Problem with city names

Hey again people

I'm having a trouble with a scenario I'm working on. When any civ builds a new city, they don't get a name. The computer just builds unnamed city's as a result. Is there a way to fix this? I'm using Civ 2 Gold and its based on an older scenario i made. (although i wasnt aware i had the problem back then).


If i can fix this id also like to rename the citys for the civs so they build citys from Great Britian (and there respective part of it) instead of you finding Kyoto, Beijing and Ur in the UK.

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On a similar note is there a way to stop Engineers building Citys so only settlers can? Im trying to make it so Roman legions (replaced Engineers) can build roads and forts but not city's. (possibly not irrigation to on that note)

Thanks for your help the original scenario is my Invasion of Britain 53 AD.
When i fix these problems ill release version 2 when its done with Lots of improvments

wonx2150 said:

When any civ builds a new city, they don't get a name. The computer just builds unnamed city's as a result. Is there a way to fix this? I'm using Civ 2 Gold and its based on an older scenario i made. (although i wasnt aware i had the problem back then).

If i can fix this id also like to rename the citys for the civs so they build citys from Great Britian (and there respective part of it) instead of you finding Kyoto, Beijing and Ur in the UK.

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New city names are drawn from lists in city.txt. If MGE works anything like ToT (the version I have), when a tribe creates a new city, the game will first look for the corresponding tribe name in the city.txt file found in the scenario directory. If no matching tribe is found (because either the file or the entry within the file is missing), the game defaults to the file in the standard game directory. If there's no matching tribe name in that file, you'll get blank city names. To solve your problem, include a custom version of the file (with the scenario's tribe and city names) in the same directory as the scenario.

Note: The game records the number of cities already built by each tribe in the SAV/SCN file and this determines which city name appears next. So, if your tribe has already built 10 cities (destroyed ones included), it'll pick the 11th from the list of names. You could always include dummy lines (not blank ones) in the city.txt file or even zero the counts in the SAV/SCN file with a hex-editor - if you're into that sort of thing. Once a tribe's city list is exhausted, the game takes names from the @EXTRA entries. After that, the original tribe list is used again, and so on...

wonx2150 said:

On a similar note is there a way to stop Engineers building Citys so only settlers can?

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Nope, it's hard-coded.

Id actually figured it out my self but thanks for your answer anyway it does give me some other ideas

Id kinda sorted out the engineers problem by simply changing the way the AI treats them. I changed them to attacking units instead of setters so now in theory the Romans wont use all its legions to build city's

Thanks for your input anyway ill like to the scenario when its uploaded .

See how fast you get an answer here at CivFanatics! That's why people go here....

CivPartisan

He got lucky. Traffic isn't exactly buzzing in this forum and people shouldn't expect prompt answers. I haven't posted here in months.

That's true Wobbe...

And Civ IV is hot, along with CivRev...so people are pretty pumped up about learning about those games...which I should probably learn more about...I am so slow at learning about the new ones...

But a lot of veteran modpack writers like myself lurk a lot...especially when we are searching posts for info... I hang out here mostly...I think I used to moderate this forum at one time...got too busy though...

I've still got my website...that keeps me busy...and sometimes...I even answer questions myself...and sometimes...to myself...hey...where did everybody go?

Later,

CivPartisan

@Wobbegong

Hey, I just saw your website! Looks great! You've got a lot of ToT stuff that could be helpful...I really need to get fired up about ToT and do a few mods...

Cheers!

CivPartisan

Yeah, I've got a smattering of graphics and guides. I haven't updated the site much in the last few years.

Yeah, that's true! Your website is great! And those miniature units are truly beautiful!

Thanks. As I suggested in the other thread, static Highcolor bitmaps can be a fair substitute for animated sprites. You should also take a look at the work of Fairline (aka Gazza), who just keeps churning out high quality unit icons for ToT. He posts them in the unit graphics threads in Apolyton's Scenario League forum. Unfortunately, you have to register to view attachments - idiotic rule.

I have started uploading many of Fairline's unit graphics as well as other useful stuff, like Cities, People and the like, on the Scenario League Wiki page:

http://sleague.apolyton.net/index.php?title=Category:Civ2_Graphics

There are also Scenarios, Utilities, Scenario Creation guides and other useful stuff there too

Very handy , but why do you guys persist with this PNG preview + zipped BMP nonsense? There's no reason to be downloading everything twice. There are dial-up and throttled broadband users around. Just fix the PNGs and lose the BMPs.

As far as I understand the Bitmaps can handle more colours so the graphics are meant to be in that format. Unfortunately you cannot upload Bitmaps directly onto the Wiki so they have to be zipped. MGE has a more basic colour pallet so you can use PNGs or GIFs and post them directly onto the Wiki.

Werd100 said:

As far as I understand the Bitmaps can handle more colours so the graphics are meant to be in that format.

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No, PNGs and BMPs can both handle 24-bit colour. PNG files use lossless compression; obviously they are smaller, with no loss of data - like a zipped BMP with a preview, all in one, I guess.

