C3X Districts

[Chioban]

Yes, it's clear that it took you a lot of work. In fact, I had no idea that something like that was possible in Civ3. Mechanically, it's interesting, but it's aesthetically where it really shines and where I like it best. I understand that those three wonders you mention will be some of the ones that are missing, such as The Colossus. As for districts, I can only speculate. Perhaps something related to the port? Or a forest district? I don't know. Anyway, great work. I'll keep an eye out for updates.

 

[MilsB]

Hello!
Thank you very much for all the answers and explanations!
I will wait for the completion and implementation of these current features (extraordinary from my point of view)!
In the meantime, I play the game (I have several favorite modes, but now I play RARR) with great enthusiasm, after the implementation of C3X 26 with all its extraordinary features! There are still some headaches (such as Stack button...) but they are minor in addition to what the game offered now!

Many thanks guys!

 

[bingyu893]

Thank you for your response to my previous questions!

My guess is that Civ 3 uses ASCII characters rather than Unicode, so non-Latin-based languages may not be able to be shown, unfortunately. I'm guessing others in the Civ 3/C3X community may have more knowledge of the underlying issue than I do.

In my experience, Civ III still uses Unicode, but displaying other languages requires the corresponding character sets. I previously translated Text/c3x-labels.txt and Text/c3x-script.txt into chinese and employed the appropriate character sets, and these 2 flies both worked correctly.
However, I encountered issues while translating *.districts_config.txt,*.districts_wonders_config.txt and *.districts_config.txt, districts such as Campus and Holy Sites functioned correctly. Yet Neighbourhoods and Wonder Districts failed to translate properly; they retained their English names and could not use translated technology as a prerequisite.

If you have specific cases where AI workers are doing silly things or building districts on resources when they have other options too, please let me know and I'm happy to take a look.

I met this situation while playing today, I simply cannot understand why the AI doesn't bulid the holy site on the vacant grassland adjacent to the resources. Additionally, I've noticed that despite setting the city radius to 3 tiles, the AI does not appear to take this factor into account when bulid district.

Yes, not currently but in R27 (the ports & naval-related release I'm working on) I intend to allow districts to provide happiness as well

I shall look forward to it

 

[instafluff]

However, I encountered issues while translating *.districts_config.txt,*.districts_wonders_config.txt and *.districts_config.txt, districts such as Campus and Holy Sites functioned correctly. Yet Neighbourhoods and Wonder Districts failed to translate properly; they retained their English names and could not use translated technology as a prerequisite.

Ah, actually this makes sense. For standard districts (those defined using config files alone), right, you can set the name to whatever you'd like. For special districts (e.g., Wonder districts), you can change their values and requirements, etc. using config files, but the name is actually important to keep the same, as this is what C3X Districts uses internally to know which special district to override. So unfortunately for those, right, it won't work correctly if you change the name (though you should be able to change the tooltip just fine)

The tooltip should hopefully help, but also by the way, in R27 I've added an additional display_name property you'll be able to set in the config files, which you'll be able to safely change the name as well.

So in summary:

Config in R26:

#District
name                  = Neighborhood
tooltip               = <whatever you want>

(warnings like "Are you sure you want to build a Neighborhood...?" will unfortunately still say "Neighborhood")

Config in R27:

#District
name                  = Neighborhood
display_name          = <whatever you want>
tooltip               = <whatever you want>

(only your defined names will be shown)

In my experience, Civ III still uses Unicode, but displaying other languages requires the corresponding character sets. I previously translated Text/c3x-labels.txtandText/c3x-script.txt into chinese and employed the appropriate character sets, and these 2 flies both worked correctly.

Got it, that's great!

I met this situation while playing today, I simply cannot understand why the AI doesn't bulid the holy site on the vacant grassland adjacent to the resources. Additionally, I've noticed that despite setting the city radius to 3 tiles, the AI does not appear to take this factor into account when bulid district.

I think the holy site is within the work radius of both cities, right? If yes, I suspect that is because the AI district placement algorithm gives a significant boost to candidate tiles available to multiple cities. This value is likely overriding the penalty to building on a resource. That's my guess, anyway. It takes a lot of factors into consideration. Anyway thanks, I think I'll double the resource penalty to try to prevent this where possible.

 

[MilsB]

Hello!
1. I have a small problem... Enchampment is set to appear after discovering Warrior Code... in RARR, barracks appear automatically after building the Sphinx Wonder and normally after discovering Military training, before Warrior Code!
I have the setting advance_prereq = Warrior Code, and I want to change it to Military Training...
- which files do I need to modify to make the setting correct?

2. A strange thing is that after I discovered Military Training (appear: Army, Barracks, Training Campus), the Barracks do not appear at all in the construction grid of the city...
What can I do in this case?

