Cross-Platform Editor for Conquests now available! 1.51

[Takhisis]

Oppan landline style!

It should work in Linux either way (and I do occasionally test in Linux). I left Linux out of the above post because the actual minimum requirement is usually harder to find - for example, I can find which versions of Java common distros support, but actually figuring out what the requirements are across distros is more difficult (as far as I can tell, the editor should currently run on Linux 2.6 or later). And also because for the most part, people who are running Linux are running a relatively recent distro, and thus have the ability to run recent versions of Java.

Well, once I settle down on my new distribution I'll be sure to tell you.

 

[Lee_Dailey]

howdy Quintillus,

i'm using win7x32, sp1. i won't likely change anytime soon. [*grin*]

take care,
lee

 

[Quintillus]

Version 0.89 is now available! Download from the usual place.

This is primarily a feature release, with several new features, and one bug fix. Highlights of this version are:

• Relocate city functionality. Now, on the map tab, there are two new buttons available when you have a city selected - "Relocate city" and "Relocate City with units". These allow you to do what you'd expect - just click somewhere on the map, and your city will be relocated.
• Auto-archive functionality. When enabled (the default, at least for now), when you save a BIQ, a copy of the previous version will be saved with the word "archive" and the date and time in its name. That way, if you realize you messed something up and still have the archive file, you can go back and more easily undo the mistake.
• Support for Chinese BIQ files, making Chinese the third language-specific version of BIQ supported (after English and Russian). See below for more information (and screenshots!) on this.
• Added support for modifying Worker Strength. This is one of the last commonly-used features from the Firaxis editor to be missing (and wasn't that difficult to implement). As a bonus, odd choices for the worker strength value shouldn't be so difficult to keep from changing as it is in the Firaxis editor.
• Fix for Elite Ship and Requires Victorious Army being confused.
• Slightly more lenient graphics support, including 1-bit PCX support and at least some very-large-ruin-graphics support. These were both encountered for the first time (at least for me) with one of the Chinese BIQs I was testing with.
• Tentative steps towards making the interface scale with screen size. These are very much not complete, but the changes are in the BLDG tab, most notably that the building list will take as much vertical space as you give it now.

A few additional notes on new features:

Auto-archive, described above, is intended to supplement autosave in making it easier to recover from mistakes, even if you didn't realize you made a mistake at the time. Autosave saves at a set interval and will delete old autosaves; auto-archive creates a backup when you save and will not automatically delete old backups (you can of course delete them yourself). The intended workflow is that you realize something isn't working, but were pretty sure it was at some point in the past. You can load up the old archive to compare, and you can even use the BIQ Compare section of the editor to get a comparison of exactly what has changed in a semi-readable format.

I'm not sure if most people will actually want auto-archive or not; it's configurable in the settings. I have enabled it by default for now, mainly because it's a fact of life in software that most settings that are off by default never get used by most users, no matter how useful they are. I figure there's a good enough chance that it will be useful to enough people to leave it on at least in 0.89. You can, however, turn it off in the Settings area.

Chinese BIQ support is the other big feature that doesn't completely explain itself. You'll first have to change the BIQ language in the Settings area and restart (this will also change the font, to one that supports Chinese characters), and then you can load Chinese BIQs.

Screenshot:

Note that the editor interface itself will remain in English, and allowing the editor interface to be in different languages would be a major project, and one that I've been putting off until interest is demonstrated (it may be a chicken-and-egg problem). However, any Chinese in the BIQ (such as unit and city names) will be displayed. I believe it's being displayed properly, but I don't read any Chinese myself, so I could be wrong. Taking some predictable strings and searching for them in the Chinese Wikipedia showed that it's at least right some of the time. If you read Chinese and can confirm or deny that the Chinese is being displayed correctly, that would be great. There were at least 3 different character encodings to choose from, and while I think I chose the correct one, I could be wrong.

