darkpanda
Dark Prince
- Joined
- Oct 28, 2007
- Messages
- 844
While digging into the SVE file format as part of my JCivED development effort, I recently stumbled into interesting finds:
War, Peace or... ALLY ??
Searching for and playing with the bytes that control diplomacy, i.e. embassies, peace and war state with other Civs, I found a combination of flags that results in a Civ being marked as "ALLY" with another Civ:
I am rather positive I never saw this in an actual Civ game -even when succesfully convincing a friendly Civ to join you at war against another Civ- and I am guessing there were initial plans for more complex diplomacy, in particular regarding alliances, that were never completed...
Custom spaceship design ?
Meanwhile, deciphering the SVE bytes that code for Civ's spaceships, I found that it is actually coded on a 144 bytes, that is to say a matrixof 12 x 12 bytes, where each byte acts as spaceship "cell" that can have a set of different values representing different spaceship parts... What is interesting is that it is virtually possible to place any spaceship part in any cell, as shown on the experiment below:
Random placement
Gas tanks in front of engines
In addition, the red contour highlighted in several occasions may seem to indicate a "wrong" placement ; note that this can be seen in an actual game, for example when building a spaceship component's "propulsion" before its "reservoir" (I am just guessing the english names here, as I am playing a French version...)
On a side note, when placing spaceship parts in cells that are not part of the conventional layout, the parts are simply ignored by Civ...
My guess here is that Sid Meier initially wanted a much more interactive way to design your spaceship, where you could select what to place where and how to balance spaceship parts, but this, as well, never made it to the release...
However Sid Meier heavily coped for that in further Civ versions, as well as Alpha Centauri
War, Peace or... ALLY ??
Searching for and playing with the bytes that control diplomacy, i.e. embassies, peace and war state with other Civs, I found a combination of flags that results in a Civ being marked as "ALLY" with another Civ:
I am rather positive I never saw this in an actual Civ game -even when succesfully convincing a friendly Civ to join you at war against another Civ- and I am guessing there were initial plans for more complex diplomacy, in particular regarding alliances, that were never completed...
Custom spaceship design ?
Meanwhile, deciphering the SVE bytes that code for Civ's spaceships, I found that it is actually coded on a 144 bytes, that is to say a matrixof 12 x 12 bytes, where each byte acts as spaceship "cell" that can have a set of different values representing different spaceship parts... What is interesting is that it is virtually possible to place any spaceship part in any cell, as shown on the experiment below:
Random placement Gas tanks in front of enginesIn addition, the red contour highlighted in several occasions may seem to indicate a "wrong" placement ; note that this can be seen in an actual game, for example when building a spaceship component's "propulsion" before its "reservoir" (I am just guessing the english names here, as I am playing a French version...)
On a side note, when placing spaceship parts in cells that are not part of the conventional layout, the parts are simply ignored by Civ...
My guess here is that Sid Meier initially wanted a much more interactive way to design your spaceship, where you could select what to place where and how to balance spaceship parts, but this, as well, never made it to the release...
However Sid Meier heavily coped for that in further Civ versions, as well as Alpha Centauri
