CivAssist II 30-Oct-2016

[Lee_Dailey]

howdy ainwood,

i'm gonna presume you are asking those q's of me. [*grin*]

civ = civ3 complete, conquests, patched to v-1.22
install path = "C:\Program Files\Firaxis Games\Civilization III Complete"
exe path = "C:\Program Files\Firaxis Games\Civilization III Complete\Conquests\Civ3Conquests.exe"
os = win7x32, sp1

c3c is run as admin.
autosaves are NOT in the virtual store, but in the actual c3c install tree. here ...
"C:\Program Files\Firaxis Games\Civilization III Complete\Conquests\Saves\Auto"

the game i am running is a scenario, not a normal game.
*****

also, the error only shows up under these two circumstances ...
- start CA while c3c is already running
- start c3c while CA is already running

if i start CA while c3c is NOT running, i get no error.

i always continue and it runs fine. well, except for it not finding the autosave files. [*grin*]

take care,
lee

 

[ainwood]

Thanks. Could you humour me and try running both CivAssist and Conquests without running them as an admin?

Running Conquests as an administrator will definitely cause problems. CivAssist monitors the Conquests exe process to see when it exits, and it does this by adding an event to the process to determine when it exits. However, when Conquests is run in admin mode, CivAssist doesn't have appropriate privileges to attach the event to the process. I want to see if there are any other issues in your set-up that could cause problems.

Modifying so that CivAssist will work when Civ3 is in admin mode might be possible - but might take a bit of a rewrite of the process monitor. Why do you want to run in admin mode?

 

[Vellocet]

You have to run Conquests as an adminstrator, don't you? Isn't that a part of XP compatibility mode? I tried running Civassist as admin first and then starting conquests as user and still got the same error.

 

[Puppeteer]

You have to run Conquests as an adminstrator, don't you?

I install to an alternate folder outside of the protected "Program Files" hierarchy and run Conquests without further adjustments (no admin mode. no compatibility mode). It avoids many difficult-to-diagnose issues. I arbitrarily chose c:\users\Public\Games\civ3 . Others have gone with c:\civ3 or similar.

In my Win7 install vids I also put CAII and another thing or two in alternate locations, but really only the Civ3 games need to be moved. The rest work fine installed with defaults.

 

[Vellocet]

I reinstalled Civ3 in c:\users\me\games and started it with no privileges, and started civassist with admin privileges. Same error. Does .NET v1.1 being installed make a difference? I uninstalled it and no change.

 

[ainwood]

Can you try it without XP compatibility mode on?

 

[Vellocet]

It's not on, I didn't change anything after reinstall, the only thing I did special was "run as admin" for civassist.

 

[Lee_Dailey]

howdy ainwood,

i finally got "real life" to ease up a tad. [*grin*]

here's what i did ...
- removed the "run as admin" option from the icon to start c3c
[everything on the compatibility tab for the icon is set to the default "blank".]
- ran c3c from that icon
- it started up and and did NOT show the usual "run this as admin?" dialog [as expected]
- started a new game with all default settings
- started CA
- got the usual error [i can't see any difference from the previous one, but i have the image and the text if you want them.]
- selected the usual "continue"
- CA came up blank

i presume because the "game file path" setting still points to the old location and it doesn't have any way to get to the virtual store. the "game file path" setting cannot be cleared from inside CA. i can still use the "pick" button to get a file from the old location and load it.

however, if i navigate to the virtual store location and try to load the auto save file there, i get a new error ...

"cannot open file '[correct file path & name]', access is blocked."

according to windows, i have full access to the files and the folder.

take care,
lee

ps-
just in case i didn't mention it before, this startup error was present with CA before you started working on it. so it aint anything YOU have done, from what i can tell. [*grin*]
lee-

 

[jhking]

Ainwood,
Thanks for continuing to maintain this program. I'm running C3C from Steam: 1.22 in the "start game" screen. I've tried to get CA II to run inside Win 8.1 but since dotnet 1.1 isn't supported in 8.1 that was a non-starter.
I then blew the dust off a windows 2000 install disk and set it up inside a VirtualBox VM.
CA II, all the MSFT service packs and dotnet 1.1 install just fine.
The application starts but every time I try to read a *.sav file I get a messagebox
"Cannt open file 'c:\sav\conquests Autosave 1870 AD.SAV' , access is blocked".
This occurs from the standard savegame folder or if I copy the file someplace on the W2K box's virtual drive.
Civassist's about says it's 2.0.5083.
Since I can't read a copy of the savegame I've included the first 4 bytes of the autosave just in case they've jacked with the format for Steam. Autosave starts with
43h 49h 56h 33h or 'CIV3', string 'BICQ' appears at 232h
Fullsave
starts with 00h 06h 86h 24h
I don't see a 'BICQ' string but since IIRC fullsaves are compressed that's no surprise.
Any thoughts would be appreciated.

 

[ainwood]

For info, I am on holiday away from my pc, and can't work on this at the moment.

