[Civ2] Civilization II MGE User Interface Additions (CIV2UIA)

[Blake00]

There is another field 'City radii'. Here is visualization. But, again, it reveals cities hidden from the player.View attachment 631083

oh wow.. that's awesome!!! even at this stage it would be good for late games at least when you already know where cities are.

43. New game default map zoom 1:1. Now, when starting a new game, the map zoom is set to 1:1 (level 0), regardless of the screen width (previously, if the screen width was more than 1000 pixels, the zoom was set to level 2).

Yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thank you!!!!

.

 

[Blake00]

@FoxAhead Got another annoying MGE modders dream request for ya mate haha.

To this day the 7th city style slot in in Cities.gif containing the modern alternative graphics sits unused in MGE.

In Test of Time they unlocked the 7th City slot to use for a Renaissance period or extra 7th custom Civ city in their fantasy and scifi scenarios. ToTPP has of course taken it even further allowing modders to do even more than 7 city types which is amazing! However for good old MGE I'd just be happy to have the vanilla ToT style 7th city slot unlocked.

It looks like Microprose made it accessible in ToT via in a similar way to how the existing 5th slot is linked to Industrialization (Ind) and the 6th slot is linked to Electronics (E2). As when I look at the ToT Fantasy scenario I can see the underground Goblins used the 7th slot.

And when I start a new game as them I see this in their tech screen

And when I look in rules I can see that tech is in the old X2 custom tech area so they must have linked it to that slot.. or they added a place somewhere that allows you to select the tech slot to link it to as I notice the industrial city slot is now moved and linked to X1 instead of E2 in this scenario too, but I can't see in rules how they relinked that. No doubt @Knighttime or @Prof. Garfield can probably educate me on the specifics of how to allocate city slots 4-7 to techs of your choice in ToT.

But anyway it would be awesome if you could somehow do in MGE what they did in ToT and unlock that 7th slot to one of the custom tech slots. Obviously it's best as a tickbox setting that would not be on by default otherwise any existing scenario using those custom tech slots would end up with some players cities getting whatever's in the 7th city slot. Unless you or someone can think of a better less intrusive way to implement it?

The reason I ask is the Heroes of Might & Magic 2 MGE mod I made with @Metro Polis is entering the final stages of development and we were forced to give the 7th Neutral faction the same city style as one of the others which was a real shame as the guys behind the awesome HoMM2 style Succession Wars mod for HoMM3 have kindly given me their custom graphics for their special addon 7th desert race and I'd love to use it for our 7th faction. When I eventually convert the mod to ToT I'll obviously be able to solve the problem there but it would be nice if I could also fix it for the MGE release too, so I figured it can't hurt to ask you about the possibility mate haha.

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

It looks like Microprose made it accessible in ToT via in a similar way to how the existing 5th slot is linked to Industrialization (Ind) and the 6th slot is linked to Electronics (E2). As when I look at the ToT Fantasy scenario I can see the underground Goblins used the 7th slot.
...
And when I look in rules I can see that tech is in the old X2 custom tech area so they must have linked it to that slot.. or they added a place somewhere that allows you to select the tech slot to link it to as I notice the industrial city slot is now moved and linked to X1 instead of E2 in this scenario too, but I can't see in rules how they relinked that. No doubt @Knighttime or @Prof. Garfield can probably educate me on the specifics of how to allocate city slots 4-7 to techs of your choice in ToT.

The default schematic is, 5th slot activates with 'Ind' (Industrialization), 6th slot with 'Aut' (Automobile) AND 'E2' (Electronics).

Base-game ToT unlocks the 7th slot with 'Inv' (Invention).

However, the Fantasy scenario uses unique hard-coded rules: as you've identified, the 5th slot unlocks with 'X1' (Extra Advance 1) and the 7th with 'X2' (Extra Advance 2); furthermore, the 6th unlocks with 'U2' (User Def Tech B). Consult this table for reference.

 

[duplj]

New version 1.19 (build 692).

