C7 Progress and Announcement Thread

[WildWeazel]

My fellow CivFanatics,
It has been exactly one year today since I revealed our intention to make our own Civ. Coincidentally, Civ3 is now old enough to drink!

For those just joining us, C7 is a WIP open source 4X game, built with the Godot Engine by Civ fans, with the goal of allowing full reuse of Civ3 mod content in an all new engine with more advanced features, mods, graphics, and system support.

Last year several of us announced that after much research and discussion, we felt that this was a viable pursuit. Since then we have made substantial progress with 5 pre-alpha releases thanks to 10 code constributors. Our most recent release is Carthage: Preview 3 with another coming very soon.

We all start somewhere, right?​

You can find out much more about C7 or get involved yourself in our project sub-(sub-sub...sub-?)forum, Civ3 Future Development. Or go directly to the release page for the latest downloads.

This thread will be a place for announcements such as new releases, and to introduce C&C newcomers to our work.

 

[Quintillus]

As @WildWeazel said, another was coming very soon. Thus:

Carthage Preview 4 is now available!

This adds five bug fixes (including catching those zombies that were traipsing around for Halloween), and also teaches the AI to try to take out barbarian camps near their cities.

 

[Takhisis]

That pic should say ‘turn’, but OK.

/subscription post

 

[ajb]

Well then, simply shocking! I'm looking forward to seeing this continue to progress!

Will it have the ability to have more than the usual max players (or did I miss that part)?

My apologies for hijacking the thread for an off topic question (regular civ3), but if I have barbarians attacking a settlement with no_raze enabled, will they destroy a level one settlement, or just pillage it? (I have pre placed settlements which i do not want destroyed, however I'd like for the barbarians to have some sophisticated attack units, who can really challenge the player/AI civilizations. . . ideally I want one area to essentially remain level one settlements because of the perpetual barbarian attacks, which will foce actual armies to be sent to that area to clean things up)?

 

[WildWeazel]

Will it have the ability to have more than the usual max players (or did I miss that part)?

The general answer to any question of this sort is that we will try not to impose any hard limits on the game engine. It will be up to the mod creators to decide what is practical.

 

[WildWeazel]

Hi folks, just a quick bit of news. Godot 4.0 is now available, which is the biggest release for them and a major upgrade for us. This new version of the game engine provides full support for the modern .NET 6 and C# 10, giving us developers more power than ever. It also overhauls the whole engine, which gives us more features to work with but also some breaking changes. Since even before the release pcen on Github has been hard at work fixing the graphics and other issues for our upcoming migration to Godot 4.

So, we're trying to squeeze out the final "Carthage" while also laying the groundwork for the next big phase of development. As always, new contributors are always welcome. If you're not a developer, hang tight. Our next milestone may require a lot of text and artwork...

 

[ajb]

Hi folks, just a quick bit of news. Godot 4.0 is now available, which is the biggest release for them and a major upgrade for us. This new version of the game engine provides full support for the modern .NET 6 and C# 10, giving us developers more power than ever. It also overhauls the whole engine, which gives us more features to work with but also some breaking changes. Since even before the release pcen on Github has been hard at work fixing the graphics and other issues for our upcoming migration to Godot 4.

So, we're trying to squeeze out the final "Carthage" while also laying the groundwork for the next big phase of development. As always, new contributors are always welcome. If you're not a developer, hang tight. Our next milestone may require a lot of text and artwork...

Interested to see where this goes, thanks for the update!

 

[ruby_sauce]

So this is basically enhancements to civ 3 which this forum always wanted to make if it would've released the source code?

I'm very excited regardless, can't wait to see where this is headed!

 

[WildWeazel]

I'd say that better describes C3X. C7 is a whole new game made in the image of Civ3. But yes, as many of those enhancements as possible

 

[WildWeazel]

Hi folks! Just a quick dev diary update courtesy of one of our external developers, pcen. He's been working diligently for months to port C7 over to Godot 4, the latest major release that overhauled a lot of systems.

I’ve been working on upgrading the version of Godot C7 uses. Godot is the game engine that C7 uses to render graphics, play audio, and handle keyboard and mouse input. We’re upgrading from Godot version 3.6 to 4, which is a major version upgrade meaning that large parts of the C7 code written to use Godot 3.6 features are broken and need to be manually changed to work with the new version. Upgrading to Godot 4 makes lots of new engine-level features available to C7. Some of these new features will make it easier for developers and artists to contribute to C7 and some will improve the performance of C7. By upgrading to Godot 4, we also ensure that C7 will benefit from the active development going into improving Godot 4. The upgrade to Godot 4 has mainly consisted of identifying C7 code using Godot 3.6 features that either changed or are no longer present in Godot 4, and fixing these parts of the code. Overall it’s a big change: so far 4000 lines of C7 have been modified in the upgrade process, and is finally nearing completion. The goal for the upgrade to Godot 4 is to achieve parity with the current version of C7, so once it’s ready, players testing out the Godot 4 version of C7 should notice no significant differences in gameplay.

And here are some screenshots showing the evolution of pcen's progress with Godot 4:

An early test showing some of the rendering issues seen with Godot 4.

Much better!

Rendering resource and terrain overlay graphics

Loading a real GOTM save in C7!

Zoom levels and horizontal wrapping work seamlessly


Even though it's mostly invisible to the player, using Godot 4 will be a big part of our next milestone after Carthage. This will allow us to work with Godot's latest features and more easily keep up with new releases of the engine going forward. A big thanks to pcen for all the hard work over the summer! His Godot expertise will be invaluable to the project. As always, if you have any developer skills and would like to contribute to C7, please let us know!

 

[Chalito]

Is C7 a playable game?

 

[WildWeazel]

It's "playable" but not much of a game yet. The only mechanics so far are the basic features of tile discovery, city building, unit production, and combat. The latest version can be found on the release page linked at the bottom of the first post.

 

[vmxa]

Are you going to have issues with using things like the icons straight out of civ3? Talking about horses and other resource icons. By issues I mean copy rights.

 

[WildWeazel]

Eventually C7 will ship with all free/community-made media, with the option to import from Civ3 as a fallback. For now it requires a local installation of Civ3 to pull the files, so we are not redistributing anything.

 

[WildWeazel]

Hi all! I've added a post to our intro thread with a vision for C7 in its eventual form. This is sort of a narrative summary of what we're trying to create, for anyone who doesn't yet "get it". Enjoy!

 

[Kyriakos]

Is there any progress? I am still interested.

 

[WildWeazel]

What a timely question! I just had some conversations yesterday about wrapping up the last bit of Godot 4 updates for the Carthage release to coincide with a promotional video. Expect an update very Soon™!

 

[AnthonyBoscia]

Great news. Though I'm not sure why CFC started a new forum for C7 and for some reason everybody there is using screenshots from some mobile game.

 

[Gary Childress]

Very excited about this. Looks like you're in the early stages of development.

I created a few Civ III units years ago. Working with Palettes and pink backgrounds was kind of a pain and more labor intensive than just using transparent backgrounds probably would have been. Has there been a decision yet on what format will be used for new units? I saw mention of .PNG files. Would be very cool to use transparent backgrounds instead of the traditional magenta and full color instead of palettes.

In any case God speed to you! Can't wait to see the finished project.

 

[Kyriakos]

What a timely question! I just had some conversations yesterday about wrapping up the last bit of Godot 4 updates for the Carthage release to coincide with a promotional video. Expect an update very Soon™!

Were my city sets used?