Everything. It sets up a ton of obstacles that make it harder to do anything at all, and allow you to run multiple mods at once. Is this a good trade off? ***
no!
What will get all you amazing Civ4 modders...
- Thread starter Jatta Pake
- Start date
Everything. It sets up a ton of obstacles that make it harder to do anything at all, and allow you to run multiple mods at once. Is this a good trade off? ***
no!
- A 64 bit engine, so no practical memory limits
- Multi-threading
That said, Civ 4 will probably still be the primary modding platform for most of us even if they release the SDK, mainly because we already have so much to work on here, whereas CiV is rather new and thus does not have a whole lot of previous work to draw upon.
Just to stop some misinformation: The bold parts are already possible/have already happened.
Wait, they removed Steam DRM?
No, they didn't (at least not for the normal PC version).
But it's not needed for mods.
...er...correct, I think. The Civ5 SDK is really a software developement kit, and has been released. The dll (which was in civ4 incorrectly called the SDK) has not been released.
Now these are good reasons. The fact that Civ4 doesn't scale with multicore CPUs is a major problem. Just being able to use OpenMP would already help a ton.
SargontheGreat2
Modder
1 thing for CivV, they use decimal math instead of integer math.
kiwitt
Road to War Modder
A bit late to this discussion. I was literally crying with excitement when I purchased Civ V. My next versions of Road to War - Historical, was going to be developed on this.
I installed it on my high-spec computer expecting to be blown away by the graphics. Then I saw it. It looked like console-like graphics for representing cities especially. Towns look like a bunch of stacked mushrooms or similar. That was my first disappointment.
Next was the "city-states". Why were there so many of them ? Are we playing "Civilization" (a collection of cities) being developed and competing with other civilizations, but these "city-states" were so important to the game-play that if you did not befriend them soon you were at a disadvantage.
Game-play in general felt so "console-like", I found each time playing less enjoyable. If I don't enjoy playing it, why should bother developing for it.
You are right there are a lot of great Civ IV mods out there and many more being developed. I suspect the reason they still do, is because they enjoy playing Civ IV as well. To this end, I have finally decided to start work in earnest on "The Road to War - Historical 2", and hope to have it fully finished by the end of next year, and being able to use much of my development of my first mod was probably the decider for me.
I installed it on my high-spec computer expecting to be blown away by the graphics. Then I saw it. It looked like console-like graphics for representing cities especially. Towns look like a bunch of stacked mushrooms or similar. That was my first disappointment.
Next was the "city-states". Why were there so many of them ? Are we playing "Civilization" (a collection of cities) being developed and competing with other civilizations, but these "city-states" were so important to the game-play that if you did not befriend them soon you were at a disadvantage.
Game-play in general felt so "console-like", I found each time playing less enjoyable. If I don't enjoy playing it, why should bother developing for it.
You are right there are a lot of great Civ IV mods out there and many more being developed. I suspect the reason they still do, is because they enjoy playing Civ IV as well. To this end, I have finally decided to start work in earnest on "The Road to War - Historical 2", and hope to have it fully finished by the end of next year, and being able to use much of my development of my first mod was probably the decider for me.
As does Civ4 since Warlords.
Only for very, very few calculations. Most of the calculations are using integers (sometimes multiplied times 100 or so to allow some decimals without actually using floating point numbers).
Yeah, the times 100 stuff is what I understand as decimal calculation. Of course it doesn't use floating point calculations, which would be unnecessary overkill anyway in my opinion. It's pretty unlikely that rounding effects can hurt you in Civ4 BtS.
So you started out crying with anticipation and ended up crying with misery?
AbsintheRed
Deity
He is not alone
I guess it's true for almost all Civ IV modders...
The disappointment about Civ V - and Civ V modding in particular - was huge
kiwitt
Road to War Modder
Agree - We did not like Civ V, why should we mod for it.
Oh and btw ... I virtually eliminated stacking by making putting units in towns a negative happiness factor, but because the AI had to defend towns, it is caught in a catch-22 situation; How to defend towns, without making them unhappy. So they AI then spreads its forces over all their towns reasonably evenly.
