C-evo Distant Horizon

[PeterBB]

C-evo had been around for a while, but I've not seen any mention in this forum.
C-evo

There is extra documentation hosted on Fandom.
Game Mechanics
Strategies

Its been recentently ported to Lazarus, with many bug fixes and improvements.
C-evo: New Horizons

I've now made by own fork of C-evo too.
C-evo Distant Horizon (latest version download here)

The main new features are larger maps, now up to 400% instead of 230%.
Also I've added French, Spanish & Portuguese translations.
These are machine translations, so feedback from speakers of those languages would be appreciated.

Graphics are rather retro, resembling Civ2 & Freeciv.
A novel feature of C-evo is custom design of the military units.

The AI is tough, especially up to mid game.
Expect to have your own ass handed back to you on the first few games!

On that note, just noticed a minor wrinkle. There's always one!
If startng on a random map (as opposed to a premade one) you need to disable
'Free Player Setup' (bottom right of the start menu) in order to expose the difficulty setting.
I suggest to play the first game on Beginner...

Cheers,
Peter

 

[Dadais]

Graphics are rather retro, resembling Civ2 & Freeciv.

Does it finally allows for 64x64 pixels units ?
May we have also 64x48 terrains & terrain layouts ?

To match latest civ2 standards...

Thanks

 

[PeterBB]

Does it finally allows for 64x64 pixels units ?

Units are 48x48

May we have also 64x48 terrains & terrain layouts ?

There are three terrain sizes. Can be easily change using the mouse wheel.

66x32 Small
96x48 Medium
144x72 Large

The screenshots on the website used the Medium size tiles.

https://a.fsdn.com/con/app/proj/c-evo-eh/screenshots/C-evo.png/max/max/1

Cheers

 

[Dadais]

Units are 48x48


There are three terrain sizes. Can be easily change using the mouse wheel.

66x32 Small
96x48 Medium
144x72 Large

The screenshots on the website used the Medium size tiles.

https://a.fsdn.com/con/app/proj/c-evo-eh/screenshots/C-evo.png/max/max/1

Cheers

Thanks for the answer

Can you do something about unit sizes (and then would you plan to) ?

I mean, civ2 unit graphics saw a massive quality update thanks to fairline and others, for most using tot unit size (64x64).

I loved discovering c-evo decades ago. I loved its personalized ia concept, its unit designing concept, its territory display, its civilization particularities...

Sadly, it now looks on many points like a downgrad in compare with civ2totpp, despite its everlasting qualities.

 

[PeterBB]

The Fairline graphics do look nice.
Seems I got the size wrong, the C-evo units are actually 64x48. As there is spare space at the top of most of the Fairline units, it should be easy enough to crop them down from 64x64 to 64x48, so no coding changes would be needed. It would just be a question of updating the graphics files. Fix the background colour etc...
But to be incorporated in C-evo-dh, media must be FOSS licensed, as this version of C-evo is mainly for Linux, even though its cross platform.

I can't find any licence grant relating to these graphics.
Does anyone know if there is one, or is anyone in contact with Fairline?
I would be interested in trying out some of these unit graphics if the licence situation can be sorted.

 

[Dadais]

64x48. As there is spare space at the top of most of the Fairline units, it should be easy enough to crop them down from 64x64 to 64x48, so no coding changes would be needed.

From experience, many don't have the 16 needed free height.
Too bad then. Thanks for taking time to answer my selfish whishes.

 

[Hans Lemurson]

I've been an appreciator of C-Evo for many years. Much better balanced and designed than Civ2, and even Civ3.

I recently played a long game of it and found myself wishing for two "quality of life" improvements:
- Movement Cost indicator. Trying to guess how far a unit can get on a rail network, or eyeball an aircraft's max range gets very annoying after a while.
- Separate "production complete" notifications for Buildings and Units. I don't need to be alerted to the fact that my military city built yet another infantry.

Are you the right person to whine to for such things?

 

[PeterBB]

Hi Hans, glad you like the game.
In the forseeable future I'm only planning to look at serious bugs (ie crashes).
There is the official forum http://www.c-evo.org/bb/viewforum.php?f=4
and it is open source ....

 

[Hans Lemurson]

I am not yet experienced enough with programming to want to fork the project myself, nor do I think a 4th fork would do anybody much good.

But maybe I should go liven up the official C-Evo forums...haven't been there in a while.

 

[Blake00]

Ahh! @PeterBB good to see you here man! We've chatted a couple of times on the C-evo forums about my Civ2 preservation work, your good old Civ2 CivMapGen tool and that Civ2 super map convo that your tool came up in conversation in. I'd wondered a few times if this place had a C-evo thread but hadn't got around to investigating so it's good to see you've made a new one and are visiting this place. Feel free to drop by the civ2 area too if you ever wanna chat about the good old days haha.

I'm probably still a year away from playing my big planned C-evo game and doing a video on it. I like to cover the best mods for a game in my tour videos so keep me in the loop if any cool total conversion scenario/mods come along for C-evo. I must say I the idea of porting some graphics from ToTPP to C-evo is a pretty cool one.