Also note that just because you can load a Chinese BIQ in the editor, does not necessarily mean that you can load it in-game. The big hazard is if the Chinese BIQ depends on Chinese characters in folder or file names. While the editor won't crash because of this, when set to the correct language, non-Chinese copies of Civ3 are likely to choke on that. Not every Chinese BIQ will necessarily have that, but the ones I tested with did, and my copy of Civ3 (currently in Russian) was not able to load the BIQs. I'm still working on the problem of figuring out how to make Civ3 be able to switch between languages.

And a screenshot of the map. This is featuring xiaoxiaoa's Shingeki no Kyojin mod, with his original screenshots available via this link (note that some of the units look different, since his screenshots are in-game and mine use the units_32.pcx versions).

 

[Quintillus]

Version 0.89 announcement immediately above

Well, once I settle down on my new distribution I'll be sure to tell you.

I'd be curious what you go with and how it works. As the screenshots above make evident enough, I too am still using XP. So I may well be switching to Linux this year, too. Right now I'm leaning towards Linux Mint, but that's subject to change. Of course, I'll be keeping Windows around for games, including Civ III.

Side question: As the maintainer of the Civ3 Front-Page Updates, do you reckon I should submit editor updates to that thread? I traditionally haven't, as I don't recall seeing many if any utility releases/updates in that thread. But, by the time I joined CFC, there weren't that many new utilities coming out as it was, so perhaps utilities weren't so unusual in those updates when CivIII was newer.

Totally unrelated: When updating the download link, I noticed that the number of downloads is now over 11,500. I thought it was somewhere between 1000 and 1500 last time I updated. Not that it's a bad thing if there's suddenly a huge surge of interest. But it seems kind of unlikely that total downloads increased nearly tenfold in a few months. So if someone reading this thread is downloading the editor 100 times per day, I appreciate the effort to increase the download count, but I'd recommend saving Thunderfall's bandwidth instead!

 

[Blue Monkey]

Auto-archive, described above, is intended to supplement autosave in making it easier to recover from mistakes, even if you didn't realize you made a mistake at the time. Autosave saves at a set interval and will delete old autosaves; auto-archive creates a backup when you save and will not automatically delete old backups (you can of course delete them yourself).

I take this to mean that autoarchive does not overwrite its own backups. What naming scheme does it use?

Side question: As the maintainer of the Civ3 Front-Page Updates, do you reckon I should submit editor updates to that thread? I traditionally haven't, as I don't recall seeing many if any utility releases/updates in that thread. But, by the time I joined CFC, there weren't that many new utilities coming out as it was, so perhaps utilities weren't so unusual in those updates when CivIII was newer.

During my tenure utilities were submitted. Steph was still actively working on his editor during part of that time. He definitely posted versions with new features for announcements (but not the ones that were minor bug fixes).

 

[Civinator]

Hi Quintillus, one of these many downloaders was me. The new handling of worker jobs is a big step forward. Thank you very much for all your work and cleverness!

One of the last options missing is to allow scientific leaders appearing in game again, as it was possible with the C3C-editor 1.00 and was reintroduced in Steph´s Editor, too.

 

[Quintillus]

I take this to mean that autoarchive does not overwrite its own backups. What naming scheme does it use?

During my tenure utilities were submitted. Steph was still actively working on his editor during part of that time. He definitely posted versions with new features for announcements (but not the ones that were minor bug fixes).

It's correct that the auto-archive doesn't overwrite its own backups (unless you save multiple times per minute). The format is best explained by an example. Supposed I'm working on WWII Europe.biq. I'm in London, and make a save right now. The old version would be saved as:

WWII Europe_Archive_2014_02_14 2232.biq

I'll probably go ahead and add to the submission list then, since there are new features in this release. Yes when there are new features and no otherwise seems like a sensible way to do it.

Hi Quintillus, one of these many downloaders was me. The new handling of worker jobs is a big step forward. Thank you very much for all your work and cleverness!

One of the last options missing is to allow scientific leaders appearing in game again, as it was possible with the C3C-editor 1.00 and was reintroduced in Steph´s Editor, too.

You're welcome with regards to the worker strength. It didn't end up being that difficult, leading me to think that I could've done it years ago. But I remember it seeming to be more difficult back in 2010, so perhaps it's the experience that made it easier now.

