Cross-Platform Civ3 Editor

Cross-Platform Editor for Conquests now available! 1.51

Is there anything I should know beforehand? WINE is giving a bit of trouble, as it usually does, but all the fonts are FUBAR.
 
Is there anything I should know beforehand? WINE is giving a bit of trouble, as it usually does, but all the fonts are FUBAR.

WINE shouldn't be necessary for the editor (although of course it will for Civ3 itself). The editor ought to run without any issues (or at worst, any serious ones) with Java on Linux.

For Civ3, I seem to recall being able to install Vanilla but having some issues with Conquests, as well as some general issues due to the copy protection on the CD. However, I never really pursued it that much since I was only playing around with it and still had Windows as a main OS. Others will be better able to help with getting Civ itself running. And it may have improved and/or changed since I tried it.

As for the fonts, the editor supports three fonts that are present on most Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms. Tahoma is the default, with Trebuchet MS and Arial being other fallbacks. If the default isn't working well, you can change it in Settings, or if it's really not working well, you can open the civ3editor.ini file which will appear in the same folder of the editor after it's run for the first time, and modify the fontChoice line. I'd recommend setting it to fontChoice=Arial, as I believe that's the most common of the three on Linux (although on systems with Tahoma and Trebuchet MS, they tend to look a bit better, and IIRC they might be more common on Macs).

I'd also be curious what it looks like and which distribution of Linux you're using if the fonts are really off. It looked okay on my main Linux VM, but that one is from 2009 and has KDE 3.5, so it's pretty out of date by now. I'll probably create a new, much more up-to-date one once the new Linux Mint comes out later this month, and do some testing on that.

Technically there is a fourth font choice in the editor, SimSun, but it's only there because Chinese BIQs needed a font with Chinese character support. If it's present on your system, it's a valid option for non-Chinese BIQs as well, but I don't expect it to be as common as the other three.
 
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.
Hmm... my english is not very good, but I would say that there is a lot of sarcasm in your post.

I did exactly what you have writen (as I have writen in my post before ;) ), saved the scenario with increased number of players from 12 to 24, closed the editor (to be sure) and reopened editor and scenario and the number of players was back to 12.

And I double checked, the file was not write protected.

If I have somehow offended you with my previous post, I apologize for that.
 
I wasn't offended - it really is not easy to figure out how to do that. I should have made it clearer how to increase the number of players, and will in the next update.

I was able to get the increase to not work once. It's working for me most of the time, though. I'll look into it and see if I can figure out why it occasionally does not work.
 
Conquests editor places a 999 shield limit on unit costs, so I tried your editor and was able to input higher costs. So far so good. Only issue now is that I am unable to open my old PTW scenario files.

"An unexpected exception occurred: java.lang.NulPointerException"
 
Conquests editor places a 999 shield limit on unit costs, so I tried your editor and was able to input higher costs. So far so good. Only issue now is that I am unable to open my old PTW scenario files.

"An unexpected exception occurred: java.lang.NulPointerException"

Do you mean opening the PTW files with the Conquests editor or with the PTW editor?

Increased costs would be helpful in slowing production of very high-tech items or things like battleships, aircraft carriers, and nuclear submarines.
 
Conquests editor places a 999 shield limit on unit costs, so I tried your editor and was able to input higher costs. So far so good. Only issue now is that I am unable to open my old PTW scenario files.

"An unexpected exception occurred: java.lang.NulPointerException"

This editor doesn't currently support PTW files. That's something that I've looked into a little bit, but haven't completed because there hasn't really been a demand for it. The recommended workaround is to save BIX files as BIQs using Firaxis's Conquests editor, which does open them, and then open them in this editor.

It probably wouldn't be to difficult to add support for opening PTW files, I'd just have to figure out exactly what is different in the file format. Adding support for saving them is a bit more tricky since it really requires two modes - Conquests Mode, and PTW Mode with the Conquests features disabled. All possible, just more likely to happen the higher demand is (since I probably wouldn't use those features myself).

But I'm glad it's working for getting around the unit-cost limit in Conquests!

Edit: I'm looking into PTW support a bit more. I'd gotten a bit farther than I'd remembered when I last looked at it in 2011, so that it supported opening BIX version 11.19 and later with no custom map (though not yet saving those as either BIX or BIQ). It was still tripping up on the World Map and Cities BIX in part because it's an older version of BIX (11.18). I've addressed that now, but there's still work to be done on graphics support with the older files, such as not expecting barricades. And there's work to be done on saving as either BIQ or BIX. Interestingly, I'm pretty sure my test case back in 2011 was the TETurkhan Test of Time (Just Mod).bix file.
 
Opened the PTW file with the Conquests Editor, and without doing anything I saved it. I was then able to open it with Quintilllus's editor.

Now, using the editor, I am going to attempt to make a realistic world map (largest possible) with a height to width ratio of 1:2 (height x1 and width x2).
 
Why PTW and not Conquests?

btw, I've always thought that Play the World is a far better-sounding name than Conquests, and, correspondingly, .bix than .biq, but there must be a gaming reason there, right?
 
Is it actually possible to play Play the World on Macs? I know there's a vanilla and Complete for Macs, but I can't recall having heard of a PTW release for Mac. But it's possible I missed it.

I like the sound of Civ 3 : Conquests better than Civ 3 : Play the World myself, but that's probably biased by my perception of Conquests being the superior expansion. Nevertheless, I do plan to at least make it so that you can open PTW files with the editor, rather than hopping through the Firaxis one to be able to open them. How far, if any, beyond that I go, is to be determined.
 
The Civ3 Complete DVD for Mac includes PtW as an "unsupported" additional installation.
 
What do they mean by 'unsupported'?
 
So, if you run seeminglyharmlessfile.vir and it turns out to be a virus it's not their fault. Right?
 
Unwarranted! I don't think Aspyr install viruses from their DVDs. Their PtW works fine for me.
 
My memory may very be faulty, but iirc the reason for the "unsupported" status had do do with the exigencies of the porting process. There were always (att) difficulties with the multiplayer functions across platforms having to do with problems outside the game engine itself. PTW also included fan developed scenarios on the disc. And there was a relatively short window between the Mac release of PTW & Conquests. Justifiable (maybe not good) reasons to no longer support an old version of the game even when including it in a "complete" set.
 
I have never had problems running Play the World on my Mac, and I enjoy the scenarios, especially the Test of Time.
 
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