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

[FoxAhead]

New version 1.20.1 (build 723).
Hotfix:
Fix `Dont break move on ZOC` option causing AI to accidentally attack your units and break cease fire.

Download
https://github.com/FoxAhead/Civ2-UI-Additions/releases/tag/v1.20.1

 

[Blake00]

Just finally tried your latest version and wow mate.. so much good stuff.. I love all the advisor screen improvements with the icons and stretchable windows.. I love how you can shrink the sidebar but the minimap stays vertically big for larger maps (eg below is me playing that super earth map I found a while back). Love the tooltips on units and cities.. so friggin good.

I was a bit worried about whether the shrunken side bar would mess with custom interfaces like the one we use in the HoMM mod but I can see everything looks fine still! I was also curious to see if your tool tips box was taking it's background pattern from the usual place in the icons gif file but I'm guessing it's not as it stayed grey and didn't change, not that it really matters haha! It's picked up my building and resource icons from my custom icons file though which is good.

Btw I noticed you haven't updated your feature list within the mod itself as it's still the same list as the old version. You gotta add all your new and AMAZING stuff you listed here into there mate haha.

Any chance you'll be including your below city radius borders as an optional tickbox in the future? I know you wanted to make it better and not show hidden/undiscovered cities, however honestly what you got it to here is good enough for me and I'm sure it'll be more than enough for others too. Especially as when I think of some of those similar era early civ border games (eg SMAC, CTP1&2, FreeCiv, Civ3) I'm pretty sure 1 or 2 of them actually showed borders for hidden/undiscovered cities too so even the pros couldn't do any better sometimes haha!

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

 

[FoxAhead]

the tooltips on units and cities

Why are the resource numbers different on your screenshot: DANSVILLE 49/43/57 (F1) vs 40/21/51 (tooltip) ???

 

[Blake00]

Why are the resource numbers different on your screenshot: DANSVILLE 49/43/57 (F1) vs 40/21/51 (tooltip) ???

yeah thats weird.. I'll go have another look to see if I can reproduce it

 

[Blake00]

hmm nope.. now it's fine.. I wonder what the hell I did lol...

 

[darbyjack]

Just wanted to say thank you. I've been using this for years. At this point, it is an essential piece of software for anyone wanting to play Civ 2 today.

For some reason, my antivirus is blocking the download of the zip file (Avast). It's not even giving me a warning, the web browsers just give generic "Failed - network error" message.

Edit: also the exe was deleted a moment ago, I'm assuming Avast did that. Not had this issue before strangely enough. Something must be triggering a false positive.

 

[FoxAhead]

my antivirus is blocking the download of the zip file (Avast)

I will send this files for reanalysis as false positive to the Avast but that will take time. Also check your signature base is up to date. Also I'm not sure that next release I'l have to do this again as my program uses "suspicious" technique called dll-injection.

 

[granite00]

I love what this addition did for MGE. Is there anything like it for the older 2.42 version of Civ2?

 

[emaitch]

Hi
I've been an avid civ2 player for 20 years. I'm not a software developer so I don't really understand all the terminology or how the ecosystem of files interacts and work. I have just managed to keep my civ2 playable by following a few of the basic help. I have applied the patcher to allow it to work on windows 7 and 10/11. I could really do with some help. I'm trying to get the FOXahead Additions thing to work because I'm trying to get multiplayer to work and whilst it used to work on windows 7 my laptops no longer seem to find each other on windows 10. When I downloaded this UI addition it said the wrong size of file but I do have Multiplayer Gold 5.4.)f Multiplayer 26-March 99 Patch 3 (JB no limits version). Can I get the multiplayer working in any other way?

If anyone can help and teach me more of what I need to know I'd be grateful.

 

[FoxAhead]

I love what this addition did for MGE. Is there anything like it for the older 2.42 version of Civ2?

I have no plans to repeat all this work for 2.42. Why you're asking? What is there in the 2.42 that is not in the MGE?

 

[FoxAhead]

wrong size of file

(JB no limits version)

That is the reason. Please, use the original CIV2.EXE.

 

[granite00]

What is there in the 2.42 that is not in the MGE?

I used to play 2.42 in Windows 7. Once I moved to Windows 10, I began to play with MGE because it was easier to install. I found the AI was building far less cities in MGE vs. the number of cities the AI built in 2.42. In my experience, 2.42 seems more challenging.

 

[Milk_Duds_Woop]

Hello Friends, I had hope that you might be able to provide help with an issue I'm having. I installed the patch yesterday and everything seemed to work like a dream, However, When I attempted to play today I can't get the game to work. I am able to play with the original .exe but that's it. The game also crashes now for some reason. I tried to re-install the patch but my computer keeps striking the .dll file when I extract it. I also noticed a civ2_.exe application in my directory that wasn't there before. It refuses to open so I'm not sure what that's about. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Everyone stay safe and healthy wherever you are and "goodnight and joy be with you all"

EDIT
So after playing around a bit more I found out that every time I attempt to build a new city the game crashes. I backed all my files up just in case something like this was to happen. Don't know if this information is important but I thought I should through it out there.

