BTS Unaltered Gameplay Project

[ruff_hi]

@Ruff, I verified that two units told to heal together will wait until both are fully healed. They heal as a group.

Really - I have had a large group of units healing and they become available in 1s and 2s over a few turns. Do you have a save that I can test? Not saying that I don't believe you but it is just hard to WB damaged units.

 

[ruff_hi]

In my opinion, a good alternative (or a good idea in any case) may be to change the color of health bar for a fully healed unit, maybe a different shade of green (or the color of the good-but-not-fully helathy unit may be changed, instead).
Another idea may be to chang the color of the round indicator to differentiate an unit which is fortify or healing or building fron one which is only waiting.

The PLE mod put a blue border around a unit that had a promotion due. Actually, what it did was lay down a blue background and then put the unit icon over the top. I couldn't do that with my mod because the inbuilt unit select feature of CIV4 failed (PLE re-wrote the unit selection code). For my mod, I put in 4 little blue graphics (top, left, right, bottom) and left the unit graphic alone. For injured units, we could change this blue border to red (critically injured) or yellow (slightly injured) and have full strength units with no border. Question: what about an injured unit that had a promotion due? Blue and then red / yellow would be my preference.

 

[Ket]

alerum68: What is going to be and when is build .12 going to be pulled from the revisions?

 

[Ket]

@purplexus - I think it's going to be Ket and myself who are heading up the XML changes. I prefer to have it as XML instead of Modular just because, IIRC, you can't load Modular XML unless it's in the MOD directory, and I want to keep BUG in the CustomAssets if at all possible.

Alerum68, Well there is a way around this, we can have the main BUG which runs in custom Assets and then the flavor stuff as an optional add on, that way if we wished to go modular or semi modular we could.

Thoughts?


@EmperorFool
Can we please take a look at that bug in the time date routines, I can 100% repro running any mod with date altering XML (Epic, FX, Mine, And Most Scenarios)

 

[alerum68]

Is the weekend, so expect version 0.14 (skipping 0.13 for superstitious reasons) to be post very soon.

The only problem I have with this is that I want to play MODs with the flavor. Could you explain the benfits of switching over?

And I'm getting the same time bug in the late stages of the came, and it is a PITA.

 

[EmperorFool]

@Ket, I'm not ignoring you on the time bug, just busy preparing for a new job starting Monday. I'm done with that and can get back to the "real work" -- BUG bugs.

Could you post/PM me a modified XML file that causes the crash? While waiting, I'll see what I can do on my end by playing with the file. As you have a reproducable test case, it'd much easier for me to take that.

@Alerum, it's crashing with a regular game for you?? Bizarre. I played an epic game speed game last night up to about 1650ish, and I have all the clock features turned on. You're definitely not running any mods with it?

@Cammagno, please PM me your SF.net account name so I can add you.

Okay, off to stomp bugs. BTW, I somehow disconnected the GP Tech Prefs option from the INI/screen cuz it no longer functions for me. That should be easy.

 

[alerum68]

EF I don't have any Docs on the mods you created. Do you want to include any? And the game is much later then that, in Epic. Not loaded from a MOD, just has BTS in CustomAssets. I don't think it's the mod though. What happens is it just keeps flashing Waiting for Other Civs...

 

[Ket]

@EF hey no problem just trying to be a squeaky wheel and make sure it does not get over looked.

I will be moving tomorrow...so I wont be able to post it till the evening but ill get to it.

@Alerum hmmm that could be very problematic...

 

[Ket]

@EF my SF.Net account is Civ_Ket

 

[Ket]

EF I don't have any Docs on the mods you created. Do you want to include any? And the game is much later then that, in Epic. Not loaded from a MOD, just has BTS in CustomAssets. I don't think it's the mod though. What happens is it just keeps flashing Waiting for Other Civs...

Woah where getting this without the times being changed.. Holy cow..
Ok... Good find Alerum!!!!!

Hmm... I think where blowing though a bounds somewhere and causing a blow up in the C++ routines... Question is what exactly is causing it.

Has anything changes int he era's from warlords to bts? Wait the whole date system changed over to months from years but thats just a cosmetic textual change in the XML.... does anything reference years (even though months is not really months)

 

[alerum68]

I Updated SF with version 0.12.

@Ket - Hoping you can upload what you have added to xml to the forum tonight, and I'll work off what you have. Also, you're added to SF now. I'm going to be playing this without anything loaded but straight up BTS and seeing if I get the same error.

Edit: Ran it with 0.11, 0.12, and vin-BTS, and still getting the same result. Whatever is causing the game to lock isn't something we have done. Would someone on 3.03 load this save for me and see if you get the same results as I do?

 

[alerum68]

@EF - Just started playing with 0.12. VERY nice. You got the Logger options set up perfectly!