 

[Lee_Dailey]

howdy ainwood,

oh. my. god. you are taking personal time off instead of working on this game utility? how dare you!

[*grin*]

enjoy the times, dude! this util is not important ... it's useful, but not at all important when compared to a full life.

take care,
lee

 

[mythras]

Hi, ainwood
I'm a Civ3fans from China.The CivAssistII has saved a lot time in Game. Thanks to your effort for this software. I have a problem not a bug.
A number of Chinese player don't use this good software due to language support.
If we play the chinese version CIV3, using CivAssistII open the .sav. The sw can't support Chinese and show unreadable codes such as ?$# > etc.
I think it is a problem about double byte support.
Could you please fix it if you have free time?

Mythras

 

[Quintillus]

Hi ainwood,

Mythras's post inspired me to revisit Chinese BIQ support in my editor, and I was able to figure out what had been stumping me with regards to Chinese support. The key points that I found were:

• Instead of the Windows-1252 encoding that Civ III English uses, Civ III Chinese appears to use the GBK character set. My guess is CAII is either explicitly using Windows-1252, or is using it by default. [1]
• You'll need a font that can support displaying Chinese characters. You can find a list of these that are included with Windows 2000 - 7 here. SimSun seems to be working nicely for me, although as I don't speak Chinese, I can't personally vouch for the accuracy, beyond that things look OK with this font at the GBK charset. [2]
• I haven't yet found a way to automatically detect whether a BIQ is in English, Russian, or Chinese. I've been using a user-configurable drop-down for language that remembers the user's previous choice so far. There may be a way to do this automatically, but I haven't found a good one yet. The one that comes to mind is looking at whether text in areas such as the description is in English, Russian, or Chinese, but that comes with issues such as having dictionaries to identify text, and the fact that many English words will look OK if you use GBK (Chinese) character encoding, but not all will. So a user-configurable option is the best I've come up with so far.
• The other thorn I've found so far is that at one point I had an exception where I had assumed that a string's length was 32, which is always is in English and Russian BIQs. However, some Chinese characters do indeed take 2 bytes in GBK, so when I tried to do something with the 31st character (starting with 0), it was out of bounds. The (non-C-style) string's length was 30 instead of 32, since the two Chinese characters took 2 bytes each, leaving 2 characters and 28 null bytes to make up the length. This was an edge case, however, and I don't actually remember why I added it 3.5 years ago even looking at the commit comment. So you hopefully won't have many issues like this.

Hope this is helpful if you do look into reading SAVs in Chinese. Although in my case it was BIQs, my suspicion is that it would work the same with SAVs.

Footnotes:

1 - I'm not 100% sure that Civ III Chinese actually uses GBK, as there are other Chinese encodings such as GB2312 that may be used. GBK looks OK to me, and would be a reasonable choice, but I don't speak Chinese, so I can't say whether the correct characters are actually being used. And technically, I'm not 100% sure that English Civ III uses Windows-1252, as there are a few other English character sets that are very similar to it.
2 - If you try using a font that isn't on that list, chances are the Chinese characters will be rendered as boxes and thus not legibly. That's what happened when I was using the default in my editor, Tahoma - it didn't have any graphics to represent the characters I was asking it to render.

 

[mythras]

Hi ainwood and Quintillus
I can send a chinese .biq and .sav document if you need.

Br,
mythras

 

[Quintillus]

Hi ainwood and Quintillus
I can send a chinese .biq and .sav document if you need.

Br,
mythras

For myself, I have Chinese BIQs to test with (although I can't actually load them in game with my Russian version of Civ3). At this point I don't think a .SAV would really be of much help to me. However, it may well be different for ainwood.

 

[vmxa]

Yes now that win8 upgraded to 8.1, I cannot run CAII. I cannot get 1.1 to work or reinstall. Would be so great to see CAII use a current version of .net. Back to CRP till then I guess.

 

[ville-v]

Does this program show the map seed and where?

 

[WeirdoJoker]

I downloaded CivAssistII (the latest I could find), but every time I try to open the game file in it, I get the following error message:

"Unknown Save File Version. Please ensure that your copy of Civ/PTW/C3C is patched to the latest version."

What does that mean, and how do I fix it?

 

[Puppeteer]

I downloaded CivAssistII (the latest I could find), but every time I try to open the game file in it, I get the following error message:

"Unknown Save File Version. Please ensure that your copy of Civ/PTW/C3C is patched to the latest version."

What does that mean, and how do I fix it?

What does it say in the lower-left corner when you start Civ3? Mine says 1.22 .

Also, usually you can start CAII and start playing, and it will find the game you're playing and show it to you.

 

[WeirdoJoker]

What does it say in the lower-left corner when you start Civ3? Mine says 1.22.

I've got 1.07f. Do I then need a patch to update or something?

Also, usually you can start CAII and start playing, and it will find the game you're playing and show it to you.

Tried, didn't work. When I click "File" in CAII I get a list of the saves, but it won't open them. Is this a fault in my version of CivIII, or my version of CAII?