Hello
with your patch in diplomacy near the amount of gold, this symbol is displayed

and I wanted to say about the borders of the city, there is a similar implementation in the Alien Crossfire 1999 game where the city borders are displayed with a red line (this option is selected in the settings) and they are not visible until you open the city, maybe you can see how it is implemented there

is it possible to translate the 'Turn' variable that you added or is it hardwired into a library or exe file?

 

[FoxAhead]

Hello
with your patch in diplomacy near the amount of gold, this symbol is displayed

View attachment 633840

and I wanted to say about the borders of the city, there is a similar implementation in the Alien Crossfire 1999 game where the city borders are displayed with a red line (this option is selected in the settings) and they are not visible until you open the city, maybe you can see how it is implemented there

is it possible to translate the 'Turn' variable that you added or is it hardwired into a library or exe file?

New version 1.19.1 (build 700).
No new features. Just some minor localization fixes:
1) Use localized words 'Turn' and 'Cities' from the LABELS.TXT file instead of hardcoded ones.
2) If somehow dialog @REPORTFOREIGN was corrupted and line '@listbox=7' is missing in the GAME.TXT file then don't try to display gold icons in resulting radiobuttons list.

Download
https://github.com/FoxAhead/Civ2-UI-Additions/releases/tag/v1.19.1

 

[FoxAhead]

I apologize if this has been asked before. Would this utility be able to address some of the AI issues in Civ2 MGE? (Such as being too aggressive)

New version 1.20 (build 707).
This time something special.
44. Finally fixed AI attitude calculation. Due to the uninitialized variable, every turn the attitude of the AI changed to the minimum, which made the AI very aggressive towards the player. This bug turned out to be so obvious that it was decided to completely remove the option to enable the fix. This bug is fixed by default without any options.
Unlike the previous version of the patch, which originated somewhere in the deep history of this forum, and which completely cut off the change in the attitude, now the calculation of the attitude should be performed as it was intended by the algorithm.

Download
https://github.com/FoxAhead/Civ2-UI-Additions/releases/tag/v1.20

 

[Thrillville109]

Hey, I tried running UIA on Windows 98 First Edition and it just crashes on launch, saying it "caused an exception eedfadeH in module <unknown>".

It also says after crashing "Exception EOIeException in module CIV2UIALAUNCHER.EXE at 0006FCD5. Class is not registered."

 

[FoxAhead]

Hey, I tried running UIA on Windows 98 First Edition and it just crashes on launch, saying it "caused an exception eedfadeH in module <unknown>".

It also says after crashing "Exception EOIeException in module CIV2UIALAUNCHER.EXE at 0006FCD5. Class is not registered."

Please, check this previous message. It seems some ActiveX library is missing in your OS.

This is something we've been looking for. Something that runs on Windows 98 SE, and is able to fix massive CPU-usage problem among other things as well.

One of our team members has tested this launcher on his Windows 98 SE -laptop.

Other fixes tested so far:

Tim's patch crashes.
civ2patch gives the following error message: "Failed to allocate memory for dll injection."
civ2mge_cpu_fix_1 gives the following error message: "File XDELTA3.EXE is linked to a missing export function KERNEL32.DLL GetFileSizeEx."

But this one looks promising. Unfortunately, version 1.4 is the last one that worked. All of the newer versions crash with the two following messages:

Civ2uialauncher

Program has executed an illegal function and it will be ended.

If the problem does not disappear, contact the manufacturer of this program.

CIV2UIALAUNCHER caused an interrupt eedfadeH at module <unknown> at memory location 0000:00000000.
Registrys:
EAX=00000000 CS=0000 EIP=00000000 EFLGS=00000000
EBX=00000000 SS=0000 ESP=00000000 EBP=00000000
ECX=00000000 DS=0000 ESI=00000000 FS=0000
EDX=00000000 ES=0000 EDI=00000000 GS=0000
Bytes at memory location CS:EIP:
Heap dump:

&

Exception EOleException in module CIV2UIALAUNCHER.EXE at 0006FCD5. Class is not registered.

