Autocast Interface

[Goodgimp]

I'm unfamiliar with how the Civ4 interface is put together, so sorry if this is an obvious question.

I was looking at the possibility (or lack thereof) of having the Autocast icons for the various spells different than the base spell. Something like a simple colored border to designate that it's the autocast icon, not the regular spell icon. After doing a little poking around, though, I can't seem to find where the interface itself is being populated.

Is something like this possible and if so can someone point me in the right direction?

Thanks!

 

[Sephi]

definetly possible. Needs some DLL modifications though. Buttons are read in CvInfos.cpp CvActionInfo::getButton(). Right now I have set it so Autocast commands use the same buttons as spell commands, but it would be relatively easy to change. Most work is in creating a new dds file for every spell that can be autocast (around 100).

 

[Goodgimp]

Haven't touched the DLL / C++ portion of the mod stuff yet. The dev environment I have is Visual Studio 2008, is that going to be able to recompile the DLL with the changes? If not, could you provide a list of tools/downloads I'll need in order to get it going?

 

[Valkrionn]

Haven't touched the DLL / C++ portion of the mod stuff yet. The dev environment I have is Visual Studio 2008, is that going to be able to recompile the DLL with the changes? If not, could you provide a list of tools/downloads I'll need in order to get it going?

Visual Studio is what I use, as it can generate a Debug DLL. If I remember correctly, Sephi uses both that and Codeblocks, so he can have two instances up at once.

But yes, VS will compile the code for you, and is the only compiler I know of that can create a Debug DLL.

 

[Sephi]

here is a guide on how to set up VS so that you can compile a BTS dll. It's not as simple as Valkrionn thinks. An up to date makefile should be included in the wildmana download.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=10018

 

[Valkrionn]

Yeah, should have posted a link to that tutorial. It WAS relatively simple, though.

 

[Goodgimp]

That'll be very handy, thanks to both of you. I'll take a look at this over the Holidays and see if I can't get the hang of it. If I were to make such a change to the autocast interface, what's the best way of distributing something like that, if the goal is to be as modular as possible? Is it feasible or would a forced overwrite of the previous DLL be required?

Also, as long as I'm digging around in C++ and mucking with DLLs, is there anything (for performance reasons) that stands out which can be moved from Python into core DLL functionality, or is that generally unworkable / frowned upon?

 

[Sephi]

unfortunatly dll cannot be made modular, game will always use only one.Winmerge is a popular programm to copy changes from one dll to another. Also don't forget to mark all your changes so you can find them later