Cross-Platform Editor for Conquests now available! 1.51

[Quintillus]

There may be a delay of a day or two on version 0.73 because of an upgrade gone wrong on my computer which made all of my data (except backups on another disk) inaccessible. After a long investigation, I've determined that no data was lost, but I do not currently have my main OS in a booting state. Thus I may or may not be able to get everything ready in time to compile a new version for on the 4th.

 

[Lee_Dailey]

There may be a delay of a day or two on version 0.73 because of an upgrade gone wrong on my computer which made all of my data (except backups on another disk) inaccessible. After a long investigation, I've determined that no data was lost, but I do not currently have my main OS in a booting state. Thus I may or may not be able to get everything ready in time to compile a new version for on the 4th.

howdy Quintillus,

sorry to hear about the system troubles. good luck with the whole thing! i can wait a while. i don't have any raging need for an update _right_now_ ... [*grin*]

take care,
lee

 

[Quintillus]

After rendering my system unbootable and inaccessible, and then recovering access and bootability, I once again have access to everything I formerly did! Thus...

Version 0.73 is now available! Download it from the download page. The changes are heavily focused (but not exclusively) on the map tab.

Changes:

General/Functionality/Bugfixes

• The disappearing unit bug has been fixed. This was caused by giving new units invalid strategies, and was seen for non-offensive land units or air/sea units.
• Support is now present for BIQs that have both units with more than one strategy, and multiple units with the same name.
• With the above, multiple strategies are now handled correctly.
• You can now change the ownership of units without deleting them and readding them.
• Starting locations on the same tile as a city/colony now change ownership when the city/colony changes ownership.
• You can now switch units/cities/colonies/SLOCs from being owned by a Civ to being owned by a specific Player (or vice versa). Any of those other than cities can be owned by barbarians, as well.
• Fix to how I store tile ownership. Previously, scenarios with city ownership stored by Player (not Civilization) could appear to have the wrong owner for a city on the map tab.
• Fixed a bug where if you type in a new value for a city's culture or population, and then immediately click on a different tile, your new value is lost.
• You can now add units of any ownership (including player/barbarian ownership).

Efficiency

• Efficiency improvement in that when changing a city's cultural value with the sliders, new borders are only calculated on a power-of-10 change (ex. 99 to 100 culture). In the relatively uncommon event that an intermediate change affect borders, you will see this change when you select a different tile.
• Drastic improvement to the algorithm used to calculate tile ownership, used for example after a city's cultural value or ownership change. This calculation takes 99% to 99.9% less time now (depending on map size). There should no longer be a lag when a new tile is selected on a gigantic map.

User Interface

• Fix for a UI issue where the "Add units" panel could sometimes cause the panel on the right side of the map tab to go off the edge of the screen. This was noticeable mostly with scenarios that had units with long names. This also allowed me to make the box for the type of unit present on a tile slightly larger.
• Added a show/hide feature for the panel on the right side of the map tab. Click the ">" button on that panel to hide it, and you'll be able to bring back with a "<" button that then appears. In exchange, you can see more of the map.
• The extra black border to the right of the tile view on the panel on the right side of the map tab is no longer there.
• The only options when asked to confirm city deletion are now "Yes" and "No" (no more "Cancel").

 

[Quintillus]

Version 0.74 is now available! It introduces two new features (including adding cities!), as well as improving speed and fixing a couple bugs. Changes:

• You can now add new cities to the map. Click on the house icon, and then click somewhere on the map to add a city. You'll be prompted for a name for the city, and it will then be created and selected. Click on the hand icon to go back to select mode, or click somewhere else on the map to add another city.
• You can now drag the mouse across the map to change the terrain, without clicking every individual tile. Just click once, drag, and all tiles you drag over will be changed, unless changing the tile in question to the requested terrain is not possible (i.e. you can't put Ocean in the middle of a bunch of Plains with no Coast).
• The border-calculation feature has been tweaked as I discovered my formula did not match Firaxis's at the highest cultural levels - such as cities with 10,000 culture.
• Cities now lose their culture properly when you decrease their culture. This sometimes did not happen properly in the editor (though it would work fine in-game).
• Cities also now lose their culture properly when they are deleted (this also was purely a cosmetic in-editor problem).
• It now takes less time to reassign a city to a different owner. Culture-recalculation is now faster than in Firaxis's editor across the board.

I've left the version at 0.74 instead of 0.80 as there is still work to be done on the map (including adding a few features). For that reason I've also left the map disabled by default. 0.80 will come when the map is feature-complete, and also working as intended across-the-board, to the best of my knowledge.

Download link is here.

Any comments on 0.73, by the way? The download count crossed 500 since I posted it, so I know someone's downloaded it.

 

[tupaclives]

WOO HOO!!!!

I've been waiting for the 'add cities' ability'! Very excited

As for 0.73, it worked very well the only bug I encountered was that the game will crash if I attempt to load a scenario where I have changed the list of city names for a Civ.

EDIT: Bug detected, the house icon doesn't actually appear for me, it does still work it just doesn't actually show up the icon.

 

[Quintillus]

WOO HOO!!!!

I've been waiting for the 'add cities' ability'! Very excited

As for 0.73, it worked very well the only bug I encountered was that the game will crash if I attempt to load a scenario where I have changed the list of city names for a Civ.

EDIT: Bug detected, the house icon doesn't actually appear for me, it does still work it just doesn't actually show up the icon.

Thanks for the response! I knew you'd been wanting the ability to add cities, and it seemed like it was time to add it.

I've figured out what caused both of those bugs, and will have a new version with those bugs fixed, as well as a couple new features, available momentarily.

edit: The Internet is hammered, it may take a few minutes for this to upload.

