Advanced Civ

[black_rider]

Oh, thank you very much for explanation. And what about city grow and production tabs in world map ? This things under the city itself. It's possible to make them larger?

 

[f1rpo]

There's the Wide City Bars option in the center of the Map tab on the BUG menu, but that won't make the bars thicker. (And the right half of the wide bars won't be selectable by a mouse click.) That option causes the WideCityBar.nif under Assets\Art\Interface\CityBar to be swapped in at runtime. So, for a thicker version, someone would have to create another .nif file. I have no skills in that area.

 

[f1rpo]

A small correction regarding font sizes and help text: It's actually Size2_Normal that gets used for help text, and, while the width of the help text area can't be changed freely, it does automatically get somewhat wider when that font size is increased. Probably not quite wide enough to avoid additional linebreaks though. And a comment in the theme file actually says explicitly which font sizes are important:

Spoiler :

// Civ really only uses the following font sizes and styles:
// 1 - normal
// 2 - normal, 2 - bold, 2 - italic
// 3 - normal, 3 - bold
// 4 - normal, 4 - bold

And it looks like a help text area with arbitrary width will soon-ish become possible: Modifying plot help width

 

[black_rider]

You tips were much useful, thanks. But maybe you know how to make bigger these specific text ? Dunno what they are called. Tooltips ?

 

[f1rpo]

In the code, it's called the help text area (but I also read tooltip a lot on the forums), so that's what I was referring to in my previous post. Increasing Size2_Normal in Civ4Theme_Common.thm will of course affect a lot of text, not just the help text. Hopefully, the line width of the help text area will automatically increase enough to accommodate the bigger font.

 

[black_rider]

Yeah it's much better now. Only thing that left small is city production and growth bar on the World map. (yellow circle on the screenshot) But it's just small nitpick. As we can say, it's perfecty possible to play Civ 4 on a 1440p monitor. Thank you for your help.

 

[f1rpo]

Thanks for the screenshot. Yeah, doesn't look too bad. Icons not all too pixel-y. I guess the Wide City Bars option didn't really help. I think some improvement could be achieved from the ideas and tools and this thread, but it'll take some experimentation, and the BULL game font icons that AdvCiv has inherited will need to be integrated with the font changes. Maybe someday I'll find the time; or someone else might.

 

[f1rpo]

I've taken another look at that game font thread and gone ahead and created the attached GameFont file using @sqwishy's tool. The parameters being Font - 24px "Source Sans Pro Semibold" and Color - rgb(240, 245, 250). That font is not somehow a marvel. I've tried more than a dozen in the game; this one was the least difficult to read for me. I guess it has about the right boldness/ weight and compactness. Actually, it's compact enough to almost fit on the original city billboard (third attached screenshot), but I intend to use it with sqwishy's enlarged version. Also kind of similar to Firaxis's original game font. SIL Open Font license (as far as I can discern), which I'll have to distribute along with the font. The color is a little silvery with a very slight blue hue – for slightly better contrast; but it appears essentially white to me. I've had to adjust a lot of the letters manually to position them (somewhat) properly, so the choice of the font can't easily be changed now. If I stick with this change, there'll probably be no option on the BUG menu; the larger font is tied to the GameFont file and it'll require the larger billboard. I'm attaching the files in case that someone wants to try them out. I realize it's not a vast improvement.
Edit: Some miracle has turned Christianity into nuclear barrels and bananas (above the city billboards). Blindly copy-pasting parts of the GameFont gridlines around seems to have fixed it. Attaching the updated file, deleting the old one. The indexes of small and large icons still aren't aligned, but that doesn't seem to cause problems.
Edit (in the new year): The icon indexing is still not correct (e.g. in Sevopedia, the city screen ...) and I haven't been able to fix that. It's probably better (for this mod) anyway to just use the billboard fader settings in Civ4DetailManager.xml. I've pushed the latest state of my GameFont.tga and CityBar.nif approach to GitHub in case that I need to go back to after all: Git branch (likely not to become merged with the main branch)

 

[black_rider]

As you can see, it works really great for 1440p. Now, I can enjoy my beloved game to the fullest. Thanks. It's a little wider, than in your screenshots, but keep in mind, that I also incrase game font a bit for 1440p. For me it's great and visible.

 

[f1rpo]

Glad to hear – although I've noticed an issue with the icons above the city billboards. They're completely mixed up. For good measure, I also put the CityBar.nif in the wrong path, which is probably why you're still seeing the old, small one. Both fixed now, I hope; please see my previous post for an updated attachment.

 

[black_rider]

Even better now.