The laptop used for testing has 98lite Professional without web integration and it has Windows 95 shell.

We'll be following the progress of this project!

It seems that your system doesn't have ActiveX installed. May be it was stripped by 98lite? ActiveX module is used in this project for shortcut creation feature (button "Create shortcut...").

 

[Thrillville109]

It seems that your system doesn't have ActiveX installed. May be it was stripped by 98lite? ActiveX module is used in this project for shortcut creation feature (button "Create shortcut...").

It's stock Windows 98 First Edition. How do I install the ActiveX components I need?

 

[FoxAhead]

It's stock Windows 98 First Edition. How do I install the ActiveX components I need?

Investigated in more detail the true cause and it seems to be MSXML. In Windows 98 First Edition, it is version 1.0 SP1 (4.72.3110.0). But Delphi 7 (on which CIV2UIA is built) uses at least version 2.0. And in Windows 98 Second Edition, just version 2.0b (5.0.2614.3500). Try to find how to update MSXML on Win98FE or consider switching to Win98SE (yes I'm writing this in 2022).

 

[Thrillville109]

Investigated in more detail the true cause and it seems to be MSXML. In Windows 98 First Edition, it is version 1.0 SP1 (4.72.3110.0). But Delphi 7 (on which CIV2UIA is built) uses at least version 2.0. And in Windows 98 Second Edition, just version 2.0b (5.0.2614.3500). Try to find how to update MSXML on Win98FE or consider switching to Win98SE (yes I'm writing this in 2022).

Replaced MSXML.DLL, still spits out the exact same error.

 

[FoxAhead]

Replaced MSXML.DLL, still spits out the exact same error.

You have to register it with the command "regsvr32 msxml.dll".

 

[Thrillville109]

You have to register it with the command "regsvr32 msxml.dll".

I just installed IE5 instead, so it all just works now.

 

[Thrillville109]

Is the game supposed to feel a little slower?

 

[FoxAhead]

Is the game supposed to feel a little slower?

What do you mean? Is it slower compared with unpatched one on the same machine? If units moving slow - then maybe settings "fast piece slide"? Or if the deal is the patch, then try to switch off for example CPU patch option.

 

[Thrillville109]

On a 333MHz Pentium II, everything takes just a little bit longer with the patch (besides generating a large map, which has an absurd wait time). The turn for the 6 other players takes about a second over the half a second it was unpatched, and units move just a little slower (which fast piece slide fixed, thanks!).

 

[FoxAhead]

On a 333MHz Pentium II, everything takes just a little bit longer with the patch (besides generating a large map, which has an absurd wait time). The turn for the 6 other players takes about a second over the half a second it was unpatched, and units move just a little slower (which fast piece slide fixed, thanks!).

On a 333MHz you definitely should turn off "Fix CPU usage" option.

 

[Thrillville109]

On a 333MHz you definitely should turn off "Fix CPU usage" option.
View attachment 634346

Okay, so I changed these settings during the game I was playing, it didn't fix it, even after closing the game and restarting it. However, once I started a new game, this did the trick and the game no longer seems sluggish. Thank you!

 

[Lord_Hill]

Well done @FoxAhead on finally solving one of the oldest civ 2 mysteries by finally figuring out the attitude bug completely! What a great tool, wouldn't dream of playing MGE without it

 

[Kaiser0985]

New version 1.20 (build 707).
This time something special.
44. Finally fixed AI attitude calculation. Due to the uninitialized variable, every turn the attitude of the AI changed to the minimum, which made the AI very aggressive towards the player. This bug turned out to be so obvious that it was decided to completely remove the option to enable the fix. This bug is fixed by default without any options.
Unlike the previous version of the patch, which originated somewhere in the deep history of this forum, and which completely cut off the change in the attitude, now the calculation of the attitude should be performed as it was intended by the algorithm.

Download
https://github.com/FoxAhead/Civ2-UI-Additions/releases/tag/v1.20

Can't believe it, It was the most annoying feature of the game and after 25 years you solved it? I am gonna try a new game, if it works I'll make you a bronze with your name