C3X: EXE Mod including Bug Fixes, Stack Bombard, and Much More Release 26

[bingyu893]

Hi Flintlock, I sincerely appreciate your amazing work! C3X defenitely change my way to play Civ3.
I have a small request: Is it possible for features such as buildings_generating_resources and building_prereqs_for_units to support retrieval of Civilopedia entries? If that could be worked then I can fully use these functions in my language (Chinese).
Thank you for your understanding and help!

 

[Zorro270]

Hello folks !

Me too, I have a little request
Instafluff, Flintlock: can you add the option to retrieve the "district, Natural Wonders, night&days,.. 's" graphics from the scenario folder (like the scenario configs files) ?

This way, we can create modpacks with custom district graphics

 

[instafluff]

Me too, I have a little request
Instafluff, Flintlock: can you add the option to retrieve the "district, Natural Wonders, night&days,.. 's" graphics from the scenario folder (like the scenario configs files) ?

This way, we can create modpacks with custom district graphics

@Zorro270 this one is on me and is already implemented in the upcoming version 27 release

 

[Zorro270]

@Zorro270 this one is on me and is already implemented in the upcoming version 27 release

You are the best

 

[Flintlock]

Hi Flintlock, I sincerely appreciate your amazing work! C3X defenitely change my way to play Civ3.
I have a small request: Is it possible for features such as buildings_generating_resources andbuilding_prereqs_for_units to support retrieval of Civilopedia entries?

I'm glad to hear you like it. Matching the names in the config against Civilopedia keys would be relatively easy. I could knock that out in a day so I'll add it to the short list for R27.

By the way, I'm curious how the game runs in non-western European languages like Chinese. I presume you're using the same executable as the English version because C3X works, is that right? I notice that on the Steam and GOG store pages they list only English under supported languages. Do you by any chance know what encoding the game uses for Chinese text? It may actually be even easier for me to have the mod re-encode the config file using that encoding when appropriate than have it look for Civilopedia keys. Right now the way it works is the config file itself is supposed to be UTF-8, which can support any language, and the mod converts it when loading to Windows-1252 because that's the encoding that I observed the game using internally. I'd like to know when or how it can use other encodings.

 

[bingyu893]

I'm glad to hear you like it. Matching the names in the config against Civilopedia keys would be relatively easy. I could knock that out in a day so I'll add it to the short list for R27.

By the way, I'm curious how the game runs in non-western European languages like Chinese. I presume you're using the same executable as the English version because C3X works, is that right? I notice that on the Steam and GOG store pages they list only English under supported languages. Do you by any chance know what encoding the game uses for Chinese text? It may actually be even easier for me to have the mod re-encode the config file using that encoding when appropriate than have it look for Civilopedia keys. Right now the way it works is the config file itself is supposed to be UTF-8, which can support any language, and the mod converts it when loading to Windows-1252 because that's the encoding that I observed the game using internally. I'd like to know when or how it can use other encodings.

Well, I'm not an expert in this area. However, based on my observations and experience, the Chinese version of Civ III basically translates the in-game text files into Chinese and employs the GBK character set to ensure they display correctly. I believe the ideal solution would be for the game to natively support UTF-8 encoding rather than Windows-1252, though achieving this would likely prove quite challenging.
Anyway, thank you for your response!

 

[vmxa]

It is a bit late in the game to bring this up, but here goes noting.

To me it is not always clear, at a glance, what the values are intending. I mean the true and false. A few need rereading to be sure what the action will be, enabled or disabled.

A legend at the start making it clear such as:

fixed - changed
org - no change from the games std AI.

 

[vmxa]

I seem to be losing the battle with the ini. I tried KeepRes=0 Video Mode=1280 and the game comes and is runnig at 1024. I tried several Video Mode= value, but always goes to 1024. If I run with KeepRes=1 it ignores the Video Mode and runs at desktop setting of 2k. That is a pretty small window. Now that I think of it, I am not
sure I ever checked to see, if the game display settings changed.

I could not get the settings to fit on the window, so I could read the res, but it looks loke it was 1024 as the settings page ran off thew screen, lol. So it would seem that the ini does not change the game res. KeepRes can force the display value to be used or you get the game value of 1024. Else I am totally lost, not impossible.

Anyone run into a solution on getting the game to be slightly better fix for the screen? 1024 makes for a lot more scrolling on 200x200 or larger maps.

 

[ajb]

I seem to be losing the battle with the ini. I tried KeepRes=0 Video Mode=1280 and the game comes and is runnig at 1024. I tried several Video Mode= value, but always goes to 1024. If I run with KeepRes=1 it ignores the Video Mode and runs at desktop setting of 2k. That is a pretty small window. Now that I think of it, I am not
sure I ever checked to see, if the game display settings changed.

I could not get the settings to fit on the window, so I could read the res, but it looks loke it was 1024 as the settings page ran off thew screen, lol. So it would seem that the ini does not change the game res. KeepRes can force the display value to be used or you get the game value of 1024. Else I am totally lost, not impossible.

Anyone run into a solution on getting the game to be slightly better fix for the screen? 1024 makes for a lot more scrolling on 200x200 or larger maps.

You should also add PlayIntro=0 because the game gets confused trying to resize the display after this. Not sure if this is 100% true but I don't have the intro playing on mine, I'm assuming that was done for a reason. Widescreen works amazing even on 2456 (or whatever the display screen is -- I'm not near that monitor).

 

[Flintlock]

Well, I'm not an expert in this area. However, based on my observations and experience, the Chinese version of Civ III basically translates the in-game text files into Chinese and employs the GBK character set to ensure they display correctly.

That sounds right. I poked around inside the EXE looking at things related to text encoding, and I didn't see anywhere that the game chooses a particular encoding. I think it's simply using whatever default it's getting from Windows. In future versions, I'll have the mod re-encode the config to whatever encoding the game retrieved from Windows and stored internally. I'm not completely sure that's the right encoding to use, but it appears to be what the game uses when it does some of its own text encoding and I've checked on my system that it matches Windows-1252. Hopefully that will mean text in Chinese or any other language will work in the default config, as long as that text matches the language Civ 3 is running in.

To me it is not always clear, at a glance, what the values are intending. I mean the true and false. A few need rereading to be sure what the action will be, enabled or disabled.
A legend at the start making it clear such as:
fixed - changed
org - no change from the games std AI.

Are there some particular config options you think could be made clearer? Originally I used the convention that setting anything to false or 0 corresponded to unchanged, standard game behavior. However that made some options more complicated such as the min city distance option. That was originally an adjustment to the min distance, so setting it to 0 gave you the standard min distance of 1, setting it to 1 gave you 1 + 1 = a min distance of 2, setting it to -1 gave you 1 - 1 = a min distance of 0, and so forth. I decided that was too complicated so I dropped that convention and now I just try to make each option work the way I think is most natural. I generally make it so that setting to true changes something whereas false leaves it as standard but that's not a hard rule.

 

[vmxa]

The artillery ones confused me for bit. Probably being 80 is the real culprit.

ajb I will check it out, thanks.

edit:
PlayIntro=0 did prevent intro from playing, but had no impact on res setting, sigh.