I think the editor already supports scientific leaders - there is an option for it under "Game Rules" on the PROP tab (the very last option). I haven't tested it in a long time, however. I do recall its support in Steph's editor, as IIRC I did some research to figure out how to enable that in Steph's editor back then.

The other missing features are mostly smaller ones, such as fog of war and giving particular units particular names. The biggest one that comes to mind off the top of my head is allowing painting larger blocks of terrain at once.

 

[Civinator]

[*]Slightly more lenient graphics support, including 1-bit PCX support and at least some very-large-ruin-graphics support. These were both encountered for the first time (at least for me) with one of the Chinese BIQs I was testing with.

Quintillus, in SOE I also experimented with enlarged ruin graphics covering a landbridge between France and Britain looking like sea.

My question: Up to what size graphics are supported with this ´feature?
The thought behind this question is: Can I use this feature for a map of the earth in dimensions up to 362 x 362, or with other words can I use such a graphic to replace all visible terrain graphics by setting them to transparency and than having the image of the earth for the gameplay of civ 3?

 

[Quintillus]

Quintillus, in SOE I also experimented with enlarged ruin graphics covering a landbridge between France and Britain looking like sea.

My question: Up to what size graphics are supported with this ´feature?
The thought behind this question is: Can I use this feature for a map of the earth in dimensions up to 362 x 362, or with other words can I use such a graphic to replace all visible terrain graphics by setting them to transparency and than having the image of the earth for the gameplay of civ 3?

Right now the practical limit is that the tile with the ruin graphics needs to be visible somewhere on the screen in order for the ruin graphics to show. If it's off the edge of the screen by more than a couple dozen pixels, the ruin graphics won't show up. This is because, at the current time, I test to see whether the tile is visible first, before drawing anything. So, unless you have a really big monitor setup, this wouldn't work in the editor for a 362x362 size map. The Age of Titans map that I've been testing with is 30x45, and it works pretty well up to about that size on my 1920x1200 monitor, with the ruins pretty close to the center.

I could look into expanding it so the ruin graphics would always be visible, although considerations would include whether graphics that large are supported by Civ3 (or if it would experience a similar issue if the tile containing the graphics was off-screen), if there would be issues if there were two or more large graphics (probably okay if they don't overlap), and that changes might be a bit more difficult than what has been done so far since the drawing method is targeted towards only drawing things on tiles that are visible on the screen, for efficiency reasons. I don't think this would ruin efficiency, but it likely would require another special case, and a more complex one than the current large ruin graphics.

But if Civ3 does indeed support it well, it may well be worth adding support. It would be pretty cool to use the BMP importer or Bitmap2BIC to get a map of the earth and have an actual satellite image as what you see in-game.

 

[Civinator]

Quintillus, thank you very much for your answer. May be the problem with the visibility of the ruin graphics on a fixed map can be fixed by giving the map the "Show entire-map-setting" and/or a setting for an exception of the "Fog of War" for the tile where the ruin is placed on the map. The ruin should be placed on a water tile, so no settler or worker can chance here something. As far as I rememeber from some tests long ago, ships do no harm to ruins in water.

I agree, the real question is, if C3C supports such big graphics.
Nevertheless this is an interesting option.

 

[Quintillus]

I think an exception for the tile would probably be the best approach. I already have an exception for larger-than-usual ruin graphics, so it would be a tweak or expansion on that, but with some additional supporting code since I might have to limit the editor to just drawing part of the graphics for technical or practical reasons. Way back when, the editor did show the entire map every time it refreshed the picture, but that was not practical for performance reasons (it's all CPU-powered graphics, without GPU help), and even with some general improvements since then I don't think going back to showing everything at once would work well.

This does remind me that the zoom option, when used with less than 100% zoom, will allow more tiles to be visible, and thus have more of the map drawn at once (and correspondingly, it will refresh more slowly). So, if you set the zoom sufficiently far out, this may work even today, if not at 362x362, at least at higher resolutions than at 100% zoom.

