I've continued work on the map, as well as a few small changes elsewhere, but have run into a slight problem - how the game knows which colors to change on units for civ color. And how much to change them by. I checked and Firaxis's editor definitely changes more than just one color when it's changing civ-specific color, but I don't know which colors in the palette are changed, or how they are changed. It would be possible for me to use Paint and the GIMP with highly-zoomed-in images to reverse-engineer a decent approximation of the formula, as I did with borders to, but if this information is already known I'd rather stand on the shoulders of giants than have to built The Colossus anew. Unfortunately my searches haven't turned up anything on this particular aspect of palettes and civ-specific colors (I did find some very good info on the civ-specific colors in the ntpXX.pcx files, but those aren't the same sort of civ-specific colors).
The map does now display everything (unless I'm forgetting something), and I've also added an interface so that you can get information about all units on a tile, improvements in cities on a tile, etc. A few items are missing, such as the auto-named city option (does anyone use that? I didn't know it existed until a few days ago) and the ability to set AI strategy on individual units, but at this point it's the ability to edit the map that is the next major step. Right now the only thing you can do is rename cities.
I did test the editor on all the BIQs I have (a decent but certainly not exhaustive collection), and after a few bugfixes having to do with the map, all open except two:
*TETurkhan's world map, because it uses custom PTW-style city graphics, which don't have all the terrain buildings Conquests does. I don't plan to make this a high-priority fix.
*The Human Body scenario, because it uses non-standard-size city graphics in one of its files.
The latter point is something I plan to implement more generally - Balthasar's Manhattan scenario doesn't display the Empire State Building correctly in my editor because it is too tall. The good news is, this is a problem because Civ3 is more flexible than it first appears in at least one aspect. Both of these scenarios would open with map graphics disabled.
An additional 'standard', non-map update might be coming before long - I've made some updates there as well, such as fixing the Import from SAV ability.
Someone else would have to tell you the default path on a Mac.
"name Game Data" is the default folder name for each version of Civ inside the Mac Civ 3 Complete installation. On my Complete installation it is Civ III {my rename}/Conquests Game Data {the default install name}/Scenarios. Inside Civ III/ are similar paths: /Play The World Game Data/Scenarios/ & /Civilization 3 Game Data/Scenarios/
If you've included the ability to manually set the directory then anyone who can get the game installed in a custom file path should have the skills to do that as well.
The default directory is configurable, but I'd like to have it automated at least somewhat as that seems to be a common cause of the editor not working out-of-the-box for people. You have a good point about those who installed the game to a custom directory probably being able to point the editor there, though.
Thanks for the title change, too - forgot to mention that in my last post.
There's a Mac OS Cocoa API call to find out where an application is installed, but it only returns the path to the copy that would be launched by default. If someone has Civ3 installed elsewhere than /Applications/, it's quite likely to be a second copy they use for mod development.
I don't know whether the API is exposed to Java these days - Java-Cocoa bridging was deprecated a few versions ago. It may be possible to wrap it in small utility that you could run from Java, but you would have to tell me how worthwhile the effort to do this is.
I've no feel for which path is more common. I tend to use ~/Documents/Civilization 3 Conquests/Scenarios/, as i think of that as "my" space as opposed to the application directory, which was installed by Aspyr. But I may not be typical.
In light of Blue Monkey's point, it probably isn't worth it to write a utility to find the primary install path. And I'm afraid it would be a complete guess as to where most people use for their scenarios, so I think I'll leave it as it is for now.