C7 Progress and Announcement Thread

[Blake00]

Looks like I was watching the wrong C7 thread and have missed the updates in this one.. Quintilius just linked me here after dropping by the Civ 4 Mini Engine thread where a bunch of talented Civ4 folks are looking at facing the same 'Godot engine connecting to existing Civ assets files' challenges you guys have been..

Noticed someone accidentally calling this Civ7 earlier in this thread lol.. and just watched @SuedecivIII 's new video about you guys that mentioned you still wanting name suggestions.. if you want ones that don't look like Civ3 or Civ7 but are kind of Civ3 related and lead to catchy acronyms then maybe...

Third Age of Civilization?.. can all it TAC.. actually maybe not, as TAC is taken by the Civ4 Col mod haha.. maybe TAoC then.

Third Civ?.. call call it TCiv or 3Civ or 3C..

Or hell.. just go with C3 instead of C7 lol.

oh how about C3 Engine.. can be C3E.

But I think as someone who follows a lot of open source fan rebuild projects I like the sound of 'OpenC3' the most!
.

 

[SuedecivIII]

I agree that OpenC3 is nice.

 

[Quintillus]

Noticed someone accidentally calling this Civ7 earlier in this thread lol.. and just watched @SuedecivIII 's new video about you guys that mentioned you still wanting name suggestions.. if you want ones that don't look like Civ3 or Civ7 but are kind of Civ3 related and lead to catchy acronyms then maybe...

There is actually a few threads on naming, the latest being this one. Lots of nominations but no process has been determined for deciding on what the new name will be, so the existing one has persisted.

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Incidentally, I checked the GitHub just now, and it seems C7 has a new regular contributor over the past month to two months - TomWerner (are you a CivFanatics, TomWerner? Your contributions make it look like you should be). Some visible new features are in development, such as the first part of a city screen:

You can reassign which tile is being worked by clicking on the tile, or assign an entertainer/taxman/scientist by clicking on a worked tile.

Basic tech research and slider-setting is also working, although not yet with notifications of completed research:

Tech tree in particular is what I was thinking should be the next major feature prior to when we started switching to Godot 4 and my motivation faltered.

You can see the list of recent updates at https://github.com/C7-Game/Prototype/commits/Development/ . Some of them may be a bit technical, but others - AI researches tech, properly calculate city borders based on culture - are readily understandable.

 

[WildWeazel]

I was about to ask the devs to put together an update on recent additions, but there it is

Tom and Yegor both have been making quick progress with loading and rendering more of the game state from saves and scenarios. We're hashing out the technical plans for the next milestone, while getting some new contributors on board.

 

[WildWeazel]

Hello again! With the lack of activity here since Carthage you might think things have slowed to a crawl again. Not so! I've been absent for a while but meanwhile the dev team has been pushing forward in several areas and made stunning progress these past few months. Below is a summary of interim work compiled by TomWerner. Keep in mind, this list is already two months out of date! There's plenty more to be seen, and rumor is a new preview release may be coming soon. As always, follow along on Discord to see the latest and join the discussion.

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New Features

City borders

• Borders are now loaded, and culture is used to calculate the extent of borders
• Big thanks to @esbudylin for this work

Fog of war

• The fog of war graphics are now properly displayed
• Visible vs known tiles are now correctly differentiated
• Big thanks to @rchoffardet for this work

Worker actions

• Mining, roading, and irrigating are all supported
• These improvements are functional and can be loaded from scenarios and saved games
• Big thanks to @KulkoBSW for getting the animations working, as well as implementing multi-turn moves

City screen

• Tile yields and citizen assignments are now shown
• Citizen assignments can be changed, and specialists can be cycled through
• Production can be changed here as well

Science

• The science advisor now allows selecting technologies to research
• Techs that aren't required for era advancement are marked as such
• The science slider can be used to adjust research rates
• Era advancement is fully functional
• Researching techs unlocks new units to build (thanks @esbudylin!)