 

[Blake00]

Hello Friends, I had hope that you might be able to provide help with an issue I'm having. I installed the patch yesterday and everything seemed to work like a dream, However, When I attempted to play today I can't get the game to work. I am able to play with the original .exe but that's it. The game also crashes now for some reason. I tried to re-install the patch but my computer keeps striking the .dll file when I extract it. I also noticed a civ2_.exe application in my directory that wasn't there before. It refuses to open so I'm not sure what that's about. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Everyone stay safe and healthy wherever you are and "goodnight and joy be with you all"

EDIT
So after playing around a bit more I found out that every time I attempt to build a new city the game crashes. I backed all my files up just in case something like this was to happen. Don't know if this information is important but I thought I should through it out there.

Welcome!

That crash only happens on 64bit systems when you go to the text entry screens (ie name your city and name your ruler) in default vanilla Civ2 without the patch correctly installed.. I remember we had another guy a page or so back who just stuck the Civ2UIA program in the game directly and didn't actually run it everytime to let it patch the game to apply it's fixes. Hopefully you didn't do the same?

If so I think @FoxAhead will need to change his original top thread post to say in giant red letters "EXE FILES DON'T RUN THEMSELVES PEOPLE, YOU NEED TO ACTUALLY RUN MY EXE FILE FOR IT TO WORK" if this keeps happening lol.

Although I can see you saying only the original exe works now, so that implies you were using Civ2UIALauncher.exe to start civ2 before that hopefully.

If so what happens when you run that exe.. need more info then "doesn't work". eg when you run Civ2UIALauncher.exe do you still get the launcher window with the play button? or is it not even getting that far?

If you do get the launcher window then is the 64bit patch ticked in options?

If you are running the right exe and the correct options are ticked then I don't know what the issue is sadly.. so if you can post a bit more about when and what happens after you hit the play button then hopefully FoxAhead to diagnose the issue for ya.
.

 

[FoxAhead]

I am able to play with the original .exe but that's it. The game also crashes now for some reason.

every time I attempt to build a new city the game crashes.

Yes, this is the one known bug on 64-bit systems. UIA fixes it. But the way UIA works, you need always run the game through UIA launcher, so it will fix the game in-memory without modifying civ2.exe file.

but my computer keeps striking the .dll file when I extract it.

Sadly, most anti-viruses are very angry with Civ2UIA.dll file. Maybe, because it was built with Delphi7, which is used most for building hacking/cracking software. So try to check your anti-virus rules.

 

[Blake00]

ahh yeah somehow I missed the DLL bit.. yup that'd be the problem lol. Hopefully there's options in your virus scanner to force allow it.

 

[Milk_Duds_Woop]

Thank you guys for the welcome and replies! I think You're right. The anti virus seems to really not like the .dll file. It keeps deleting the file completely from the computer. After sleeping on it I attempted to run re apply the patch and it worked again. So what I'm really confused about is why would it keep flagging it last night but now it's working? By this trend it will probably strike the .dll File again at some point. Also the game isn't crashing anymore when I build a city with the patch re-applied. I know this sounds stupid and probably doesn't make a lot of sense as I'm still trying to wrap my head around it. I guess this would be the part where I would ask if anyone knows how to force windows security to be ok with the .dll? Thank you all, cheers.

 

[Blake00]

Ah so you're using the built in Windows security virus scanner instead of a 3rd party one? That's interesting as I use the older version of that (Microsoft security essentials) and mine doesn't seem to care about the dll! I would have thought their virus definitions were the same but oh well.

As for allowing stuff usually when it detects something I get a window asking me about it where I can tell it to allow the file. However if that's not happening then if you open up your scanner then hopefully you have a history tab somewhere similar to what I see below and then hopefully you'll see the DLL in there and you can click on an allow button.

 

[Hans Lemurson]

Nostalgia just called me back to Civ2, and I was very pleased to see that your wonderful Civ2 UIA project has been given new updates.
The GOTO lines and the City Trade-Paths are especially welcome, since in the last game I had left off on I had been struggling to figure out where to put the roads between all my cities in order to get trade route bonuses.

The little city preview window you can get by pressing Ctrl is nice too!

The latest note about fixing the "Overly Aggressive Civs" bug got me pondering the difference between a "bug" and a "feature". Is it still the same game without pointlessly homicidal AIs? What obligations do we have to past history when fixing obvious errors?
That then lead me to think about one of the other major bugs that has plagued Civ2: Pathfinding. GOTO orders will not cross the "International date line", and I think there are some other strange behaviors which hurt the AI's abilities to wage war and settle properly. If the problems were well defined enough to be fixable, would this be going too far and somehow violating the spirit of the game's history?

But regardless, I'm really grateful for everything you have done Mr. FoxAhead. You've made Civ2 much more playable and enjoyable.

I do have a question though about the Soundtrack:
I have a Civ2 MGE Disc Image mounted to the D Drive, and can get the Movies to play, but the soundtrack will not. Choosing "Pick Music" gives a message that "This option is not available unless the Civilization II CD in the disc drive".
Is there something I can do to make that part of the program aware of where the CD is?

 

[Prof. Garfield]

The latest note about fixing the "Overly Aggressive Civs" bug got me pondering the difference between a "bug" and a "feature". Is it still the same game without pointlessly homicidal AIs? What obligations do we have to past history when fixing obvious errors?

The "classic"/2.42 version of the game had an AI that was not universally hostile unless the human player was supreme and it was after turn 200. The hostile AI basically means that a peaceful cooperation strategy is less effective and worthwhile. I suppose that that makes the game "harder", but its not like the AI stands a chance against a competent player anyway.