New Resources

Hydromancerx · Nov 1, 2011

So we know there is a limit to resources before graphics errors occur. We are at the limit right now and the only way to add more is to remove existing ones. Many resources are so interwoven that its nearly impossible to remove them nor would you want to.

The "Goods" system provides an alternatives to resources where you use building requirements rather than resource requirements. This means the map resources like iron or cows have to stay. Note that they are also important for city vicinity combos where you can make more goods by having combos of 2 resources.

Thus this leaves the building made resources like Hit Singles or Steel. The downside to converting these means they can no longer be traded. This may be an acceptable price to pay if we are getting more map resources in return.

I have recently been able to more or less phase out lesser resources of Alcohol and Biofuel. While not exactly the same as their resource counterparts the goods version do work and allow for more combos between other goods.

So counting those we have possible removed building made resources of ..

1. Alcohol
2. Aluminum
3. Ammunition
4. Biofuel
5. Chemicals
6. Hit Movies
7. Hit Musicals
8. Hit Singles
9. Nanotubes
10. Oil Products
11. Semiconductors
12. Steel

My goal is to convert all 12. Like I said Alcohol and Biofuel are more or less done. however the rest are a bit trickier. The easiest would be all the "Hits". When I attempted to remove them before people freaked. While they will not be as unique as they were in vanilla I think would could expand more hit like goods too. Like Good (Hit TV Show) or Good (Hit Website).

Things like Oil Products or Aluminum are heavily intertwined with buildings and units. It would be easy if we could just give units more than one good requirement but sadly they can only have one building requirement. However you can make 1 building have many requirements. Thus many more modern units will have to require a building. This is not new since we do this for mounts and wooden ships. So it should work.

Then we have a 13th choice, the Geothermal Power is weird to be trading it. What are we trading steam? Thus I think It would be better off as a terrain feature and then you put an improvement on top and the geothermal power plant can just use terrain feature requirements instead of a resource ones.

lastly if these open up what map resources should we add in their place? I know Titanium was high on the list. Should things like Date Palms be converted into a resources instead of a Terrain Feature? Here are my choices ...

1. Titanium
2. Tin
3. Natural Gas
4. Platinum
5. Clay
6. Papyrus
7. Flax
8. Dates
9. Flowers
10. Nuts
11. Melons
12. Squash
13. Poultry

In conclusion this thread is not asking whether or not they should be converted but what new resources do you think should be put in their place? Also which do you think are the highest priority?

Dancing Hoskuld · Nov 1, 2011

Hydromancerx said:
So we know there is a limit to resources before graphics errors occur. We are at the limit right now and the only way to add more is to remove existing ones. Many resources are so interwoven that its nearly impossible to remove them nor would you want to.

The "Goods" system provides an alternatives to resources where you use building requirements rather than resource requirements. This means the map resources like iron or cows have to stay. Note that they are also important for city vicinity combos where you can make more goods by having combos of 2 resources.

Thus this leaves the building made resources like Hit Singles or Steel. The downside to converting these means they can no longer be traded. This may be an acceptable price to pay if we are getting more map resources in return.

I have recently been able to more or less phase out lesser resources of Alcohol and Biofuel. While not exactly the same as their resource counterparts the goods version do work and allow for more combos between other goods.

So counting those we have possible removed building made resources of ..

1. Alcohol
2. Aluminum
3. Ammunition
4. Biofuel
5. Chemicals
6. Hit Movies
7. Hit Musicals
8. Hit Singles
9. Nanotubes
10. Oil Products
11. Semiconductors
12. Steel

My goal is to convert all 12. Like I said Alcohol and Biofuel are more or less done. however the rest are a bit trickier. The easiest would be all the "Hits". When I attempted to remove them before people freaked. While they will not be as unique as they were in vanilla I think would could expand more hit like goods too. Like Good (Hit TV Show) or Good (Hit Website).

Things like Oil Products or Aluminum are heavily intertwined with buildings and units. It would be easy if we could just give units more than one good requirement but sadly they can only have one building requirement. However you can make 1 building have many requirements. Thus many more modern units will have to require a building. This is not new since we do this for mounts and wooden ships. So it should work.

