Civ Assist beta

Readme for 1.1.1.350 beta

Pending Bugs

One beta tester has gotten error messages with XP when pressing the menu hotkey( alt+m )
to bring up the launch bar. Still haven't isolated what it could be. I have
dropped in some temporary debugging code to try to help determine what section of
code the bug is in. Be on the lookout for a error dialog asking you to email CivLackey
a specific piece of text. You'll know it if you see it - I'm leaving it the standard
windows error dialog so it will stand out. It could occur on non-XP machines
as well...
( kudos to Bill and the Redmond boys, for such a consistent programming environment... @;-)

Bug fixes

Fixed a bug that prevented the clock from being added/removed correctly when
Show Clock in the Options Menu was checked/unchecked - only happened under rare
circumstances.

Fixed some errors in the dialog text formatting routine - was causing dialog
popup messages to be laid out all screwy on certain machines. Still may need
some tweaking, but it's better now.

Fixed an error that occurred when the Print button was clicked a second time
in the Historian. The first time, it created the file and showed it in wordpad.
If you closed wordpad, then clicked the print button in the historian again, it
would say it couldn't find the file ( doh! ).

Fixed a bug that caused the overwrite prompt to ask you twice when overriding the
autosnapshot filename.

Found and fixed several bugs in the inter-form / dialog mechanics - i.e. popup dialogs,
hotkey editors, etc. There were ways to leave dialogs open, or for dialogs to end up
behind Civ.


Non-bug fixes

Fixed the 4-way cursor on several of the popup editor forms( alarm settings, snapshot settings, etc )
to maintain consistency with the 3 assistant forms ( the 4-way cursor indicates that
the form can be moved, since there is no caption bar at the top ).

Changed the X to an O on the "okay only" type popup messages, as per ZeroOne's suggestion, to
maintain consistency with Civ.


New Stuff

Added the dimensions to snapshot assistant and snapshot prompts when saving auto-
snapshots.

Added a jpeg quality setting at Thunderfall's suggestion.
It can be set in the control panel of the Snapshot Assistant,
or in the Snapshot defaults editor, which can be accessed via the System Options Menu |
Snapshot Assistant menu.

Also at Thunderfall's suggestion, added a self-killing popup after a snapshot or
historian file is successfully written to disk, just so you know the process is complete.

Added a forgotten menu item to the Global Options menu - to reset the dialog prompts.
If you ever check a "Don't ask me this again" checkbox, there wouldn't be any way to
undo your decision without editing the ini file. This resets _all_ such checkboxes in the Civ Assistants system.

Added an "open in Windows Explorer" submenu for the file history menus for both the historian
and snapshot assistants, so as to get to your files quickly.




Readme for 1.1.1.320 beta

New stuff
It kills the Civ Autorun screen for you - just a convenience item.

Fixed the mouse-wheel functionality. Mouse wheels should work everywhere you would
expect them to. Let me know if they don't...

Added a "Big Hints" feature - can be turned on / off via the System Options Menu | Global menu.
I wanted to add more descriptive multiline hints, but I don't personally like reading them in such a
small hint window / font size, so the Big Hints feature uses a larger font / window to display hints. Not sure if
this works on all systems. Let me know if it doesn't work or if it annoys you...

The various Civ Assistant hotkeys are editable via the System Options Menu | Global menu. Also,
there is a print hotkey cheatsheet menu item. If you click it, it will open an .rtf file in Wordpad or the default
editor. From there you can print it. Let me know if you have any problems launching the editor.

Added a close all versus hide functionality. Also, changed the
close ( x ) icon in most places to a minimize icon since that is
more indicative of what is actually happening.
BTW: I don't like the minimize icon. I tried to make it look consistent with the circle and x icons already in use, but I'm not an artist. If any of you are and could help me out with it, I'd be most grateful.

Added history menus for snapshots and historian files accessed. The most recent will always be at the top.
(I could make them sortable by alpha or most recent, just didn't do it.) You can get to them via the
System Options Menu, Recent Snapshot / Historian file menus.

There is a play clock / alarm feature. It is described below.

The architecture is heavily reworked to facilitate the increased number of popups and minimization of resources and the ability to create small patch files in the future.
Therefore, there may be bugs yet in switching from form to form. I have weeded out several such anomalies, but there may be more. They primarily show
up when you access a support popup, such as file open dialogs, alarm editor, etc. If you see a "cannot make a modal window visible" type message, let me know. Also, if you access a form and it drops behind Civ unexpectedly, let me know.