Werd100 said:

Unfortunately you cannot upload Bitmaps directly onto the Wiki so they have to be zipped.

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And rightly so. People who post BMPs in webpages deserve a swift kick up the backside. They are uncompressed and unnecessarily large.

Werd100 said:

MGE has a more basic colour pallet so you can use PNGs or GIFs and post them directly onto the Wiki.

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See above.

The whole reason this preview crap started is because of an issue with the way Internet Explorer (IE) handles gamma levels in PNG files. PNGs contain 4 bytes of data at the head of the file called the gAMA chunk. This information is meant to assist applications across different platforms (eg, Macs vs PCs) standardise gamma levels; Macs use lower gamma levels than PCs. Anyway, IE makes a hash of it (I believe Firefox and Opera don't use it at all), causing PNGs to appear darker than they should. When somebody copies a PNG file (as opposed to using Save As...) in IE and pastes it into an existing file, the darkened graphics are transferred. A few years back, this was happening frequently over in the Scenario League forum. When Fairline complained about his graphics being darker, I explained what was going on and how to fix it.

If you use a utility such as Ken Silverman’s PNGOut you can remove the gAMA chunk and thus remove the problem. Based on what I've seen in the SL forum, some of you guys are allergic to command line programs: try PNGGauntlet. It's a front-end for PNGOut. Just leave the Preserve Gamma Information box unchecked. You'll also end up with better compression - after all, that's what PNGOut is mainly used for. Note that graphics editors tend to add the gAMA chunk automatically, so if you make edits to the file, you'll need to run it through PNGOut again.

To be honest I am allergic to most things computer related It is only my love of History and Civ II that causes me to dabble in such techno terror. If things get too technical or don't work as I expect them to I tend to feel an overwhelming urge to smash up my monitor

I will take a look at PNGOut/Gauntlet and see how it works out

EDIT: Just tried Gauntlet out and managed to compress some PNGs without smashing any of my PC Hardware. Is it OK to quote your post in Apolyton as I think we could all make use of this utility, especially as most scenarios are for ToT nowadays?

I will take a look at updating the SL Wiki this way in future, though re-uploading all the images again is not a fun prospect. Thanks for the advice!

Werd100 said:

To be honest I am allergic to most things computer related It is only my love of History and Civ II that causes me to dabble in such techno terror. If things get too technical or don't work as I expect them to I tend to feel an overwhelming urge to smash up my monitor

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Of course, I wasn't talking about you specifically .

Werd100 said:

EDIT: Just tried Gauntlet out and managed to compress some PNGs without smashing any of my PC Hardware. Is it OK to quote your post in Apolyton as I think we could all make use of this utility, especially as most scenarios are for ToT nowadays?

Click to expand...

That's up to you, but I've already explained it more than once to the same group of people. It's also on my website.

BTW, I use PNGOut and PNGCrush (another PNG optimiser) on all of the PNG files (8-bit and 24-bit) on my website to get them as small as possible; at one stage the site only had a capacity of 10 MB, which had me counting my kB. The version of PNGOut that comes with PNGGauntlet is a little out of date (like 2+ years), so I take the version from Ken Silverman's site and drop it in PNGGauntlet's Support subdirectory, replacing the old. Haven't experienced any incompatibility issues from doing so.

If your graphics packs are large, eg, the Icons on my Miscellaneous Graphics page, then it would be sensible to use a small sample or screenshot as a preview and include the main package as a ZIP/RAR/7Z.

Catfish

As I was not around (well not in Civ II land) when you last posted on your website about your LOTR project I was wondering how it was going?

I am a master of unfinished projects so I can sympathise, although your work seems to go above and beyond the average. How close are/were you to finishing? Did you ever release a public playtest version? I know how frustrating it can be when you have put in huge amounts of time and effort only to find out that the Civ II AI does not grasp your grand scheme

Werd100 said:

As I was not around (well not in Civ II land) when you last posted on your website about your LOTR project I was wondering how it was going?

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I haven't touched it since early in the year when someone asked me for it. Only just reinstalled Civ2 after building a new machine a few months ago. I think the main issue that needed resolving was the matching of events with an optimised tech research rate - a bit of recalibration. It made me shorten the period of the AI's main assault, which I'm not sure didn't lead to an inferior game. Some of my older games were a real tough slog. I think I cleared up the worst of the AI's problems (it's a huge map with lots of natural barriers and a low city density - about as hard as you can get in Civ2), but I haven't played a game in a long while.

Werd100 said:

How close are/were you to finishing?

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Need to resolve the above issues. Graphics, sounds, documentation: all done. A few descriptions in describe.txt need completing. That's about it.

Werd100 said:

Did you ever release a public playtest version?

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Nope.

Apologies to the thread-starter for going wildly off-topic here.

Yes, sorry for the diversion

This problem was solved a long time ago. So it might as well go off in weird and wonderful directions .