Oh and btw ... I virtually eliminated stacking by making putting units in towns a negative happiness factor, but because the AI had to defend towns, it is caught in a catch-22 situation; How to defend towns, without making them unhappy. So they AI then spreads its forces over all their towns reasonably evenly.
I had the advantage of having a comp that couldn't run CiV when it was released, so I never spent any money on that wreck.
TC01
Deity
The dangers of posting my opinion to a three-paged thread is that everything I'm about to say has already been said by others more eloquently, but hey- it provoked me enough to reply, so I will. (I may use "we" here a lot, but I'm not trying to speak for all modders... but as a modder I hope I have some idea as how many of them think).
I think you don't understand why many people create mods in the first place.
I never thought of myself as creating mods for Civilization- I thought of myself as creating mods for Civilization IV. Or, more frequently, existing mods, such as Final Frontier or Fall from Heaven 2. Why? Because those were the things I wanted to edit and improve.
People are still making mods for Civ 3. Hell, every once in a while someone posts a Civ 2 scenario. There's a thriving (well, it used to be anyway... I don't know about nowadays) Alpha Centauri community still around who make and enjoy mods.
People make the mods they want to play, on the games they want to play.
So sure, if someone hates Civ 5, they're not going to want to mod for it.
Now, I actually like Civ 5... but I still have no desire to mod for it. There are no projects I want to create there. On the other hand, there are Civ 4 projects I would like to maintain (and I don't as often as I should, but that's not the point) and keep improving.
Maybe if someone makes a Fall from Heaven size project, I'll want to contribute content to it. Or maybe some day I'll feel like building a space-style mod such as Final Frontier... but I doubt it. I dont know that I can explain why, I just dont feel interested in making such a mod.
Now, there definitely are people who probably said "I want the next version of my Civilization mods to run on the new engine", or "I want to port my Civ 4 mod to Civ 5 because I like Civ 5 better". We've heard from some in the thread who intended to do this, but gave up when they ended up not liking Civ 5 (or not having the modding tools to make it happen).
But there are also plenty of people who'd rather work on existing projects (that may be modmods of somebody else's projects) on a game that maybe they like more... and there's nothing wrong with that, is there?
IMO, Civ 4 has aged well, even though there are a bunch of things I find annoying about the engine. It's a nice base to develop mods on.
I have no idea about what modding Civ 5 is like, but I have little desire to learn Lua unless I'd have to. Maybe it would turn out to be better than modding Civ 4, maybe Lua is better than Python (though I personally disagree).
But what difference does that make if there are no Civ 5 projects Im interested in making?
I think you don't understand why many people create mods in the first place.
I never thought of myself as creating mods for Civilization- I thought of myself as creating mods for Civilization IV. Or, more frequently, existing mods, such as Final Frontier or Fall from Heaven 2. Why? Because those were the things I wanted to edit and improve.
People are still making mods for Civ 3. Hell, every once in a while someone posts a Civ 2 scenario. There's a thriving (well, it used to be anyway... I don't know about nowadays) Alpha Centauri community still around who make and enjoy mods.
People make the mods they want to play, on the games they want to play.
So sure, if someone hates Civ 5, they're not going to want to mod for it.
Now, I actually like Civ 5... but I still have no desire to mod for it. There are no projects I want to create there. On the other hand, there are Civ 4 projects I would like to maintain (and I don't as often as I should, but that's not the point) and keep improving.
Maybe if someone makes a Fall from Heaven size project, I'll want to contribute content to it. Or maybe some day I'll feel like building a space-style mod such as Final Frontier... but I doubt it. I dont know that I can explain why, I just dont feel interested in making such a mod.
Now, there definitely are people who probably said "I want the next version of my Civilization mods to run on the new engine", or "I want to port my Civ 4 mod to Civ 5 because I like Civ 5 better". We've heard from some in the thread who intended to do this, but gave up when they ended up not liking Civ 5 (or not having the modding tools to make it happen).