Then we have a 13th choice, the Geothermal Power is weird to be trading it. What are we trading steam? Thus I think It would be better off as a terrain feature and then you put an improvement on top and the geothermal power plant can just use terrain feature requirements instead of a resource ones.

lastly if these open up what map resources should we add in their place? I know Titanium was high on the list. Should things like Date Palms be converted into a resources instead of a Terrain Feature? Here are my choices ...

1. Titanium
2. Tin
3. Natural Gas
4. Platinum
5. Clay
6. Papyrus
7. Flax
8. Dates
9. Flowers
10. Nuts
11. Melons
12. Squash
13. Poultry

In conclusion this thread is not asking whether or not they should be converted but what new resources do you think should be put in their place? Also which do you think are the highest priority?

Currently the trade system is mostly broken. I have managed to get animals back into trade. That just leaves the Hits to trade so you can't remove them.

Hydromancerx · Nov 1, 2011

Dancing Hoskuld said:
Currently the trade system is mostly broken. I have managed to get animals back into trade. That just leaves the Hits to trade so you can't remove them.

Could you please explain their importance? And why say a good could not do the same benefit as it (minus the trading). I just don't understand them enough to agree or disagree with you.

AIAndy · Nov 1, 2011

Hydromancerx said:
So we know there is a limit to resources before graphics errors occur. We are at the limit right now and the only way to add more is to remove existing ones.

Where exactly do the graphics errors happen?

Hydromancerx · Nov 1, 2011

AIAndy said:
Where exactly do the graphics errors happen?

I believe it was stuff like red dots, can't see if your city is unhealthy or unhappy.

Afforess said:
After extensive testing, it seems that this fix is only a partial fix. Adding more resources, while it appears to work on the outside, still ruins anything that uses the larger game font icons, namely the city bar. This why Healthiness and Happiness indicators were broken for a while in my beta's.

Sadly, it seems we will ever be able to add any more resources.

We may just have to invent a new way to do some of the things resources did, and remove some redundant or useless resources.. (Ancient Temple, I'm looking at you!)

Dancing Hoskuld · Nov 1, 2011

AIAndy said:
Where exactly do the graphics errors happen?

History lesson: Originally when you went over the limit of resources you knew immediately because everything went bad, even the font in one word would not be consistant over the word. Some letters would be in 8 point another 18 point and so on. the icons everywhere would be the wrong ones, in the pedia :hammers:

may be shown as

Work was done and we no longer have that particular problem. However I suspect that the fix was applied to only the gamefont.tga file not the gamefont_75.tga file because now the only places we are getting the error is where the graphics come from the gamefont_74.tga file. IE under the name of the city on the main screen and in the resource list in the city screen.

Hydromancerx said:
Could you please explain their importance? And why say a good could not do the same benefit as it (minus the trading). I just don't understand them enough to agree or disagree with you.

You can't trade goods. Those three Hits are the only things you can trade because they are the only things in C2C which you can't place with a Great Farmer or get from mod that spawns resources on farms/jungle camps/mines.

Hydromancerx · Nov 1, 2011

Dancing Hoskuld said:
You can't trade goods. Those three Hits are the only things you can trade because they are the only things in C2C which you can't place with a Great Farmer or get from mod that spawns resources on farms/jungle camps/mines.

Well I suppose you could make a unit that make "good" buildings inside your city without the need of another building making it. And then make that unit tradable. However that would be uber micromanaging. And it would only be available in one city and could not spread like resources do.

Dancing Hoskuld said:
History lesson: Originally when you went over the limit of resources you knew immediately because everything went bad, even the font in one word would not be consistant over the word. Some letters would be in 8 point another 18 point and so on. the icons everywhere would be the wrong ones, in the pedia may be shown as

Work was done and we no longer have that particular problem. However I suspect that the fix was applied to only the gamefont.tga file not the gamefont_75.tga file because now the only places we are getting the error is where the graphics come from the gamefont_74.tga file. IE under the name of the city on the main screen and in the resource list in the city screen.

Is there any merit to this old comment by Afforess?

Afforess said:
I suppose if I could find a way to get rid of all references to the gamefonts with resources, and just use the button instead, it might work. It would be a big undertaking though.

So is it true that the only way to get more resources is to replace all gamefont graphics with icon/buttons instead?

EDIT: Also follow up quotes ...

Afforess said:
The only thing is that most of the Gamefont code is in the EXE, so I doubt I can get rid of all the icons for resources. Which is why using goods would work.