It's also worth noting that the editor also supports maps with more than 362 tiles in one dimension, as long as there are fewer than 65,536 tiles total, and C3C seems to support this as well (although since I don't think anyone has made a fully-featured map that larger, there hasn't been much testing of AI with those sizes). Firaxis just limited the maps to the highest integer that was less than the square root of 65,536, but 400x250, for example, should work just fine. If I ever do make an Earth map, I plan to take advantage of this to make a wider-than-usual map.

 

[Lord Malbeth]

Does this editor allow one to rename units once they've been placed on the map, like the original Civ3 editor? I can't seem to figure that out.

 

[Quintillus]

Does this editor allow one to rename units once they've been placed on the map, like the original Civ3 editor? I can't seem to figure that out.

It doesn't allow that currently. That's something I plan to add before 1.00, but it has been a low priority so far - you're actually the first person in the thread or via PM to ask about it. I don't think it would be particularly difficult to add, though, so if it's a feature you'd find useful, I could do it sooner rather than later.

 

[Lord Malbeth]

It doesn't allow that currently. That's something I plan to add before 1.00, but it has been a low priority so far - you're actually the first person in the thread or via PM to ask about it. I don't think it would be particularly difficult to add, though, so if it's a feature you'd find useful, I could do it sooner rather than later.

If you could, that would be awesome (but not rush). BTW, props for making this! I haven't played Civ III in awhile because I switched over to a Mac and couldn't find a Mac-verison of the software. Long story short, I finally did, and this editor has been really, really awesome and useful!

 

[Quintillus]

If you could, that would be awesome (but not rush). BTW, props for making this! I haven't played Civ III in awhile because I switched over to a Mac and couldn't find a Mac-verison of the software. Long story short, I finally did, and this editor has been really, really awesome and useful!

I'm glad to hear that! Especially that the cross-platform nature of the editor is proving helpful - although there are some Mac users here, I know some of them also use Windows for Civ3. And sorry for the slow response; I haven't been on CFC for 7 or 8 days (and it still has the Merry Christmas theme... it might be time to change that for this year).

 

[Lord Malbeth]

I'm glad to hear that! Especially that the cross-platform nature of the editor is proving helpful - although there are some Mac users here, I know some of them also use Windows for Civ3. And sorry for the slow response; I haven't been on CFC for 7 or 8 days (and it still has the Merry Christmas theme... it might be time to change that for this year).

I used to do my modding exclusively on my Windows computer, but I've only had intermittent access to it for several years now, so the discovery of this editor (and a site that allowed me to DL a Mac-version of Civ 3) has been awesome.

And no worries about the delay. At least, I'm in no rush.

 

[timerover51]

Does this editor allow one to rename units once they've been placed on the map, like the original Civ3 editor? I can't seem to figure that out.

I would find that helpful as well, Quintillus, as I use that as a way of distinguishing ships for loading land units on.

Secondly, I have finally got down pat the Import Map function, and what works and what does not. Thank you for that.

 

[Kirejara]

Hi Quintillus,

maybe I do something wrong, but your lovely editor does not allow me to change the number of players in a scenario.

Regardless what value I enter the number of players in game and firaxis editor did not change.

However after I used the firaxis editor, your editor shows the correct number of players.

Thanks!

 

[Takhisis]

Bing! Linux-testing should start soon-ish.

 

[Quintillus]

Hi Quintillus,

maybe I do something wrong, but your lovely editor does not allow me to change the number of players in a scenario.

Regardless what value I enter the number of players in game and firaxis editor did not change.

However after I used the firaxis editor, your editor shows the correct number of players.

Thanks!

There actually is a way to increase the number of players in the scenario, but it's totally non-obvious. If you change the number and press Enter, it will add players (or inform you that decreasing the number of players is not yet supported). But it's so non-obvious that I initially thought there was not a way, and had to look up how to do it in the code. So, the next version will have an "Update" button that makes it clear how to update the number of players.

Bing! Linux-testing should start soon-ish.

Cool.