 

[sqwishy]

Edit: Some miracle has turned Christianity into nuclear barrels and bananas (above the city billboards). Blindly copy-pasting parts of the GameFont gridlines around seems to have fixed it. Attaching the updated file, deleting the old one. The indexes of small and large icons still aren't aligned, but that doesn't seem to cause problems.

I thought these were related. When I was playing around with the GameFont some time ago, occasionally my icons for big and small didn't match for a particular index. When that happens, the icons above the citybar might appear incorrectly. I thought I left myself notes about this but I can't find them, so I don't quite remember how I resolved it. I have a mysterious screenshot that I've attached where the city defense icon is not using the right icon in the font and the indexes being messed up. Also the icon shown in the city bar has a black bar underneath that shouldn't be there, as if it's drawing part of a black icon from underneath it because the game thinks those icons are taller than they actually are; so the height had a relationship with the indexes being messed up.

But I ran the game with the gamefont you attached and even though it seems like the indexes aren't right, the citybar text is showing the right symbols? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ So that's good I guess.

I've had to adjust a lot of the letters manually to position them (somewhat) properly,

Ideally, the tool positions the letters at the right place. Earlier copies of the tool weren't so great at this but I did improve it; but even now I tried it with the font you specified and yeah it looks very silly I'll look into this but I dunno if I can do much since I thought I already fixed it.

(to clarify, this image is what I got from 24px "Source Sans Pro Semibold". this is not the GameFont.tga you attached)

EDIT: Uh I made a mistake building the GameFont.tga used in the image above. This is how it _should_ look. The letters are less bouncy. It might be the case that you used an older copy of tool. The latest copy can always be found online at https://sqwishy.github.io/civ4-atlast/atlast.html Unless some of the manual adjustments you were horizontal? As far as I can tell the program _should_ generate a GameFont.tga with correct descent markers for vertical alignment of the characters.

 

[f1rpo]

Thanks a lot for taking a look. Right, I had used the outdated version of your tool. I did read your old post saying that you had put it all on GitHub - but figured that would just mean the import and export of icons, i.e. the atlas (un-)packer, would be available in addition to the font generator. On that note, I might've been wiser to use that second tool as well. Probably then I wouldn't have this odd indexing mismatch.

The updates of the font generator look very useful. The vertical alignment looks much better in your second screenshot. I did also make horizontal manual adjustments, but I see that you have this covered too with the new trim settings. The outline also sounds promising. A good number of fonts that I tried (especially some aimed at Asian scripts) just were a little too slim, resulting in a flimsy appearance. Now tempted to give it another go.

Edit: Perhaps one gotcha to point out with the GameFont generator in case that someone else ever runs into this: Firefox's fingerprint protection had been blocking most of the fonts that I wanted to try: Request for font "Khmer UI" blocked at visibility level 1 (requires 2) on the developer console. Easily fixed by (temporarily) increasing layout.css.font-visibility.resistFingerprinting under about:config.

 

[f1rpo]

I've meanwhile gotten sidetracked a bit with a font size setting in GlobalDefines that gets applied by hacking the EXE. It's working nicely, but I'm still unsure if it's an improvement all in all. Without the custom theme files (that I've been using so far for font size changes), the mod can be placed under My Games and can be renamed without major errors. And the font size setting in GlobalDefines is easier to find and easier to use; it's just one percentage that affects all fonts, the smaller ones more so than the larger ones.

On the other hand, renaming the mod is still not really advisable as that will cause a new .ini file to be created in the mod folder, and that file (unlike AdvCiv.ini) won't prevent the loading of CustomAssets along with AdvCiv. And AdvCiv installations with differently named mod folders won't be able to load each other's savegames. As it used to be (and still is in v1.11 and on the GitHub master branch), naming the mod folder anything other than "AdvCiv" results in an error message (modified by me) that points out the problem. I also have an error message (that one adopted from "We the People") that warns about attempting to launch from My Games. And there are the usual concerns about the hack approach not working correctly with all editions of BtS. Sounds like I want to stick with the theme files.

 

[keldath]

Hey hey,
Happy to see 1.12 is in the making .
I didnt think ill get back to more modding for mine, but, here i am, following advciv updates.

 

[f1rpo]

Considering updates and mod-mods, I've also had some second thoughts about enlarging the GameFont.tga. That'll be annoying for anyone who has already customized that file or uses the Cyrillic version. And it has occurred to me that a similar enlargement can be achieved simply through the fader settings in Civ4DetailManager.xml. Attaching two screenshots, the first with the enlarged Source Sans font and enlarged CityBar.nif (though now smaller than Sqwishy's version); the second with the original GameFont.tga and CityBar.nif and 25% increased CITYBILLBOARD_SCALE. The new font is larger and a bit more readable. On the other hand, the fader also magnifies the city icons (which could be accomplished through GameFont.tga too, but it's laborious). The enlarged CityBar.nif being positioned closer to the city center is a result of me compensating for the strangely high position of the city icons. I could take the fader approach and still tweak the CityBar.nif to move it up just a bit for some more compactness - but without burying the city defense string under the unit models. And to center the city name and production string better; they're too far to the right in the original .nif.