Diplomacy

• The player can now engage in diplomacy with the AI
• War declarations, peace treaties, and tech trading are all supported, though no per-turn deals yet

Artwork

• Custom resource graphics, created for C7, have been added

Behind the scenes improvements

AI

• The AI will now actually use its worker, and will follow the basic "mine green, irrigate brown" rule
• The "automate" and "explore" unit actions are supported
• The basic unit AI structure has been improved to make modifications easier
• The explorer AI was rewritten to avoid clumping up explorers
• Settlers are now escorted by defensive units
• Boats are no longer considered useful defensive units in cities
• A new combat AI was written so the AI can wage war
• War declarations are now implemented, so the AI can start wars, rather than just responding to war declarations
• The AI now trades techs with other civilizations they have contacted

Pathing

• We are now using the more advanced A* search algorithm
• Various pathing bugs were resolved, which results in much more logical path decisions
• Continents are now tracked, significantly speeding up AI pathing calculations

Governments

• Governments are now tracked, but can't yet be changed
• Unit support costs are tracked, and units are disbanded if a civ runs out of money

Project health:

• Continuous integration tests have been set up, and we now create a release with each pull request
• Tests continue to improve, and we can now play "headless" games in the test, and verify various invariants hold
• Consistent code formatting has been applied and is enforced by the CI runs

Miscellaneous

• A bug when running the game for the first time on windows has been resolved (thanks @KulkoBSW)
• It is now possible to save games (thanks @esbudylin for getting the load/save dialog properly set up in Godot!)
• The dotnet version targeted was bumped to 8.0 (thanks @lt-brlara)
• Path variables and relative paths are now properly handled when finding the civ3 install (thanks @David1Socha)

What's next?

Some important game mechanics will hopefully be coming in the coming months:

• Corruption
• Despotism penalty
• Switching governments
• Improved building handling
• More worker moves
• Happiness
• Strategic resources
• Luxuries

Thank you to everyone for your interest and support! If you would like to get involved, we work on GitHub and mostly coordinate through our Discord. We can always use more programmers, and we can definitely use anyone with artistic skills - there are lots of civ3 graphics that we want to replace with our own version.

Finally, we are getting to the point where this is a playable game - cities can be improved, maps can be explored, empires can be expanded, and war can be waged. If you're interested in playing the game (and finding all the bugs we've missed), the very newest binaries can be downloaded:

• Linux
• Mac
• Windows

 

[Virote_Considon]

Really great to see how this is coming along!

 

[Vuldacon]

Very Remarkable... Major Accomplishments! Congratulations to you All

 

[Kyriakos]

Good going

 

[WildWeazel]

Heads up, I just opened our final-est name poll over in the project subforum. We have four top options compiled from the previous rounds. After this, the development team will make a final choice to take effect with the next milestone!

 

[WildWeazel]

Artists and creators! Another request for input: we are prioritizing essential graphics/media for the next milestone so that the game can run standalone without loading files from Civ3. That means we're collecting mod files: especially units, leaderheads, and pedia/tech icons for things in vanilla C3C. If you would particularly like your work to be considered, or alternatively do NOT want us to use your work in the game, please let me know. Even if you've said so before, I may have forgotten - I know I've heard from Plotinus, Kyriakos, Vuldacon, and R8XFT. If you happen to know of any creators who've expressed as much in the past (such as not wanting their content used outside of CFC) that would also be very helpful.

I'm not asking for specific nominations at this point, but if you'd like to help find good candidates that's helpful too. Anything added to the game at this stage need not be final. In many cases we will want to create or enhance resources to show off the engine's capabilities anyway, and of course there is plenty of time to debate the best of the best. But for now, we just need a usable substitute for all of the original content so we can start publishing a complete game. I mostly focused on graphics here, but we will also have less critical needs for sounds/audio and Pedia text. Anything we use needs to be all-original or otherwise free-as-in-freedom, that is no derivatives of Firaxis content or conversions from other non-free games.

As always, anything you would like to make specifically for C7 would be most welcome, and we're now getting to the point where those opportunities are wide open (but again, focused on replacing content in C3C). Just let us know what you have in mind!

 

[register]

As far as I'm concerned, I'm happy to offer my units if they fit your Ancient Era theme. I also plan to create a few antique and medieval city sets, so I'd be glad to make them for C3C as well.