The Historian's Assistant is implemented. See below.

The Snapshot Assistant is implemented. See below.

Clock
I don't know how useful this will be to most Civvies. I originally made it because my wife gets upset
if I play Civ late into the night for hours on end... I hadn't intended to include it in the Civ Assistants,
but then I decided why not. Let me know what you think. Anyway, about the timeclock...

This is a fully configurable time clock / alarm. You can show the clock on the launch bar if you wish.
Left click the clock or use the System Options Menu | Menu | Clock Display menu to change what
the clock is displaying. Display modes are Current time, Time civ has been running, Time until Alarm, Time
alarm is set to go off. You only get the last two if the alarm is enabled and set. You only get the second if
Civ is running ( doh! )

The alarm comes in two flavors. The first is an alarm that you have to set for it to be active. It will work in or out of Civ.
The second is an auto playtime alarm. If you have enabled it, then when Civ is launched, an alarm is automatically
set for the specified duration. The auto-alarm can also be repeatable. For example, you could have an autoalarm fire
every 2 hours while playing Civ. You can get a popup or sound ( or both ) when the alarm fires. If you want to override
the alarm sound, put a wave file named alarmsound.wav in the Civ Assistants directory. It will use that instead. The
alarm sound plays continuously for about 5 seconds or so. Can scare the "Civ" out of you if you're not expecting it when it plays...

You can set the different alarm features via the System Options Menu | Global menu.

Snapshot Assistant
I've reworked this several times. That's partly what has taken me so long. I wanted it to be quick and simple. I think I'm
getting close. The default hotkeys are Alt+Printscreen and Ctrl+Printscreen ( leaving Printscreen to still be the system's print screen ).

Alt+Printscreen shows/hides the Snapshot Assistant. It is recognizable by the control bar across the top / bottom ( configurable ).
Use this method if you want to preview and select a specific area of the screenshot to save into the file. ( just left click and drag to
select the desired area ). This is also the screen you see if you open a recent snapshot file. You can use this feature to turn full
screen snapshots into smaller snapshots. Just open a previous snapshot, select the new area, and save it either as the same file or
as a new file.

Ctrl+Printscreen is an Autosnapshot. It uses the current snapshot directory and the current snapshot base filename to generate a unique
filename and writes the snapshot to disk. It prompts you with the filename before it saves it ( you can turn this feature off ). It will either
save the fullscreen ( 1024x768 ) snapshot, or if you have enabled the option, it will save the center 800 X 600 area only.

Oh, you can use bmp or jpg as well.

All this stuff is fully configurable via ( you guessed it ) the System Options Menu | Snapshot Assistant menu.

Historian's Assistant
Default hotkey is Alt+B. Can be changed, but you knew that...

Uses a notecard ( title on the left, free text on the right ) format. You can move titles up and down in the list if you want to arrange them
differently. Uses an autosave, autoopen the last file used mentality ( you can turn autosave off, but I wouldn't recommend it ). You can
save files as .csv or as .rtf. It will read in .rtf files created with the Historian's assistant, but it won't read general .rtf files. The buttons
along the bottom left give the new, open, save, save as, revert to saved and print functionality. The Print works the same way as
the hotkey cheatsheet outlined above ( it opens the file in .rtf format in either Wordpad or the default .rtf capable text editor ). You can
then cut ( to paste it elsewhere ) or print it as you like. Changes made in Wordpad are NOT reflected in the Historian's assistant unless
you saved it in wordpad and then opened the .rtf file with the Historian's asst. ( and depending upon what you changed, it might confuse
the H. Asst. ) This isn't meant to be a full-fledged text editor. It's a tool for keeping up with notes in an easy way from inside Civ, that will
allow you to easily get it from there into a CivFanatics post, etc. One thought I had was to convert to .html format. Wouldn't be difficult,
let me know if it would help you.


That's all I can think of right now. Keep in touch. I need feedback on errors, functionality, interface consistency, etc to know when and if
it's ready to release to the rest of the Civvies at CivFanitics. One quick thing I would like is a note on what platform you are running and how
the patch / update process went. I am using a free patch utility, but it seems to work great...

Thanks again for agreeing to help out...

CivLackey

Sounds good, but where do i download i? And is it compatible with Play the World?

Originally posted by werdhertz
Sounds good, but where do i download i? And is it compatible with Play the World?