I've also tweaked the fader scale settings for the unit and flag models, making them a little smaller at typical playing distances. Both screenshots reflect that change. Really should've taken a closer look at those faders earlier, especially since I changed the camera distance threshold for Globe view early in the mod's development.

 

[keldath]

Thats good thinking.
I ise the enlarge font tga.
So changes to it would be a tough one .
Looks like the shader is a nice alternative.

 

[Lanstro]

Great to see this is still being worked on! My playgroup and I have been stuck on ~v1.03 or so for a very long time while the multiplayer black screen issue that was just fixed, and great to see the group bombardment desync fixed.

Having jumped something like 8 versions in one go, it seems like the AIs now build way fewer units than they used to? We used to rarely keep up with AI military strength in our 3 humans vs teams of 3 AI games at emperor, but in ~4 games since we updated we've generally seen the AIs build maybe half the units they used to.

It's leaving us in a weird spot where emperor is now potentially too easy as the AIs no longer pose a strong military challenge, but the barbs are a bit too brutal when we tried immortal.

 

[f1rpo]

Had to check your earlier posts to get the black screen reference. Awful that this problem has persisted for so long; great if it's now mysteriously fixed.
I don't recall deliberately throttling AI unit production in recent years, and the release notes (few enough AI-related items since v1.03) don't bring such a change to mind either. I've run a couple of AI games with 1.03 and 1.11 and didn't see fewer units on the military advisor after 250 turns with 1.11. Rather on the contrary, but the tech costs and turns-to-years mapping has changed, which makes it a difficult thing to compare. In 1.11, after 250 turns, the leading civs usually already have Rifling. I suppose it's more likely a matter of fewer AI war plans than reduced peacetime production. As I recall, the AI always tended to be reluctant to start wars in team games. Maybe changing some general purpose UWAI weights ("Effort," "Greed for Assets") in AI_Variables_GlobalDefines.xml would help. As for Immortal, I assume you'd know how to dial down the Barbarians (Civ4HandicapInfos.xml).

 

[Lanstro]

I'm fairly sure it's this line in your 1.10 that fixed the black screen issue: • Networked co-op games, i.e. with several human players on the same team, had been entirely unplayable since AdvCiv 1.0. Thanks to @keldath for diagnosing the problem and even providing a hotfix (now obsolete). Bug report 1 2

Fiddling with handicapinfos.xml does seem like the solution for us. I've run a compare between the old version of it that we have been playing for a long time vs the latest, and these are the main changes at Emperor:

• starting worker from 1 to 0 - obviously will slow them down
• animal attack probability from 90 to 70 - likely to benefit humans more than AIs
• small increases in barb density - likely to benefit AIs more than humans
• changes that I'm not sure what they do:
  • iBaseGrowthThresholdPercent from 120 to 110
    iGPThresholdPercent from 120 to 110
  • iCultureLevelPercent from 118 to 112
  • iCreatePercent from 110 to 100
  • iAIGPThresholdPercent from 85 to 90
  • iAIHandicapIncrementTurns from 25 to 33
  • iAIAttitudeChangePercent from 70 to 60
  • some tweaks to the goody huts percentages
• Small tweaks that probably don't change much in terms of relative AI strength:
  • iFreeUnits from 3 to 2 and iUnitCostPercent from 90 to 84
  • iResearchPercent from 135 to 130
  • various tweaks to the town, distance, corporation and colony maintenance figures
  • iTrainPercent from 120 to 110 - would have thought this would encourage more AI units not less
  • iConstructPercent from 110 to 105 - should also make AI stronger
  • iAIGrowthPercent from 85 to 90 - should make AI stronger
  • iAIUnitCostPercent from 80 to 85 - maybe slightly discouraging AI from building units?
  • iAIWarWearinessPercent from 60 to 70 - does this discourage the AI from planning for wars because it anticipates slightly more war weariness?

Overall with the Emperor AI not having a starting worker, animals attacking less, goody huts being a little less aggressive, barbs (especially coastal barbs) less bad, it seems that the humans have a comparatively significantly stronger start than in the last version we were playing. And civ of course is a snowballing game so that makes quite a difference. Doesn't quite explain why the AIs seem to be weaker militarily, but maybe our sample size is too small. Will fiddle with the handicap numbers and report back.