the other news, I'll probably release 0.3 in a few days. No big new features, but it fixes a couple of significant bugs in the game:

• A proper fix for AI hostility. Sometimes the attitude modifier wasn't initialized properly, so it was using large random values, leading to the worst possible attitude.
• Fixed the rule 2 restrictions in @LEADERS2 so that forbidden technologies cannot be stolen. Caused by the game doing the check for the wrong tech.
• Fixed the movement rate listed for units in the Civilopedia so it respects the cosmic road multiplier. Replaced a hard-coded division by 3 with a division by the road multiplier.
• Non-transformable terrain could be transformed into a weird, undefined terrain type using the O-key. This was already fixed by the "Transform requires tech" patch, but I'll split it in two, a bug fix and a feature patch.
• Multiplayer Build World phase + CPU fix hangs the game. Fixed by not yielding during network polling.

TheNamelessOne said:

You're right, the game adds ice caps for existing maps as well. I didn't realize that. That leaves changing the terrain through the cheat menu, or editing the save/scenario file directly.

Click to expand...

I am not sure how it is is in TOT (never played it) but in regular Civ2 any map that is round will get polar icecaps (one row of glacier at the top and bottom of the map) automatically regardless of what you may have in those rows. In contrast, flat maps do not get automatic polar icecaps. (Of course you could put them in if you want to.)

Version 0.3 is ready. Here's the list of changes (a last minute addition in bold):

• A proper fix for AI hostility. Sometimes the attitude modifier wasn't initialized properly, so it was using large random values, leading to the worst possible attitude.
• Fixed the rule 2 restrictions in @LEADERS2 so that forbidden technologies cannot be stolen. Caused by the game doing the check for the wrong tech.
• Fixed the movement rate listed for units in the Civilopedia so it respects the cosmic road multiplier. Replaced a hard-coded division by 3 with a division by the road multiplier.
• Fixed the transform order by checking if the terrain type can be transformed at all.
• Multiplayer Build World phase + CPU fix hangs the game. Fixed by not yielding during network polling.
• Impassable terrain domain check. Makes air units respect impassable terrain too. Can still be overridden on a per-unit basis in @UNITS_ADVANCED.

For more information, see the included README.txt.

Wow, that's fantastic. Where were you 10 years ago? Thanks for addressing those requests, especially that @LEADERS2 bug.

You're welcome. And thank you for mentioning TOTPP on your site.

TheNamelessOne said:

You're welcome. And thank you for mentioning TOTPP on your site.

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No problem. It's ToT newsworthy. You never know, it may direct some traffic to the thread.

...and I've got a few more suggestions , most mod/scenario related:

ToT Bugs

• Eliminate incremental rush buying. It's an exploit. It's possible because when you click Buy, it doesn't actually buy the item; you can change city production before you close the deal. Perhaps clicking the Buy button should lock the city's production until the following turn.
• Fix the first turn bug. The sum of a tribe's city sizes would need to be recalculated more dynamically. Perhaps every tribe's sum total should be recalculated at the beginning of a player turn, and also when a city is captured or destroyed.

Feature Requests

• Add a reset to defaults option to the ToTPP Launcher for the maximum units and cities values - for back compatibility.
• Introduce the option to prevent the population decrease that occurs when a city without walls loses a defender. Perhaps a flag could be added to Cosmic Principles in rules.txt. It creates problems for scenarios when key cities are wiped off the map.
• Add a multiplier for caravan/freight payoffs. Less than 1 would be great for many scenarios. Another parameter for Cosmic Principles?
• Add a unit flag in rules.txt that prevents a role 5 unit (settler) from founding cities. Or unit flags which assign various settler/engineer abilities to non-settler/engineer units, ie, irrigating, mining, terrain transformation, and road, fortress, airbase and transporter building.
• Increase the maximum height of terrain2 tiles from 32 to 48 pixels.

Catfish said:

Eliminate incremental rush buying. It's an exploit. It's possible because when you click Buy, it doesn't actually buy the item; you can change city production before you close the deal. Perhaps clicking the Buy button should lock the city's production until the following turn.

Click to expand...

I like this idea, this could be stored as a city flag, which is reset on the start of the turn.

Catfish said:

Add a multiplier for caravan/freight payoffs. Less than 1 would be great for many scenarios. Another parameter for Cosmic Principles?

Click to expand...

I know that others would like this as well, so I'll bump it on my list.

Catfish said:

Increase the maximum height of terrain2 tiles from 32 to 48 pixels.

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Could you explain the purpose of this? Are you talking about the tiles in Terrain2.bmp or those affected by @TERRAIN2 in the rules?

(I'll put your other suggestions on the list too, which keeps getting bigger )

Some stuff I've been working on:

• Pathfinding (goto command). Which is seriously bugged (but I guess you all knew already). Its range is limited to 24 tiles, above that it will just move in the general direction of the destination. Below 24 tiles there's a bug where it sometimes calculates the proper path (this at least happens sometimes when crossing x=0), but then decides to throw these results away and do a different calculation.
  
  Pathfinding from Veii to Rome with tile scores, less is better:
  
  Spoiler :

  
  
  
• Unit drawing (for hiding health bars). Can be set by using the 16th bit of the flags in @UNITS (i.e. by adding a 1 on the left):
  
  Spoiler :

  

More to come later!

Good evening,
I'm trying to contact "Catfish" user but I cannot send him a private message... sorry for being OFF TOPIC.
I really like "Commands & Colors" boardgame system and some weeks ago I've started a "conversion project" with my son to recreate War of the Ring scenarios.
I've found your great unit pictures on the web
http://users.tpg.com.au/jpwbeest/jp_units.htm
and I'm writing these two lines just to ask your permission to use them and eventually share them on BGG (slightly modified to best fit my C&C project).
Waiting for your kind answer before proceeding.
Please let me know.
Thank you in advance.
Albuin

One thing I've noticed in regards to AI behavior, is that it seems to have a preference for building their cities in a mainly easterly direction; an issue especially apparent on land-dominated maps, and it is true in almost every game I play, both ToT and MGE. And as far as I can tell, the AI doesn't seem to care much about their western parts until they're blocked by either other civs or terrain. Might this be fixable?

Edit: another AI habit I've noticed is that the AI, after a while, sets the production orders of every single one of their cities to (capitalization), even if they have a pitiful army. So on long games with thousands of turns in the books, it just gets bland, so ideally, the AI should jus make more and more units, which will hopefully eventually trigger their invasion insticts once their unit numbers affect their power rankings. I'd love to see a fix for tbis, if possible.

And finally, in addition to the routing issue mentioned by others, not only does the AI circumnavigate the world instead of crossing the local date line, a unit, usually caravans, will get stuck in an endless loop going back and forth on just two tiles, prompting repeated "continue moving unit" pop up dialogs if it is player-controlled (or if the player was feeling lazy and put their civ on "autopilot" via the cheats menus).

PlutonianEmpire said:

One thing I've noticed in regards to AI behavior, is that it seems to have a preference for building their cities in a mainly easterly direction; an issue especially apparent on land-dominated maps, and it is true in almost every game I play, both ToT and MGE. And as far as I can tell, the AI doesn't seem to care much about their western parts until they're blocked by either other civs or terrain.

Click to expand...

Interesting observation. I have never played TOT, but in many games of regular Civ2 I have not noticed that. In my current game, GOTM 152, Russians and Chinese could expand by either going east or west and both chose west. I will try to remember to keep an eye on this.

Your observation makes perfect sense from an algorithmic point of view though. The AI has to pick a direction to expand in first and rather than picking one randomly the order is hard coded.