Thank you for your understanding and help!

 

[Chioban]

I made this Stonehenge for a placeholder. I don't know if it will work for you to test things in vanilla. I created it by editing an AI sprite, it doesn't fit 100% with the Civ3 style, but it might work on the map.

Test:

Almost, almost, it doesn't clash. If I have time, I'll see if I can adapt some of the wonders of vanilla. Although I can't promise they'll turn out well

 

[Civinator]

The image hill jungle 0100 can not be opened and has 0 KB.

 

[instafluff]

I made this Stonehenge for a placeholder. I don't know if it will work for you to test things in vanilla. I created it by editing an AI sprite, it doesn't fit 100% with the Civ3 style, but it might work on the map.

Almost, almost, it doesn't clash. If I have time, I'll see if I can adapt some of the wonders of vanilla. Although I can't promise they'll turn out well

That's awesome! And bravo on getting it to work using the districts system - that makes me happy. I suppose one thing to figure out is how/where to collect art like this. I think it makes the most sense to have art for districts & day/night cycle specific to a given mod managed by mod developers - assuming they want to do so. It would add a bit more work, of course, and presumably some folks may not want to use districts, which is understandable.

The image hill jungle 0100 can not be opened and has 0 KB.

Ah, thank you for letting me know. I'll fix that and update the download. It's odd that it's just that one file for that one hour.

 

[Civinator]

When having a look into the wonders 2 file, I think, besides the images in the Art\cityscreen\buildings-large file, the files in the city view folder in Civ 3 Vanilla can be a great source for the wonder images. The current wonders 2 file unfortunately shows the wrong images for Newton´s University, as this wonder is only available in era 3, and I think the wonder images in this mod should show the images when those wonders can be built in the game. The in my eyes correct city view image of Newton´s University fits very well into the wonders template of this mod and I think also the image of the Grand Cathedral with the pasted image of the buildings-large file could be an interesting alternative to the current image.

Here is a screenshot of both wonders in the template and the pcx images in the attached zip file in my eyes even look better than the image in the screenshot.

 

[Chioban]

Merry Christmas. I'm expanding the CCM3 district Wonders. I took Stonehenge from the base files, while I made The Colossus using AI, and I think it turned out well. I'd like to be able to place it more in the center of the square, but I'm using the template from the other Wonders, and I understand that anything outside the fuchsia diamond won't be visible.

I also took into account the comment from the colleague above about the error with Newton's university. If you want the PCX file, I can send it to you. Although I would like to have more wonders completed first (That will be for next year). Since I had a couple of hours free, I continued playing the game a little longer and now I have a question. Maybe you already answered it and I missed it, but here goes. How close does a district have to be to a city to benefit from its effects? (I am referring to cities that are outside the ratio)

 

[instafluff]

When having a look into the wonders 2 file, I think, besides the images in the Art\cityscreen\buildings-large file, the files in the city view folder in Civ 3 Vanilla can be a great source for the wonder images. The current wonders 2 file unfortunately shows the wrong images for Newton´s University, as this wonder is only available in era 3, and I think the wonder images in this mod should show the images when those wonders can be built in the game. The in my eyes correct city view image of Newton´s University fits very well into the wonders template of this mod and I think also the image of the Grand Cathedral with the pasted image of the buildings-large file could be an interesting alternative to the current image.

Thanks Civinator, I'm inclined to agree with you that Wonders should maintain their look of when they first are available in the game. The challenge I found was that the Civilopedia entries often don't quite fit well in the game itself when placed alongside cities and so on - either due to being at deceptively similar but different angles, slightly different shadows and color palettes, and so on. Thus the Districts Wonders tend to be slightly altered to better blend in on the map.

If I recall correctly, with Newton's University in particular, I just couldn't get the original design to feel like it blended well - though for that matter I wasn't satisfied with the final design either. I take your point, though. Let me experiment a bit with the earlier designs and see if I can update them.

Merry Christmas. I'm expanding the CCM3 district Wonders. I took Stonehenge from the base files, while I made The Colossus using AI, and I think it turned out well. I'd like to be able to place it more in the center of the square, but I'm using the template from the other Wonders, and I understand that anything outside the fuchsia diamond won't be

Merry Christmas! Sure, thanks for letting me know. I'm also working on The Colossus as well, with a slightly different design. As always, it's a balancing act between staying true to the original Civ 3 design, taking liberties to make it look slightly nicer (in my eyes), while not straying so far that it ruins immersion. I'll follow up with my design as well when I'm a bit farther along.

Also, actually things outside of fuschia diamond (the green area) will still be shown. The actual image placed in the game is a square, not the diamond, so you can safely stray into the green area and it will render just fine. The green area gives you a sense though of how much it will cover the tiles behind it.

