CivWin Editing

I distinctly recall using some program I downloaded to play Civ I as the Barbarians long, long ago. I wonder if that would have allowed you to switch Civs?

 

Do you, by any chance, remember its name? It was for CivWin, right?

 

I think it was actually for the MSDOS version, but it was so long ago I can barely remember. I cannot remember the name.

 

You need to use any hex editor to switch civs or change money etc... it just seems instructions are not easy to find.

 

SUCCESS!!!

I didn't think the hex editing approach would work since, as mentioned before, SAV files are compressed somehow. Fortunately, the compression appears to be some form of RLE, and the byte with the human player's civilization is in the beginning of the file.

The byte is at position #5 and may contain the same values listed in the Switch Sides section of the cheats page.

CivCracker does show the current value for the human player civilization, but it cannot be changed. I wonder why...

As for changing your money, it's easy using memory editors such as ArtMoney.

 

I see that this is a really old thread, but here goes: When I run CivCracker (on Windows XP) and try to open a file created with CivNet, I get the message "Index was outside the bounds of the array."

Has anyone seen this message before, and have a solution for it? I thought I had it working a while back, but that may have been just the part that converts from CivDOS to CivWin.

 

I don't think CivCracker supports CivNet saves at all as they use a different format to Civilization for Windows (and DOS for that matter).

You can go the other way though, if you open a CivWin map using the official CivNet map editor included with the game, you can use that map in CivNet.

 

Good point. I've been browsing some CivNet files and the format is very similar to the DOS format, after you unpack it from the RLE encoding.

If I could get the source to one of the map editors (like CivCracker) maybe I could modify it to work on CivNet files, too.

Can someone point me to any documentation on the DOS .MAP file format?

 

User @darkpanda (the creator of the excellent JCivEd) has done the most complete work on that (building on the contribution of many others of course). There's no nice wiki page sadly, but picking your way through the various threads, and source code of JCivEd should hopefully give you what you're looking for

MAP, PIC and PAL formats figured out ! (almost) | CivFanatics Forums
JCivED - a toolbox for Civilization | Page 16 | CivFanatics Forums

For CivWin, as you know CivCracker is closed source. I believe the only documentation anywhere is by the guy who made the DOS titleset mod, if you have a look at the 'CivWin File Format Demonstrator source' attachment, there's some code that handles the save compression format.
DOS tileset for CivWin | CivFanatics Forums

 

Just to mention that JCivED now supports CivWin .SAV files !