Stop the Presses!

This thread is to clear up information for A New Dawn, following the annoucement of Civilization 5's imminent release this fall. Once I obtain a copy (on the release day ) of Civilization 5, I will be leaving development of A New Dawn to work on a new Civilization 5 mod. I can't release details of what exactly the mod will entail, or who and what is involved, but I can assure you that I am not leaving. This means after this fall, A New Dawn will have no further official development. I appreciate all the support I've received from the community, it's you who has made this mod so great.

Hey, this is still a great mod. I've wasted gigabytes of bandwidth and memory downloading and storing Zappara's and your creations over the months

Arakhor said:

Hey, this is still a great mod. I've wasted gigabytes of bandwidth and memory downloading and storing Zappara's and your creations over the months

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It will still be completely playable when I leave, barring any 3.2X patches by Firaxis.

Anyway, I can't wait for Civ5! Sid better not let us down.

The only downside with the Civ5 announcement is that for a while, we will all be playing vanilla lol.

Question for all the modders, given all the releases and beta's that have come about with ROM and AND, how long would it take to get to the point in CIV5-ROM-AND, where it is today? Years?

The mythical 3.21 patch by Firaxis that suddenly enables multi-threading and brings you your slippers and paper in the morning?

gramcrkr103 said:

The only downside with the Civ5 announcement is that for a while, we will all be playing vanilla lol.

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Not if I have anything to say about it.

gramcrkr103 said:

Question for all the modders, given all the releases and beta's that have come about with ROM and AND, how long would it take to get to the point in CIV5-ROM-AND, where it is today? Years?

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Months? Quicker, because I learned how to mod from the ground up, last summer I knew nothing about programming. Today, I know much more. I'll be able to mod 5-10x faster.

Afforess said:

This means after this fall, A New Dawn will have no further official development. The 1.70 release will likely be the final release.

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"All good ends in time"
You made me feel sad, and old.
But anyway, lets wait for Civ5!

Since there really hasn't been any technological advances in coding types since Civ4, my guess is that Civ5 is just gunna be a very innovative, fast and pretty-looking Civ4. In other words from Civ1 - Civ2 you had platforming changes. Civ2 - Civ3 you had C++. In Civ3 - Civ4 you had a 3D engine, python and XML. You really can't do too much more from Civ4 - Civ5 except for making the Code more efficient. Yea the graphics look better but that's a given, besides it's still 3D animation (chances are they changed the software they used from 3ds Max to Maya). C++ is still the dominant computer programming language, XML is fairly new so might as well keep it too however the Python might have been replaced (due to so many lag complaints directly related to it) but any code that may be replacing it can easily be learned. So in light of this, plus it's ability to be "highly moddable" I'm guessing that large mods like RevDCM (given vanilla Civ5 doesn't have it) will be released fairly quickly.

There's no lag in python, the lag was all when the game had to translate between python and C++. Simply fix that, and the UI gets 5x faster.

gramcrkr103 said:

The only downside with the Civ5 announcement is that for a while, we will all be playing vanilla lol.

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So true.
Cant wait to see what Affores and Zappara would make.

That is fine, just make sure 1.7 is stable.
What will you do if Civ5 is not as moddable?

NBAfan said:

That is fine, just make sure 1.7 is stable.
What will you do if Civ5 is not as moddable?

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No worries there. If Sid lies to us... back to Civ4 then. But I suspect he won't, every civilization iteration has been better than the last.

*sigh*

I just hope Civ 5 doesn't suck or there will be a lot of wasted months of not working on it only to have to come back to it after civ 5 is released.

Also how much do we know about the new features of civ 5? I mean are thre going to be a lot of things left out that will only be reintroduced through expansions?

This is a very sad day...

In short I think we should keep working on it for as long as possible in case the worst comes. Plus any civ 5 game will look horrible compared to RoM and AND anways sicne they are so awesome already.

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Hydromancerx said:

*sigh*

I just hope Civ 5 doesn't suck or there will be a lot of wasted months of not working on it only to have to come back to it after civ 5 is released.

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Well, seeing how this has never been the case before, why would it be now?

Hydromancerx said:

Also how much do we know about the new features of civ 5? I mean are thre going to be a lot of things left out that will only be reintroduced through expansions?

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A bunch already from the screenshots alone.

Hydromancerx said:

This is a very sad day...

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I'm afraid I don't understand your sadness... New Game Engine = Very Fast Turns, plus lots of other new things, and it's supposed to be even more moddable. This is a very happy day for me.

