Civ III MM toolkit

D551

Warlord
Joined
Feb 26, 2010
Messages
169
Location
Utah
Hi all,

I remember using CivIIIMM toolkit years ago, and It was an awesome tool. I've recently tried using it again and its definitely outdated and has a lot of issues. Does anyone know of a different tool that can add new units to a scenario like this program did? Or know of a way to run this program so that it will work properly?

Here is a link to that tool in case there is any confusion with what tool I'm talking about.

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/civ3mmtoolkit-civilization-iii-mode-makers-toolkit.117669/

Any help here would be great!
 
i have not, I was under the impression it runs on mac, I'll check it out.
 
My editor works on a wide variety of operating systems (I mainly use Windows, myself), but I should note that while there may be some overlap, it doesn't attempt to replicate everything previous tools do, and certainly won't replicate everything a tool as extensive as Civ3MMToolkit does.
 
My editor works on a wide variety of operating systems (I mainly use Windows, myself), but I should note that while there may be some overlap, it doesn't attempt to replicate everything previous tools do, and certainly won't replicate everything a tool as extensive as Civ3MMToolkit does.

I belatedly realized that I should ask the Great Creator himself - From what you wrote, I gather it's fine on Windows 10, but what's all this I hear about Java 8?
 
I belatedly realized that I should ask the Great Creator himself - From what you wrote, I gather it's fine on Windows 10, but what's all this I hear about Java 8?

You're correct that it should work just fine on Windows 10, and in fact some of its development is now done on a Windows 10 laptop.

As for Java versions, it's slightly more complicated. Java 8 is fully supported, and can be downloaded from Oracle (the company which develops Java) at https://www.java.com/en/download/manual.jsp . This will run the editor just fine, and remains the recommended route. At one point (in 2017) I thought Java would auto-update itself to a version that is not compatible with the editor, but that has not come to pass, and as best I can determine will not come to pass.

For the whole detailed story, see the spoiler below:

Spoiler Lots of details :
For more recent versions of Java, Oracle has removed some of the "less popular" features in an effort to slim down the Java download size. One of those "less popular" features is the most modern graphics toolkit in Java, which I'd started to migrate to for features such as reorderable tech and unit lists, filterable tech and unit lists, downloading units from CFC directly to a scenario folder, and Help pages that include images of what they're describing. These features range from significantly more difficult to impossible to implement with the old graphics toolkit that is still in newer versions of Java.

Oracle is also switching to discouraging non-developers from downloading Java directly; the tradeoff of that is that in the Java 8 world, you would download Java once (from the link above), for a download of 60 MB, and each version of the editor would be about 2 MB; in the new world, you'd simply download the new version of the editor - but as that would include Java, it would be somewhere on the range of 40 - 60 MB each time. For enterprise software (Java's strongest market), the size of the enterprise software would dwarf the size of re-downloading Java each time, but that is not so much the case for small software such as the editor. This also switches the distribution model from building it once (i.e. on my Windows 8.1 desktop) and having it run anywhere, versus having to do three separate builds for Linux, Windows, and Mac (quite possibly on different physical machines), and uploading each of them (as I'd have to include the Linux/Windows/Mac version of Java with the editor). In other words, the overhead for distributing new versions becomes significantly higher. Similar overhead issues are why the "Legacy", "Windows XP", and "Windows 95" editions of the editor are not updated alongside every main editor update.

It is possible to re-bundle the new graphical toolkit with software running newer versions of Java, but it's still subject to the new-version overhead mentioned in the previous paragraph, and there are additional complexities if you want to have software run with both Java 11 (the "new" version I could target) and Java 8. Dropping Java 8 would mean dropping some older operating systems as well, such as Windows XP/Vista, and OS X 10.8 through 10.somewhere around 11.

In 2017 I thought this would all cause significant havoc, but as it turns out you can still download Java 8 and run it from the link above, and it will not try to auto-upgrade itself to a version that won't run the editor. Thus, rather than go through the horse and pony show of trying to move everything to Oracle's new model, I've preferred to spend the (relatively small) amount of time I spend on the editor on new capabilities. If at some point Java 8 really does become unavailable or support ends (and in some good news, multiple companies other than Oracle have stated they intend to provide security updates for Java 8 into the mid-2020s), I'll likely have to change that.

(As an analogy to another language, Oracle dropping not only this graphics toolkit, but also several "less popular" enterprise components in Java 9 and Java 10 is kind of like how Python made some "relatively minor" backwards-incompatible changes from Python 2 to Python 3, and a decade later a lot of companies and programs are still using Python 2)
 
Thank you, as always. Are there any security or "backward-compatibility" issues, that you know of, if I roll back to Java 8?

At this point, not that I am aware of. The latest update is from October, and based on the usual cadence I wouldn't expect another one yet. Although, as has been the case for a long time, I'd recommend not enabling Java browser plugins (or ActiveX, or Flash, more generally) Nowadays those are disabled by default when Java is installed, but in the mid-2000s that wasn't necessarily the case.
 
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