 

[Quintillus]

Version 0.75 fixes a couple bugs, and adds a couple features:

• The bug where the city icon does not appear is fixed.
• The bug where adding or removing city names or (military/scientific) leader names to a civ will cause the game to not load is fixed.
• Shortcuts for the Select, Terrain, and City icons have been added to the map tab. While you do not have a text box or drop-down box selected, press S, T, or C (respectively, for Select, Terrain, and City) to enter that mode. Then proceed as if you had pressed the button. This allows you to do more with the panel on the right side of the map tab hidden.
• You can now resize or maximize the editor. This is useful on the map tab, as it will allow you to see more of the map at once if you have a large screen. On the other tabs it doesn't presently do a whole lot.

You will find that the buttons show up in the middle of the screen when you open the editor now. They'll move up to the top once you open a file. You also no longer see the underlines for O in Open and S in Save. The shortcuts for them (Ctrl+O and Ctrl+S, respectively) still work, however.

I likely will make the shortcuts on the map tab configurable, so you can choose whether you prefer just "T", "Ctrl+T", "Command+T", or perhaps "Alt+T" to trigger the shortcuts.

Download the latest version here.

 

[tupaclives]

Looking good!

One question though, how would I go about increasing the number of players on a map?

For example, say I have my custom ruleset and I would like to import the Rhye's 134x130 map (set up for 16 players) but I would like to play 31 players on it, how would I go about it?

EDIT: I've tried changing the settings in the 'WSIZ' tab and also set the number of players in the PLYRS tab to 31 but no dice.

 

[oconnell10]

Hey just a quick question. I made a pretty good mod with helicopters new ships ground units at least two dozen new units that a love playing with but when AI gets to mid/late industrial age they take forever to do their turns one turn I let run all night and it still didn't finish. Any idea how i can increase performance/get AI to run faster? And before you ask no the new units cant be made any faster then equal units. All the new units and balanced perfectly. but one turn AI is fine then the next its a 5 hour turn. Any ideas?

 

[bluebox]

While this doubtless will allow many new ways to create invalid BIQs, it should also break down many of these long-unchallenged barriers.

Thanks for the !!

I'll try the Editor on Ubuntu now. I'm using Ubuntu daily and only use XP that was shipped with my not-so-new notebook for gaming. I might be coming back later.

 

[bluebox]

Runs smoothly and quickly on ubuntu. However, I saw some quirks regarding character encoding.

Do you have made the source code available, too?

 

[7ronin]

Does the editor permit adding civilizations above the 31 limit?

 

[Takhisis]

I'm not sure the game could handle it.

 

[Lee_Dailey]

Does the editor permit adding civilizations above the 31 limit?

howdy 7ronin,

as i recall, steph [of steph's c3c editor] said he had enabled that once and then removed it cuz the game engine would insta-crash. [*grin*]

take care,
lee

 

[AlanH]

As far as I reccall, the game software has a lot of hard coded arrays that are set to 31 civs. If you try to assign Civ #32 (starting at zero for the barbarians) then you exceed these array sizes and all hell is let loose. Unlike Civ4, Civ3 doesn't have a separate DLL where you can adjust these coded game rules. They are built into the basic game code.

 

[Quintillus]

Hi, I'm still alive!

Version 0.76 is now here. Changes:

• You can now increase the number of players.
• Fixed a bug where you couldn't reliably add new, different types of starting units to players (or remove types of starting units that they already had).
• Added some tooltips to the building tab with additional explanation of what items do. I hope to expand this across the program gradually.
• The buttons now properly appear at the top of the screen like they should.
• Very modest start time decrease that probably isn't noticeable.

To increase the number of players, go to the PLYR tab, and in the # of Players box, type in a number greater than the current number (you can't decrease the number of players at this point). Then hit Enter, and you'll have your new players. Don't forget to give them a city or some settlers or something, or you won't see them in-game.

If you would like to try to have 32 or more players, set the Safety Leve for PLYR to Minimal or None, and feel free to try having more than 32 players. All I can say for sure is that you can have more than 30 rival player slots at the game setup screen. My understanding of this limit has always been similar to AlanH's, but here's the rope if you want to try to go beyond it!

bluebox, glad to here it mostly works on Ubuntu. I've run it occasionally in my Linux VM but mostly on Windows as that's where I develop it. I haven't decided about whether to release some or all of the code as open source. What quirks in particular did you notice? I've trimmed the whitespace slightly unusually on purpose, so for example you can see on the GOVT tab that Marauder and Firebrand were originally going to be titles for Anarchy (in a standard BIQ), but were eliminated by replacing the first character with a null.

 

[Lee_Dailey]

howdy Quintillus,

thanks! [*grin*] i'll be playing with it some over the next week.

have you noticed that your editor sometimes disables scientific leaders like the standard editor does? i haven't pinned it down but i suspect it's anything in the scenario section that triggers it. i have had to use steph's editor to re-enable scientific leaders.

take care,
lee

 

[Takhisis]

Increased number of players? Are you sure? I think the game'll crash.

 

[W.i.n.t.e.r]

hmm.. would that not be sth. worth a try?

What would interest me in particular are Multiplayer games with more than the current player cap (i.e. the option of having up to 30 enemy civs, i.e. not necessarily adding more numbers of active players, but rather adding AI opponents and thus getting to a max of 31 civs for a multi-game).

ps. nice to see you are still alive and kicking, Quintillus. Hope all is well?

 

[Takhisis]

Of course it'd be worth a try, since modern computers could easily cope with several extra nonplayable factions in each game instead of, for example, having to lump a lot of different entities under 'Magna Græcia' in RFRE.