Click to expand...

I second both of those questions.

CG

Me too.

I believe this thread is actually for beta testers only.

I think that the dialogs which have an "X" button as the only choice should be changed to "O", as it's more like "OK", "I've read and understood this". "X" is like "Close, get the hell outta here.". Otherwise looking good by the quick glance I just had the time for.

Thanks for the input, ZeroOne.

You're right - I hadn't noticed the inconsistency, but all Civ's okay-only dialogs have the circle and not the x. Good eye.

Thunderfall has suggested including an "open with explorer" option for the image and historian folders so as to get to your saved images and .rtf files quickly ( so as to upload them to Civfanatics, I would presume @;-p)

I've also added a dimensions display for the snapshot assistant and the accept file prompt ( tells you the dimensions of the image file, ie. 800 x 600 ).

I have found a couple minor bugs as well. As soon as I get all this stuff fixed and quick-tested, I'll send out a new beta patch.

By the way, I've researched the Winamp thingie some more. I have successfully controlled a hidden Winamp ( can even launch it if it's not running ). The only problem is that I can only do it thru the latest 2.yx release ( 2.81, i think ). The 3.yx beta is out, but they have gone to a new methodology/architecture. I have specs for building a winamp 3.yx plugin, and therefore I _could_ theoretically build a winamp plugin that Civ Assistants would talk to, and the plugin could relay the commands to winamp. That will take longer, and could be painful since they are still in the beta stage themselves and could change stuff underneath me without notice.

So, the skinny is - there are two options:
I can play the mp3s and read/write the m3us for you from Civ Assistants ( not very hard, actually, i've done it ) and we can just forget about Winamp, or if you don't want/need to run the latest Winamp version, then I can put in support for Winamp up thru 2.yx and when 3.yx stabilizes, maybe do a plugin to control it, too.

Let me know what you think - I'd like your input since since you're the one asking for it... ( no pun intended ;-)

CivLackey

CivLackey, you may want to lower the quality of screenshots taken by the snapshot assistant a bit to reduce the file size. Maybe something like 85% JPEG quality?

Also, it would be nice to see a little "Screenshot saved" confirmation message after clicking the save button.

Originally posted by Thunderfall
CivLackey, you may want to lower the quality of screenshots taken by the snapshot assistant a bit to reduce the file size. Maybe something like 85% JPEG quality?

Also, it would be nice to see a little "Screenshot saved" confirmation message after clicking the save button.

Click to expand...

those are both "dohs" - should've been there in the first place...
I'll go one better and put the quality setting in the snapshot defaults editor - so you can decide what quality you want to use - i'll default it to the 85% range tho.

I had thought of the "screenshot saved" thing, then thought maybe a spoken message, then completely forgot about it! I'll put the "Don't show me this again" checkbox for those who decide they don't need it.

On another note: One of the beta testers is getting an AV ( GPF for you pre-2000 blokes ) when the Alt+M hotkey is pressed. The screenshot indicates XP or ME is the platform ( they haven't told me which yet - if it's ME, that may be the problem! ) Anyway, has anyone else had that problem?

Winamp 2.81 controlling suits fine. Actually everyone that I know that is using Winamp still uses the 2.x, as the 3.y (which, btw, is not a beta anymore) is much more of a resource-eater.

I wonder if you could make historian's assistant to output HTML-files too? They're much more portable than *.rtf -files, which sadly are far from compatible between different programs and their versions... Csv is a good format though, but it needs to be processed with some fourth party program if you want it look good.

How about making it possible to right-click the main form where the cursor turns to a 4-way arrow. It would bring up the menu that one normally gets only by clicking the tiny options-button. This would be more in line with other programs, such as Winamp.

Originally posted by ZeroOne
Winamp 2.81 controlling suits fine.

Click to expand...

Okie dokie.

Originally posted by ZeroOne
I wonder if you could make historian's assistant to output HTML-files too?

Click to expand...

Yes, I can - I had wondered if it wouldn't be a good idea to do that for people who want to publish their exploits / adventures.
Copy to clipboard in html format maybe as well?

Originally posted by ZeroOne
How about making it possible to right-click the main form where the cursor turns to a 4-way arrow.

Click to expand...

I don't have a problem with that, but I'd still prefer leaving the button visible. One of my personal interface rules is not to hide too much stuff - some people just never try anything new, so they
never find it. Right click menus are not intuitive to some... You can, by the way, press Alt+O ( oh, not zero ) to bring up the options menu from anywhere, even without any Civ Assistants stuff already visible.