Oh and now that I know you've got an account here I should turn over control of the CivMapGen download page I made here for you & everyone over to you as well!

 

[PeterBB]

keep me in the loop if any cool total conversion scenario/mods come along for C-evo

Hi Blake. I'm not aware of any new mods. I assume you've looked at the files section.
http://www.c-evo.org/files/files.php

Some might need updating for new versions of C-evo.

 

[Blake00]

Hi Blake. I'm not aware of any new mods. I assume you've looked at the files section.
http://www.c-evo.org/files/files.php

Some might need updating for new versions of C-evo.

Oooh no I hadn't, or if I did it was ages ago and I looked too quick. There's heaps of interesting things in there, even scifi and fantasy stuff (which is of bigger interest to me) so that's pretty cool, although yeah some of it hasn't been touched in 20 years so that's a shame. Reminds me of the FreeCol modding scene, just a long list of broken mods as the authors came and went but the game kept changing heh.

 

[Blake00]

Looks like @PeterBB did a new 1.9 release of C-evo Distant Horizon a few weeks back..

https://sourceforge.net/projects/c-evo-eh/files/Download/Install-C-evo-dh-1.9-win64.exe/

 

[Blake00]

Have been testing out your new 1.9 version over the last few hours.. I knew I shouldn't have as I had other plans for today that have gone in the bin as I'm completely addicted haha!! Loving the classic Civ2 look and feel so far.. so Civ2 in fact that I can see those bushy jungles are a variant of good old Tim Smiths HiRes graphics pack forests and those mountains, pine forests and rivers look familiar too (guess that's the benefit of using Civ2 sized assets as there's a huge amount of non-copyrighted fan content out there heh). It's fascinating to see so many familiar Civ2 things (ie wonders and buildings) all there slightly readjusted and changed along with new additions inserted in here and there... Oh and the custom unit designer is super cool and reminds me of SMACs!

Got a couple of probably dumb questions (sorry) and some observations...

1. Can I save in-game? Can't see anything in main menu in top left, and Ctrl+S or Ctrl+L have no effect too. EDIT: Looks like it's only done via quitting the game and loading from the start menu, but you can't have multiple saves per single game (unless you go find the save file in app data and make copies of it which is a bit annoying).
2. How do I get preset start positions on Earth instead of random? As the Egyptians started near where I expected to as Americans in pic below lol. EDIT: Okay I see I can edit a map and put a 'preferred' start position for me but everyone else still ends up in random spots sadly. Plus when I exit the map and save it overrides the original map giving me no option to make a copy which is a shame.
3. My mouse pointer seems to disappear when looking at the advances tree
4. When the 'turn off auto population' management box comes up in the city screen I'm tabbed out of the game and only the question box remains on the screen.
5. Also when I leave the city screen I can't move any units until I click in the world window again as if I'm still tabbed out.
6. I'm not seeing goody huts so is there not really any reward for exploration? and are there no barbarian hordes?
7. Is it possible to rename an existing city?
8. Any sort of city production build queuing? While modern games have in-game queuing systems Civ2 had a rudimentary system where you could put a list of buildings into a text file. EDIT: Ahh macro management, I found the option, cool.
9. Do you have a copy of any of those mods you link to in the C-evo files area? Or know someone who does? I'm seeing Star Wars & LOTR mods and all sorts of cool stuff but sadly many of the downloads no longer work. If we can get our hands on them I can help with the hosting issues and get them rescued like I've been doing for all the lost Civ2 mods.

 

[PeterBB]

Hi Blake,
Thanks for your post. Refrerring to your questions/observations...

1.
On saving games, the game status is saved at the end of every turn,
so if you have been playing for 100 turns, you effectively have 100 saved games.
Adjust the starting date when loading the game to use them.
However, if you then 'close' with save, or continue past end of turn,
the previous play subsequent to this date will be overwritten.
Best to make a copy of the 'book' file first.

2.
No. Start positions are all random. So an earth map doesn't really work!
(A 'save as' option for games & maps is a possibility for future versions)

3.
Very strange. I usually use Linux so hadn't noticed this.
There is no change to the cursor in TechTree.pas

4,5
Advisor screens are often modal dialogs.
They need to be closed to return to the main screen.

6a.
No goody huts. The reward for exploration is stay in the game.
Without aggressive expansion, the human player will get wiped out.

6b.
There is a Barbarian tribe in the C-evo files section,
but all AI controlled players act the same way.
www.c-evo.org/files/download.php?davidd.davidd.zip

7.
City names are stored in the relevant tribes file and can be changed there.
However, all saved games will be affected.

Cheers,
Peter

 

[Blake00]

1. Yeah in the end I just copied my book files for different stages of the game. I'm making a tour video of your game so it was handy to have save games from different eras to load up in the vid!

3. Interestingly I opened up an older version of C-evo (1.2.0) and my mouse cursor does not disappear on the tech tree window so whatever the cause it seems to be only in these new releases and if you're not getting the problem it's only a windows thing.

Thanks for getting back to me with all these mate. I've had a blast playing your game and will let you know when I go public with the video in the future.
.