Well its not the first time the next in a series has sucked. For example Neverwinter Nights was super modable both for wold building and making mods/haks. However when Neverwinter Nights 2 came around it tried to look nicer but in the process was more limiting and made modding/hking nearly impossible. Which is why most people never even know about the game.

The next example was Sim City 4 vs Sim City Societies. Sim City was a good modable game with decent graphics and a huge community. Then Sim City Societies cam and had better graphics but next to no modding and a rather stupid game nothing like any of the previous sim cities. Thus being a major flop for the series. (Which is why I uninstalled it and reinstalled Sim City 4)

Lastly The Sims 2 vs the Sims 3. The Sims 2 (and Sims 1) were very modable and lots of content over many expansion packs. Howver its seems that the Sims 3 while some what modable falls ito the same trap as NWN2 where only the most skilled can eve mod it which kills off the modding community. Not to mention with all the sims 2 expansions why would you want to play a stripped down version of the same with slight better graphics? (Which is why I uninstalled the Sims 3 and went back to the Sims 2)

I am hopeful that since Civilization is not made by either EA/Tilted Mill or Atari/Obsidian that it will not suffer the bad choices of them. So far the civilization series has always improved upon its game and seems to allowed for more customization. However Civ 4 ws made during the "goldielocks zone" of gaming which happened around the beginning of the millennium. before then most games were not modable or if they were it was extremely difficult. However the graphics did look good but are not as good as they are now. And today's graphics seem to limit much of the modding possible is most modders.

In short I hope I am very wrong and Civ5 will be even more awesome than civ4.

Firaxis promised that it would be even more moddable, and whether it's true or not will really make or break the game. If it turns out to be un-moddable, I'll be right back here. So it's a win-win, either way, I'm not going to quit modding.

Afforess said:

Firaxis promised that it would be even more moddable, and whether it's true or not will really make or break the game. If it turns out to be un-moddable, I'll be right back here. So it's a win-win, either way, I'm not going to quit modding.

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Also what happens if the game release keeps getting pushed back?

Note this was an issue with Spore when waiting for it where I literally waited from Spring 2005 till Fall 2008. Which was a crazy amount of time to wait since the original projections was winter 2005 release date.

I also have some other questions like ...

1. Do you think any code or graphics from RoM or AND can be salvaged/recycled for Civ 5?

2. How different do you think Civ 5 will be from Civ 4?

3. Do you think any planning or even pre-modding for Civ 5 mods can be done now?

Hydromancerx said:

Also what happens if the game release keeps getting pushed back?

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The screenshots make me suspect the game is pretty far along and only AI tweaks and bugs are left. I won't stop modding ever, just switch gears when I get Civ5.

Hydromancerx said:

Note this was an issue with Spore when waiting for it where I literally waited from Spring 2005 till Fall 2008. Which was a crazy amount of time to wait since the original projections was winter 2005 release date.

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Then we are going to get past AND 2.0 for sure.

Hydromancerx said:

I also have some other questions like ...

1. Do you think any code or graphics from RoM or AND can be salvaged/recycled for Civ 5?

2. How different do you think Civ 5 will be from Civ 4?

3. Do you think any planning or even pre-modding for Civ 5 mods can be done now?

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1.) Graphics, I doubt it, but the graphics boys will probably go crazy at first inventing everything over again. They always do. Code, well the ACTUAL code will probably be useless, but the concepts behind it won't be.

For example, Civ5 has no religion system. Opera and I agree that we need to work and mod that back in ASAP. We will likely use the way Civ4 mechanics work to get it in Civ5, so we don't have to re-invent the wheel.

2.) As different as CivIII was from CivIV. Very. Already, the biggest changes are in warfare, there are no stacks at all, 1 unit per tile. Civics are replaced by Social Policies (YAH! Civics Suck!),...etc.

3.) Only if Firaxis wants us to. I know this occurred with BTS, they got Rhye and Kael beta copies early and they made mods for it. If Firaxis decides to give certain modders advance copies, (*cough*please...Sid*cough*), then yes, Pre-Modding will occur. It's almost entirely up to Firaxis though.

Afforess, I have a lot of respect for your accomplishments and drive, and I understand that you'll want to jump into Civ5. Judging from the screenshots it looks graphic intensive, and I suspect some people will continue to play Civ4 for some time. Heck, people still play Civ3 and Civ2 (or derivatives). And there's bound to be a long Good/Bad discussion when Civ5 comes out.

So, I'm trying to encourage you to focus primarily on stability of AND, so that you leave a viable version that requires little maintenance, and also to be ready to work in parallel on AND and Civ5 for a little while if need be.