Afforess said:
This is very tentative, and I don't want to get anyone's hopes up too much, but it seems that the Resource Bug has been fixed, by one of Sephi's posts that I missed. Anyway, my early tests show that adding and subtracting resources seems to be working fine. There may or may not be a further limit on the number of resources. The "fix" will be in beta6.

Was this really fixed in beta6? Or is this all a lie?

AIAndy · Nov 1, 2011

Hydromancerx said:
Was this really fixed in beta6? Or is this all a lie?

I have been checking the code and there is code by Sephi in the symbol loading. I don't know how the original code looked like but this one seems to map the bonuses to the very end (by mapping the special symbols in before the bonuses).
Originally I assume that was the problem that you ran into the id space for the special symbols.

So is the problem even still there?

Koshling · Nov 1, 2011

AIAndy said:
I have been checking the code and there is code by Sephi in the symbol loading. I don't know how the original code looked like but this one seems to map the bonuses to the very end (by mapping the special symbols in before the bonuses).
Originally I assume that was the problem that you ran into the id space for the special symbols.

So is the problem even still there?

I belieev it's still there at a larger limit than before (like 75 or so as opposed to 30 or so back then). May just need a larger range allocating or soemthing. I've never come up with a test case to show the issue reliably to have a serious try to addressing it.

AIAndy · Nov 1, 2011

Koshling said:
I belieev it's still there at a larger limit than before (like 75 or so as opposed to 30 or so back then). May just need a larger range allocating or soemthing. I've never come up with a test case to show the issue reliably to have a serious try to addressing it.

If I get the code correctly it loads the resource icons into those big font TGA pictures at relative places specified by the XML. That relative places are then mapped into absolute IDs by the assignFontIds method.
I don't really see where the limit would be as there is loads and loads of space in those TGA files.

robomani · Nov 1, 2011

Hydromancerx said:
In conclusion this thread is not asking whether or not they should be converted but what new resources do you think should be put in their place? Also which do you think are the highest priority?

I think dog could be a resource, we can build them freely from nowhere. Dog may be the man best friend, but I don't think the first humans spawned with dog following them around just waiting for canine domestication.

Actuarian · Nov 1, 2011

AIAndy said:
I have been checking the code and there is code by Sephi in the symbol loading. I don't know how the original code looked like but this one seems to map the bonuses to the very end (by mapping the special symbols in before the bonuses).
Originally I assume that was the problem that you ran into the id space for the special symbols.

So is the problem even still there?

It looks to me like the final word is that he could not get the city screens to display properly when you went over the resource limit. Look at the last post in the thread and the fact that AND resources never did exceed the limit. But you guys should ask Afforess for confirmation; he'll know.

Actuarian · Nov 1, 2011

I like Hydromancerx's original idea, especially getting rid of the hits. I'd rather have the additional resources than the ability to trade hits - you could do a lot of interesting things with those additional resources compared to what you can do now with the hit resources. I'm not worried about the game being true to life, but trading hits doesn't even make sense to me on a conceptual level.

EldrinFal · Nov 1, 2011

Actuarian said:
I like Hydromancerx's original idea, especially getting rid of the hits. I'd rather have the additional resources than the ability to trade hits - you could do a lot of interesting things with those additional resources compared to what you can do now with the hit resources. I'm not worried about the game being true to life, but trading hits doesn't even make sense to me on a conceptual level.

I sympathize with DH's assessment of the state of Trade, but agree with Actuarian that Hit Musicals, Movies, and Singles don't belong as a Trade good. But I think other goods could be used to replace them to similar effect and make more sense. Maybe something like Electronics or Cars. Is Oil and Oil Products separate? Oil should definitely be a tradeable resource. All the others Hydro mentioned to change over sound good to me.

As for the ones to add in, I'm a bit iffy on those. Flowers? Really?

Poultry is good... but melons, squash, dates... hmm I would agree to Coconuts though. About as important as Rice and Potatoes I think. Maybe some can be consolidated and just call it Fruits, Vegetables, etc.

Might even want to consider some kind of Slave "resource."

AIAndy · Nov 1, 2011

Actuarian said:
It looks to me like the final word is that he could not get the city screens to display properly when you went over the resource limit. Look at the last post in the thread and the fact that AND resources never did exceed the limit. But you guys should ask Afforess for confirmation; he'll know.