But there are also plenty of people who'd rather work on existing projects (that may be modmods of somebody else's projects) on a game that maybe they like more... and there's nothing wrong with that, is there?
IMO, Civ 4 has aged well, even though there are a bunch of things I find annoying about the engine. It's a nice base to develop mods on.
I have no idea about what modding Civ 5 is like, but I have little desire to learn Lua unless I'd have to. Maybe it would turn out to be better than modding Civ 4, maybe Lua is better than Python (though I personally disagree).
But what difference does that make if there are no Civ 5 projects Im interested in making?
Osmowstroyer
Warlord
- Joined
- Aug 10, 2012
- Messages
- 253
I think Firaxis wanted to make a more appealing game, so they created CiV. The same happened with the C&C Franchise, they created the ABSOLUTELY USELESS AND STUPID C&C 5! I am not saying that ciV is useless, nor stupid, it does have better things, of course G&K talking, the religious systme and city-states are epic, but, no health? no global warming (it was my christmas wish lol)? Also the global happiness system, for me, it was horrible.
BTW, is it possible to make colonies in ciV?
BTW, is it possible to make colonies in ciV?
I had the advantage of having a comp that couldn't run CiV when it was released, so I never spent any money on that wreck.
I bought a shiny new computer in anticipation of CiV, but guess what? System Requirements Lab (Also known as 'Can You Run It?') told me my computer was not at the 'recommended' level. Things turned out OK for me in the end; my computer could run Civ4 far better than my old one, and could run Starcraft II, Total War Shogun II, and a lot of other nice games. I don't really care that it can't run CiV very well.
orlanth
Storm God. Yarr!
- Joined
- Nov 17, 2001
- Messages
- 1,805
I would love to start modding Civ5, but it seems like a whole lot of things about it are difficult to impossible to change due to hard-coding (new city/building graphics, new resources, sounds, terrain/feature graphics, etc, etc.)
The type of mods that are really interesting to make or play are total conversion mods like FfH, Dune Wars, or Planetfall (or Firaxis' own Final Frontier & the modmods thereof) that actually make it into a new, different game. The Modbuddy setup seems designed for a profusion of incremental "mods" that do things like tweak the strength of Swordsmen or add some techs to the standard techtree. I'd much rather just remove *all* the vanilla content and start adding new resources/terrain/units from the ground up, but if there's hard-coding of stuff you can't access with XML it seems like this might not be possible.
I will say that some of the initial attempts at fanmade modding utilities look like incredibly promising strategies that could make Civ5 modding a lot more achievable if they could be made to work:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=395209
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=393390
Unfortunately when I tried to install & use these neither seemed to be working with the current game (or maybe I'm just going about it wrong..) Something as simple as an Excel spreadsheet allowing you to enter unit stats in table form and format them into XML would save *huge* amounts of effort and errors for modders, and is way more helpful than the modbuddy approach of using SQL queries that let you do odd things like add 1 strength to all melee units. Does anyone know of any useful mod tools that are currently useable or in development?
The type of mods that are really interesting to make or play are total conversion mods like FfH, Dune Wars, or Planetfall (or Firaxis' own Final Frontier & the modmods thereof) that actually make it into a new, different game. The Modbuddy setup seems designed for a profusion of incremental "mods" that do things like tweak the strength of Swordsmen or add some techs to the standard techtree. I'd much rather just remove *all* the vanilla content and start adding new resources/terrain/units from the ground up, but if there's hard-coding of stuff you can't access with XML it seems like this might not be possible.
I will say that some of the initial attempts at fanmade modding utilities look like incredibly promising strategies that could make Civ5 modding a lot more achievable if they could be made to work:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=395209
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=393390
Unfortunately when I tried to install & use these neither seemed to be working with the current game (or maybe I'm just going about it wrong..) Something as simple as an Excel spreadsheet allowing you to enter unit stats in table form and format them into XML would save *huge* amounts of effort and errors for modders, and is way more helpful than the modbuddy approach of using SQL queries that let you do odd things like add 1 strength to all melee units. Does anyone know of any useful mod tools that are currently useable or in development?
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