 

[EmperorFool]

I tried your save, Alerum, with BUG and without (even cleared my cache), with the same result as you: the AIs make their moves (UI is unresponsive, cannot scroll, cannot bring up menu), and then "Waiting for other Civs" flashes continuously. At this point, you can scroll and bring up the menu. Exiting to main menu didn't work, though. It just hung and I had to kill it with TaskMgr.

The good news is that BUG has nothing to do with the problem. It's BtS. That being said, I have never seen a month in my dates. Did you set some weird option I don't know about? I've only played a few BtS games and haven't taken any into the mid 1900's I don't think. Is this new?

As for the docs on my stuff, I'll see what I can come up with tomorrow perhaps.

@Ket, this is a different error from what you're seeing. There is no exception and nothing gets written to the logs. BtS simply gets in a weird internal loop where it doesn't realize it's the player's turn.

I'm going to look into that C++ bug now.

 

[EmperorFool]

I don't see how BUG could be having any problems with the dates if BtS doesn't. The code is exactly the same. Here is the offending line (1925) of BUG's CvMainInterface.py:

szDateGA = unicode(CyGameTextMgr().getInterfaceTimeStr(ePlayer))

There is only one call to BtS's C++ code: getInterfaceTime(ePlayer). I assume unicode is a built-in Python routine since Python understands unicode strings natively. Regardless, you can see the original code on line 1940:

g_szTimeText = 
    localText.getText("TXT_KEY_TIME_TURN", 
                      (CyGame().getGameTurn(), )) 
    + u" - " 
    + unicode(CyGameTextMgr().getInterfaceTimeStr(ePlayer))

I've broken the line apart for easier reading. Notice the last term in the string concatenation is exactly the same as in NJAGCM (actually I used BtS's code to rewrite NJAGCM from scratch, but the options are all the same). If BUG has a problem with that call, so should BtS.

Ket, can you please try your saved game that fails with NJAGCM disabled or without BUG installed? As well, if you can describe a simple change I can make to my XML file locally to reproduce it, I can test it on my end.

Thanks for helping out with this, and good luck with your move.

 

[EmperorFool]

Ruff, I think I know what you mean about PLE's unit selection code. I installed PLE by itself to play around with the full thing. I like the view options, but the selection code is frustrating.

The main problem is that if you add units to the selection (shift-click), it automatically creates a group out of the new selection Inversely, if you select a group, then select a single unit in that group, and finally issue an order, the whole group gets the order -- not just the selected unit.

Perhaps after using it for a while I'd get used to the way it works and find it just as easy as the normal method, but I doubt it. The normal method was intuitive to me from the start, whereas I find PLE doing things I just don't expect. Is that why you stripped out some of the PLE code for your mod?

I'm going to look over the code more thoroughly, comparing it to the normal game, and see if I can fix it.

I'm afraid that because I'm not much of a warmonger and don't build stacks over 20 units in general (30 max), I may not be the best judge of PLE.

 

[alerum68]

I don't remember having to do that with PLE. Of course, I didn't use the shortcut keys often, but instead used the buttons on the screen. I wonder if they changed anything when they put out the BTS version.

Don't worry about the docs unless you think we need them. I'd rather have you writing code instead of Docs.

 

[EmperorFool]

PLE was frustrating me, so I added the abiliity to configure colors on the options screen.

Check out the General (for Espionage ratio), Clock (for Era) and Scoreboard (for Power ratio) tabs.

I also changed the scoreboard to show the power ratio instead of the raw score. It's easier now to tell how you compare to the other civs. It has three colors based on the value just like the Espionage screen.

Back to PLE...

 

[alerum68]

Testing now. Will reply with results in about an hour or so.

And I'm going to kick Ket's butt for not posting his stuff before the move... Come on man, isn't BUG more important then a few boxes?

Edit: Yes, the ratio is much easier to get an idea of what's going on. Two suggestions: Change the default ratio colors so EP and Power are different, and reverse the power ratio so it shows your ratio to them, vs their ratio to you.

Why was Reminders changed from Alt + R to Alt + M? It's easier to remember R, and I don't think it's used with anything else.

Edit 2: CDA isn't working for me....

Edit 3: Also I can't change the color for the Era in the Clock. The year changes colors, but not the Era name.

Edit 4: It does change, but the game has to be reloaded, or another game loaded up it seems.

 

[alerum68]

A bit off of the current topic, but do you think it's possible to modify the Great Wall so it is around your whole cultural border, instead of just your borders when you build it?

Also, what do you guys think about having Settlers show a true City Cross when you highlight a tile to move to, instead of just the 9 it will have at creation.

 

[Cammagno]

A bit off of the current topic, but do you think it's possible to modify the Great Wall so it is around your whole cultural border, instead of just your borders when you build it?

Uhm... I don't think it's realistic...

Also, what do you guys think about having Settlers show a true City Cross when you highlight a tile to move to, instead of just the 9 it will have at creation.

It will be wonderful!

Another very good mod will be one which enables the drawing and note-taking without zooming-out, and maybe with different colors available.

I know that it seems unrelated, but I usually draw some marks to show where city borders are, so...