I also took into account the comment from the colleague above about the error with Newton's university. If you want the PCX file, I can send it to you. Although I would like to have more wonders completed first (That will be for next year). Since I had a couple of hours free, I continued playing the game a little longer and now I have a question. Maybe you already answered it and I missed it, but here goes. How close does a district have to be to a city to benefit from its effects? (I am referring to cities that are outside the ratio)

I am concurrently working on my own designs as well and would like to experiment a bit more - let's see where we are in a month or so.

Regarding how close a district needs to be to a city, it depends on the C3X city_work_radius setting. The default is 2 rings around a city, though in my personal games I've tended to move towards huge maps (I normally play standard), with city_work_radius = 4 and minimum_city_separation = 6. This can feel very strange at first, but I've come to enjoy it, and cities in the industrial & modern eras still sprawl, while not feeling too dense. But I think it's all about personal taste.

Also, when you have a worker selected, you can hold CTRL, which will show the work radii around all cities in your Civ. That way you don't have to guess whether a tile will be usable by a city or not.

 

[Civinator]

Only for brainstorming: Here is a template showing the CCM-Colossus and the original Civ 3 Colossus with pasted in cityscreen-large graphics:

 

[Kyriakos]

This is very impressive...
Which files were used for the district gfx?

 

[instafluff]

Only for brainstorming: Here is a template showing the CCM-Colossus and the original Civ 3 Colossus with pasted in cityscreen-large graphics:

Great, thank you!

This is very impressive...

Thank you!

Which files were used for the district gfx?

I'm assuming you are asking as to the locations of the files? They can be found under C3X/Art/Districts. Let me know if I'm misunderstanding your question.

 

[Kyriakos]

Great, thank you!


Thank you!


I'm assuming you are asking as to the locations of the files? They can be found under C3X/Art/Districts. Let me know if I'm misunderstanding your question.

I was wondering which classical civ3 gfx pcx file they are making use of. Eg LM forests, terrain buildings, resources etc

 

[instafluff]

I was wondering which classical civ3 gfx pcx file they are making use of. Eg LM forests, terrain buildings, resources etc

Sure, well the day-night cycle art (technically separate from districts) uses all of the vanilla game terrain, resource, and city PCX files, but manipulates those using Python code to impute various color changes to reflect the hour of the day. The building lights are achieved by me custom-annotating the city (and a few other terrain building) art using special reserved colors, which I then transform with another Python script to create various light flares and so on.

The core districts art (e.g., the neighborhood, encampment, entertainment complex, etc. art) is drafted by AI generation, which (after many iterations) I then edit in GIMP after I'm satisfied. I have a small library of AI prompts I have used and adapted for various districts.

I hope that answers your question but am happy to elaborate

 

[Kyriakos]

Sure, well the day-night cycle art (technically separate from districts) uses all of the vanilla game terrain, resource, and city PCX files, but manipulates those using Python code to impute various color changes to reflect the hour of the day. The building lights are achieved by me custom-annotating the city (and a few other terrain building) art using special reserved colors, which I then transform with another Python script to create various light flares and so on.

The core districts art (e.g., the neighborhood, encampment, entertainment complex, etc. art) is drafted by AI generation, which (after many iterations) I then edit in GIMP after I'm satisfied. I have a small library of AI prompts I have used and adapted for various districts.

I hope that answers your question but am happy to elaborate

How is the code (python) activated in-game? Is there some complimentary exe or similar file? I have been out of the loop of new developments for civ3, but if your code actually is running on its own (not having to be run manually, after prompts to re-load etc) then I am most impressed! (but maybe you only mean that you used python to code changes to the gfx?)

 

[instafluff]

How is the code (python) activated in-game? Is there some complimentary exe or similar file? I have been out of the loop of new developments for civ3, but if your code actually is running on its own (not having to be run manually, after prompts to re-load etc) then I am most impressed! (but maybe you only mean that you used python to code changes to the gfx?)

Yes, the latter. The Python code is run only once, to generate the PCX files for each respective hour. C3X then loads the generated PCX files and swaps them when the terrain/building/district/city is rendered, if applicable.

 

[MilsB]

Hello!
Is it possible to have a garbage district - a landfill?
- which will bring misfortune to the citizens, maybe some diseases and where to build in the future, incinerators, ecological landfills, treatment plants, recycling, etc.?
The garbage has always existed, after all...!
This is in addition to the default pollution setting!
Thanks for your attention!

 

[robotlincoln]

Do you have any plans to create a class of districts that generates a specific resource? This could be used to create plantations for luxury crops, or could be used to re-engineer how resources work in general by giving the player the ability to determine which tiles produce which organic resources.