Creating a new Improvement, has anyone done it?

[Mercury002]

I was messing about and thought that I would have a go at creating a new unit that can create an improvement. Easy enough I had already done this with another unit that I had created. So I took the example of the previous unit and modified, it worked so I added a new improvement altogether and although the unit still works and builds the other improvements and I can see the new improvement in civilopedia, I cannot build the new improvement. I created a similar mod a long time ago in Civ 5 but CivBE is different in this respect ... or I've forgotten something.

The idea was to create a unit that would full-fill Rayki's Dune mod thumper unit discussed in another forum. The unit should be similar to the explorer, but weaker, with less combat so that it could still attack a civilian unit but just about nothing else (ideally the unit would suicide after use but that's another issue for another day / thread).

The unit should be capable of deploying an improvement outside of the sponsor region that does not bring in any additional yield, but still costs maintenance (similar to roads). This unit however would build an alien nest ... I know what you are thinking, who wants more aliens. The idea is to put the unit near your enemy / target and build an alien nest right on their boarder, this way you could proxy attack someone without declaring war or any fear of reprisal ... just there is a risk that the aliens will come back and bite you in the a$$. Obviously there could be issues with building something that is under the control of another faction however for the moment I cannot build any new improvements (alien nest or otherwise), under my control or anyone else's.

So far the values needed for this, that I know of, are the;
Text and Unit XML's, with the <Unit_Builds> table including the new improvement.
Defines XML, god knows what this is but I included it with modified information to match the rest.
Builds XML, stating the build information of the improvement and the features that it can be built upon.
Improvement XML, with all of the improvement information, improvement yield info, tech yield info and importantly the valid terrains info.

Am I missing anything, I couldn't find any mods on steam that create a new improvements but rather they altered the stats on existing ones which is easy enough to do ... anyone have any suggestions or help? It would be most appreciated.

 

[Gorbles]

Does your database.log show anything?

That said, if your mod builds and activates ingame correctly, odds are there are no errors, it's more likely you've simply missed a XML tag or SQL statement somewhere. Could even be an LUA thing (certain interface dependencies are only handled through LUA, it looks like).

Was planning on looking at this next myself for my next major modification, so I'll report back here with how I get on.

 

[whoward69]

Just a heads-up. If Alien Nests reuse the Barbarian Camp code, it's bugged. Adding a Barbie Camp just adds the camp and doesn't add it into the internal structures that control the spawning of Barbs (ie Aliens)

 

[Mercury002]

Yeah I didn't think that it would add to the barbarians / aliens, I was thinking that I could add them as a whole new sponsor (that favours a whole lot of war) as this may avoid a possible glitch with the life form sensor spacecraft (reveals any alien nest on the map). If they were part of the same barbarian faction would a whole new nest just appear on the map? would it crash the game? best just avoid those whole questions.

At the moment the mod is set up just to build the structure that costs 2 maintenance and produces +1 production just as a proof of concept but it isn't working and I feel I've missed some whole XML or something obvious, would just like a list that says for units see these files, for buildings see this for improvements see this list of files etc just to make life easy and any errors noticeable. Well I'm not gonna give up on this but I cant do anything for a day or two

It has occurred to me that whoward69 sort of did this for Civ 5 with "XML data files for Standard Civilizations (inc DLC)"

 

[Mercury002]

I am thinking that I may spend a bit of time focusing on a couple of mods.
1) Building improvements, such ass a spawn beacon for a new AI player, ideally disguised as an alien nest etc.
2) building an improvement that can act as a bridge to cross the canyon terrain (after an unlucky random map that cut off an AI civ from the rest of the map, would hate for that to be me ).

 

[Mercury002]

Ha just tried the improvement that I made at the start and realised that I didn't include an icon image so It didn't show up within the build menu, but when I used the short cut key it worked! silly me