XFire Chat with Firaxis

Player0

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For anyone who doesn't know, the developers of Civilization 4 are having a live Q and A with members of XFire tomorrow around 6pm EST until 7PM EST. Key developers, namely:

Barry Caudill, Senior Producer
Soren Johnson, Lead Designer
Mustafa Thamer, Lead Programmer
Steve Ogden, Lead Artist
Mark Cromer, Lead Sound Engineer

Will be present for the Q and A session. You can find out more at this webpage:
http://www.xfire.com/xf/modules.php?name=XFire&file=cmspage&body=xf_devchat_civ4

I've been selected as one of 100 XFire users that will be a part of this Q and A session. I'd like to extend this privilege to all of you and allow you all to post suggestions for questions to be asked to these developers. Please be aware that I have my own questions to ask, but this is an opportunity I think is important to share with other Civilization players and will take the time to read through and consider the questions posted over my own.
 
Wow! Awsome!

I would humbly request that you ask about mod tools, specifically: When, and for what programs, will plugins allowing the creating of units be available?
 
I'd like to know why they went with dds and nif for graphic file formats, when neither have widely available tools for the modding community to create new units. With a game touted as one of the most moddable ever, I find their choice of a proprietary graphics system (Gamebryo), which is almost held exclusively to within the domain of developers to be a curious one at best.

What plans have they got to make MODELLING available to the community?
 
On this issue I kinda agree with you, Kolyana. I have had no end of trouble with the .dds for icons in the Civiliopedia and city management screens.
I would also ask whether or not they intend to bring back the Civ3 Civilopedia-which is far more superior to the Civ4 version (the only part of civ3 which IS superior-or even as good as-its Civ4 counterpart.)

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.
 
Player0 said:
For anyone who doesn't know, the developers of Civilization 4 are having a live Q and A with members of XFire tomorrow around 6pm EST until 7PM EST. Key developers, namely:

Barry Caudill, Senior Producer
Soren Johnson, Lead Designer
Mustafa Thamer, Lead Programmer
Steve Ogden, Lead Artist
Mark Cromer, Lead Sound Engineer

Will be present for the Q and A session. You can find out more at this webpage:
http://www.xfire.com/xf/modules.php?name=XFire&file=cmspage&body=xf_devchat_civ4

I've been selected as one of 100 XFire users that will be a part of this Q and A session. I'd like to extend this privilege to all of you and allow you all to post suggestions for questions to be asked to these developers. Please be aware that I have my own questions to ask, but this is an opportunity I think is important to share with other Civilization players and will take the time to read through and consider the questions posted over my own.

:lol: :lol: :lol: If xfire is anything like gamespy there will be mass spaming on that day just to anoy the developers and the people there :lol: :lol: :lol:
 
Kolyana said:
I'd like to know why they went with dds and nif for graphic file formats, when neither have widely available tools for the modding community to create new units. With a game touted as one of the most moddable ever, I find their choice of a proprietary graphics system (Gamebryo), which is almost held exclusively to within the domain of developers to be a curious one at best.

I am not Firaxis, but I can answer these because we did the exact same thing on our latest games.

DDS is Microsoft's texture format. MS gives out free tools to deal with it.

As far as nifs go, it is the format that Gamebryo uses. If you use Gamebryo you are going to use nifs.

Why choose Gamebryo (which is rather readily available commercially)?

It's a fairly well fleshed out system with a very good art pipeline (most of what you can create in Max or Maya can be converted to nifs and they look in-game like they do in your art package). Oh yeah, it is a bargain for the price (it used to be only $50000 per sku - I don't know the current pricing). It would cost them way more than the license fee to build a homebrew 3D engine with the power of Gamebryo. It doesn't hurt that Mustafa used to work at NDL and knows Gamebryo inside and out (and that you get the source code). In addition, the programmers at NDL answer questions about Gamebryo very quickly.

Whether they can release a converter is between them and Emergent (formerly NDL). I assume that they are using the tools they bought from Emergent.
 
UnitQ said:
:lol: :lol: :lol: If xfire is anything like gamespy there will be mass spaming on that day just to anoy the developers and the people there :lol: :lol: :lol:

XFire isn't anything like gamespy, actually.

