I think it would be worth the work, as for Civ 2 ToT it would be a gigantic step forward, if it could handle animated units in high quality. Even standard Civ 2 had an animation for both units in battle, showing lost hitpoints for each of the units. There were a lot of civers who were sad about loosing these animations in Civ 2 ToT.
With Mercator´s sprite generator there exists a tool that allows to create such animated Civ 2 Tot units - and there are thousands of Civ 3 units, that could be converted.
I might look into it for a later release. Right now, there are some other features I want to develop first. Maybe in the future.
I was renaming the file extension for events.txt to prevent interference. In doing so, this has disabled the Lua events for scenarios. If there's no events.txt file detected in the scenario folder when you begin a scenario, none of the events from events.lua fire. However, since the print statements are showing up in the Lua console, it's clear that events.lua is being loaded. If I reintroduce events.txt to the folder, both sets of events fire. I hadn't noticed this before as I'd removed events.txt from the equation very early in the process.
I managed to reproduce and fix this now. There was one code path left that would unconditionally remove the 'events loaded' flag, even when Lua events were loaded already. This will be fixed in the next release.
I'm curious how you got around the 255 city limit as it can't be just hex editing the exe. [...]You must have added code to assign higher values than 255+ for proper home city assignment.
Exactly this. This was the hard part. Removing the limit itself is actually pretty simple. Tracking down and changing all instructions handling city assignment and changing them to handle words instead of bytes not so much.
I’m not certain if you had the opportunity to follow any of the development threads during your absence but we did encounter one issue with regards the Attacks per turn feature, which was discussed in my Vietnam thread
here. If you are willing to review or require further information let me know.
I've taken a look at the thread; if I'm not mistaken, you removed the Attacks per turn feature in the latest version of your scenario? Do you still have the relevant files of the old version with this bug lying around somewhere? In that case, I'd be happy to take a look. I'm pretty sure this is caused by the Extra unit types patch being introduced
after the Attacks per turn patch, so the latter might not be completely aware of the former.
With regards the lua integration, I was hoping to have some scenarios developed with the language, since you left, so I could have some concrete examples to review, but to my knowledge no such scenario exists (or at least none that have been released). As such, I didn’t even attempt use it for my Vietnam scenario as the task seemed much too daunting for a neophyte as myself (especially considering my event file ended up being twenty thousand lines long). Nonetheless, I fully grasp the advantage that the lua has over the macro language.
I'm working on stabilizing and ironing out the remaining bugs in v0.14 right now, but after that I'd be happy to help in the development of such a scenario. I understand that it is a daunting task, but if it were easy it wouldn't be fun right?
For my part, I’m still very interested in seeing whether you can develop the transport mechanism that you talked about in this
thread. I believe after lua that this is the next feature that would bring the most value to the game. So, if you are interested in pursuing it and require further feedback please let us know.
I do intend to finish that feature in the next major release.
Finally, I did have a question. Are you aware if it is possible to assign multiple civilizations to a single human player in ToT, other than in Hot Seat mode? Apparently, it was a feature that was possible in Fantastic Worlds. If not, is this something that would be programmable within your project?
I've just tested this by setting the human players bitfield of a saved game just as it is used for hot seat games. But upon loading the game set it back to a single tribe. When I removed this instruction, I was able to play with two human tribes just fine. But I'm not sure if this would cause any issues further on. I'll include the patch in the next release though.
Here's my first new suggestion for a new addition.
Right now, game.txt just has two dialogs for global warming. I was thinking of enabling different dialogs for different maps, so for example: Map 0 portrays AGW, Map 1 portrays Nuclear Winter, Map 2 portrays buildup of space trash, and Map 3 portrays a terraforming project.
I'll be sure to put this one on my list.
I've also started work on a little side project, which will become a stand-alone editor for ToT saved games and scenarios. This with the intent of finally being able to replace the old CivCity and CivTweak utilities, and probably adding some new features as well. I'm hoping to get a first working prototype done in a few days.
I think it would be worth the work, as for Civ 2 ToT it would be a gigantic step forward, if it could handle animated units in high quality. Even standard Civ 2 had an animation for both units in battle, showing lost hitpoints for each of the units. There were a lot of civers who were sad about loosing these animations in Civ 2 ToT.