Update on XP related bug
It appears to be only happening on the one guy's machine, since others have informed me they don't have any problems with it in XP. He is in Europe, so it could be a European release of XP, or possibly the datetime code, since he may have that stuff set to European format, which I haven't tested. Not sure yet... I don't think it should delay the release of version 1.1.1, unless someone else gets runs into it. I'm assuming that no news is good news from the rest of you! Has anyone used the timeclock / alarm yet? Good, bad, indifferent?

Thanks all,
CivLackey

I have discovered a minor bug,

If you chose warrior v.s. warrior in combat calculator, set cover as air and leave everything else as default they both have a 50.1% Chance of winning, this is impossible as 50.1% + 50.1% = 100.2%

Originally posted by Elden
I have discovered a minor bug,

If you chose warrior v.s. warrior in combat calculator, set cover as air and leave everything else as default they both have a 50.1% Chance of winning, this is impossible as 50.1% + 50.1% = 100.2%

Click to expand...

Actually, it's not a bug per se. I'll explain.

As I indicate in the About screen and Installation readme, the combat calculator code is taken directly from the online html
Combat Calculator II as implemented by FortyJ et. al. I tried to
convert their code without introducing any errors, so that the
output should be identical to the online html calculator. I checked
your scenario with the original html version, and sure enough, it
yields 50.1% for both.

However, that doesn't mean there's a bug in the algorithm. The interface was designed for you to setup the parameters for each
battle as the game situation dictates. It doesn't check for validity of your parameter selections. To do so would be cumbersome, as
it would have to know, for example, using your scenario, that a Warrior can't be an air unit.

The reason the algorithm fails is that you selected a logically impossible parameter. Granted, in a perfect world, it would tell you that you've made a mistake. But to do so, the unit data would have to be expanded to include more data, such as whether a unit was an air, sea or land unit. Plus, the code
would have to validate your selections correctly for all posible
unit attack/defense combinations. I don't think the effort to code
and debug it would be worth the result. That's probably the same
reason FortyJ didn't do it, either.

I agree that there should be something done about it, tho. I think
a better compromise would be to put in a check to make sure the results add correctly to 100%, and if they don't display "Results inconclusive" or "Check your combat parameters" or some such instead of the impossible combat results.

Also, could it be that the label "Cover" is confusing? That's one thing I inadvertantly changed from the html version. He used the label "Terrain". Would it make more sense to change Cover back to Terrain? Or maybe just make sure the hint for Cover explains that it is the type of terrain type that the unit is occupies?

Thanks for your post! It's good to know both that you're using it and that you're not using it blindly!

CivLackey

Even if you select grassland the chances are

Attacker: 45.6 %
Deffender: 54.5%

The total of which is 100.1 %

P.S. I hadn't meant to use air it was just an example I remembered.

Originally posted by Elden
Even if you select grassland the chances are

Attacker: 45.6 %
Deffender: 54.5%

The total of which is 100.1 %

Click to expand...

Aaahhh - I see. I zeroed in on the "air" thing since it was what jumped out at me. I can explain this one, too, but just to be
sure I didn't introduce the error into the algorithm, I checked it against the html version. It yields the same result here, too, which was what I had expected...

This happens to be a display issue - the actual results are
Attacker: 45.599998474
Defender: 54.400001526

The problem lies in that during the course of the calculations, the computer accumullates a rounding error for the defender's total, forcing it up past the rounding point, which makes it round erroneously to 54.5. Floating point math and rounding with computers is always flawed, with the error getting worse the more calculations you do.

In short - I can fix this one, too. I just hadn't paid any attention to it. All I have to do is tweak the display rounding to make sure it rounds the way we humans round. I'll still put in the checks I mentioned before, though, because the "air" example is not just rounding - it really is giving the wrong results due to "air" being selected.

Originally posted by Elden
P.S. I hadn't meant to use air it was just an example I remembered.

Click to expand...

Should I change the "cover" to "terrain" anyway? Anyone else have an opinion, or does it matter?

Thanks for the heads up, Elden,
CivLackey

Ok I know I should say this here but (talking for 75% of people who have CIV3) would it be difficult to had an option to edit diplomacy in scenario so Hitler will no sign a peace treaty with Churchill 2 turns after the beginning of the wwII scenario?