In addition, the developers won't be speaking to the XFire members directly. Instead we'll have a channel to submit questions to an XFire moderator who will select the best to ask the developers. So no, the developers won't be getting spammed. Only the XFire moderator will be talking to the developers directly.

In addition, anyone spamming the XFire moderator will be banned from the chat, so that shouldn't be a problem for long if it happens.

Please try to keep it on topic though. I'm honestly interested in any questions anyone may have and will try to get as much answered as possible.
 
In addition, the developers won't be speaking to the XFire members directly. Instead we'll have a channel to submit questions to an XFire moderator who will select the best to ask the developers. So no, the developers won't be getting spammed. Only the XFire moderator will be talking to the developers directly.

O, ok :thumbsup:

In addition, anyone spamming the XFire moderator will be banned from the chat, so that shouldn't be a problem for long if it happens.

Dang, lucky. :cry: :cry: i wish gamesy had something like that its anarchy in there.


Please try to keep it on topic though. I'm honestly interested in any questions anyone may have and will try to get as much answered as possible.

Ok, ask them if they are going to add anything to commbatt the mass spam in the game lobby. also I would like to know if they had fix most of the game crash problems especially in the gamespy lobby.
 
Gamespy does do something similar, when they hosted the C3C chat just after release they made the C3C lobby read only for anyone other than Admins and VIP's, and all questions had to be sent to the Admins, the only problem was that they would only let paying members of GS ask questions so we ended up with alot of stupid questions and the good ones were blocked :-/

CS
 
Well I guess Xfire and not GS is the "flavour of the day" in 2005. And as to the CIV GS lobby, it's little different from any other GS lobby, the "chatmonitor" is only a bot that cares about profanity and posting warez and porn links. Us ladder admins can only influence the C4P players, as we have no GS powers, but hopefully soon we will have a mute function anyway and if you can't stop the morons you'll be able to make them go away :p

CS
 
Well I put my name in to try and get a slot in that chat.So now Im just crossing my fingers.

so how/when will I know if Im selected or not??
 
Some more info on the Pitboss update: When it is expected (release date) and how it will work (what features it will contain).
 
Please ask something about the expansion pack(s) currently being planned. What will definatelly in and what are they thinking about (except for the stuff in the poll recently)?
 
Ask about the freaken patch!
 
The Q and A session will be starting shortly. A number of people in the chat haven't had time to come up with their own questions so I'm using this forum for those who need suggestions. If you have a question for the Civ 4 developers, now is the time to post it!
 
With Civ IV being built from the ground up to be a highly moddable game - if not one of the most moddable ever - are there any plans to make this somewhat easier?

Currently mods cannot be combined without tedious manual effort, which means that a diplomacy mod, cannot be combined with a fort mod, which in turn cannot be combined with a single unit addition mod.

Currently most modders have edited sections of Civ IV to be more to their liking, which gives great opportunity to use the leaders from one modder, the diplomacy from another, fort adjustments from a third and so on ... but the way Firaxis has designed this, these mods cannot be stacked and it's highly likely that they'll conflict, which then requires yet another modder to attempt to combine them all.

We are already seeing this and it is already causing problems and leading to restrictive modding that I'm sure wasn't the original intention or design.

So are there any plans to allow mods to be integrated or 'stacked' in a much more logical manner?
 
There were a lot of questions flying about, I was able to get the following answered though:

[18:32] [Civ IV] Mustafa Thamer: Regarding memory leaks that were overlooked... Civ was extensively tested and we would have never shipped the game if we knew of any crash or leak issues. What most people call a memory leak is really the game simply taking up additional resources as it progresses. However, we were able to make signifcant reductions in memory usage which will be available in the next patch (in final testng now). This should improve performance and stability for low-end machines.

[18:36] [Civ IV] Mustafa Thamer: Regarding memory usage in the patch and high-end machines. The patch will reduce memory usage from 20 to 50% depending on settings. You should not have the same kind of problems with late games or huge maps.

[18:48] [Civ IV] Mustafa Thamer: Question about combining moultiple mods - you are rsponsible for handling the merging of multiple mods yourself. Having the game automatically handle combining mods could l lead to unwanted side effects and numerous problems.
 
[19:03] [Civ IV] Soren Johnson: Would you ever change the way the religion system works? Perhaps make individual religions more unique or create a downsidwe to having multiple religions in each city? It's tempting, but probably too controversial...
 
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