I don't see why that would be the case.
The display in the city screen itself is governed by the Python UI so we have pretty much complete control over it.

I would suggest adding a bunch of new resources and see if we can't tackle the problems as they arise.
Best also make a test case with world builder with all resources around a few cities plus the buildings that give resources so we can see how the different parts deal with loads of resources.

Dancing Hoskuld · Nov 1, 2011

AIAndy said:
I don't see why that would be the case.
The display in the city screen itself is governed by the Python UI so we have pretty much complete control over it.

I would suggest adding a bunch of new resources and see if we can't tackle the problems as they arise.
Best also make a test case with world builder with all resources around a few cities plus the buildings that give resources so we can see how the different parts deal with loads of resources.

You can already see part of the problem in the city screen if you have rabbits or walrus. Unless StrategyOnly removing alchol fixed it. One or the other has no icon showing and the text font is not the same as the others.

Edit I have the following resources ready to be added:-
1) Fine Clay - you can find basic pottery clay almost anywhere this is the stuff (cottage) industries grow up aound/
2) Papyrus
3) Tin
4) Titanium

Possible Flax and Coconut or Dates also.

Hydromancerx · Nov 1, 2011

robomani said:
I think dog could be a resource, we can build them freely from nowhere. Dog may be the man best friend, but I don't think the first humans spawned with dog following them around just waiting for canine domestication.

But dogs are in every culture. Without dogs humans would have never been able spread as far as they did. Places like the arctic would be nearly impossible without dog sleds. And hunting in general would be much harder. Even herding livestock like sheep would be crazy without a dog.

Humans and dogs are highly symbiotic species starting out. They helped do the things that humans were bad at such as smelling scents and helping watch in the dark when humans are most vulnerable. Paired with the power of fire humans could spread anywhere with dogs and fire.

No other domesticated animal gave human such an advantage until say horses where they could then be taller, faster and carry much more. However dogs to some extent as sled dogs can do some of that too.

In short dogs are one of the most unique species when it comes to its relationship to another species. Their pack social skills mixed with intelligence and willingness to please has proven them more than a pet. And this is why I disagree in making them resource.

Dancing Hoskuld said:
You can already see part of the problem in the city screen if you have rabbits or walrus. Unless StrategyOnly removing alchol fixed it. One or the other has no icon showing and the text font is not the same as the others.

Edit I have the following resources ready to be added:-
1) Fine Clay - you can find basic pottery clay almost anywhere this is the stuff (cottage) industries grow up aound/
2) Papyrus
3) Tin
4) Titanium

Possible Flax and Coconut or Dates also.

Well with Alcohol, Biofuel and Chemicals already gone this at least opens up 3 spots. I say put in Titanium for now. That is highest priority.

Another high priority I think is poultry since it deserves to finally be a resource. Maybe use the egg resource. Can units be made into resources? Because I could make bind you a small bird from zoo tycoon to be poultry.

Also please start on converting the geothermal power into a terrain feature instead of a resource.

ls612 · Nov 1, 2011

I agree with AIAndy and say that we should try exceeding 75 resources and see if we can fix the problems that arise. Not knowing much about the history of this problem, I'd say that if the C2C team was able to surmount it, that would be a boon not only to us the C2C fanbase, but to all of CFC.

JosEPh_II · Nov 1, 2011

Hydromancerx said:
<snip>

Is there any merit to this old comment by Afforess?
<snip>

Was this really fixed in beta6? Or is this all a lie?

Beta 6 has never been completed (os79 worked on it, but even he has backed away). Beta 5 is the closest to being the new 1.76. So after all that the answer is No it's not been fixed. Especially since Afforess may never finish the 1.76 series.

Has Anyone had contact with Afforess over the last few weeks? Months? Not that I'm aware of. IMHO He's burned out on AND and is walking away like Zappara did to RoM.

JosEPh

BlueGenie · Nov 1, 2011

Had that problem with Rabbit resource, had a different font.

My 2 pennies about the Hits; is it possible to have some goods spread in a different way, for instance having hits of various types give free building in all cities part of the trade network including foreign countries?
That way anyone with some type of Hits giving

faces are more desirable to have Free Trade or Open Borders with.

Might be possible to set this on other type of goods too, for instance smuggling goods (if a building can give two goods one can have one give a negative value and the other offset some or all of it) or free medicines, or anything else that could be fun or interesting.

Cheers

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