Cross-Platform Editor for Conquests now available! 1.51

[Quintillus]

Bluemofia is correct in the distinction. I am thinking of adding an option to also delete civ-owned units/cities/etc. when the player being deleted is assigned a civ, but at the moment that is in neither my editor nor Firaxis's.

I believe Player 1 would receive both in the scenario in post #820. I suppose you could, extending on Bluemofia's example, assign ownership by civ to the AIs in that arena-style system for simplicity's sake and to keep track of where each AI is located, and then assign the player areas by player (possibly allowing for multiplayer as well). So long as you restricted who the human played with the Human Player check box, it would work out. I'm having a hard time thinking of a scenario where you'd want the possibility of a player inheriting both Player 1's assets and Rome's, however, but that should be an option for a scenario that could make use of it.

 

[Bluemofia]

If you have multiple starting locations (that circle thingy) setup, what happens is it randomizes which one you actually end up landing on. You don't even need to have one setup for Rome, and one for Player 1, you can have a dozen different starting locations for Rome, and the actual Roman player will randomly be assigned one of the starting locations.

Anyhow, one reason where you want having Roman units be different from straight Player 1, is if you want Player 1, if they choose to be Rome, to have a significant early game start. Let's say Rome has a garbage tech tree, but they have a large army to start with to compensate. That way, you are giving them a very strong early game advantage, at the cost of their mid/late game.

I don't know for certain what happens if no one picks the Roman civ though, but I suspect that the units designated as Roman simply won't spawn.

 

[Blue Monkey]

In the Mughal Empire scenario by Rambuchan & Luddi the Malacca Pirates are set up as a minor non-playable civ designed to be a nuisance without a chance of conquering another civ as in the historical situation. By changing the settings and adding a few units I found they were fun to play. Set myself some "house rules" informal victory conditions such as picking a long-term ally to aid.

Making a variation where they are powerful enough to survive as an effective civ (even if difficult to achieve full victory) if played but the retaining the original version if AI is controlling them would be one example of what I was asking about. Of course - if I understand what has been posted by all of you - that would mean Player 1 would get those extra units regardless of what civ they played ...

 

[chickenx4]

Can you view the pcx like stephs editor

 

[Bluemofia]

That is correct, there isn't a way to only cause the units to spawn when Player 1 is the particular civ. A hack is just to duplicate the .biq, and simply create a special version for the Malacca Pirates as the human player. It makes maintaining and updating it more annoying and tedious, but that's what we have to work with.

 

[chickenx4]

Can you rename civilizations and view the pcx like in stephs editor,change the leaderhead also when it will begin saving ptw

 

[Quintillus]

You can re-name civilizations by right-clicking on them on the CIV tab and choosing Rename. You can also change the leaderhead file used for each civ, by era, also on the civ tab, although if you want to create your own leaderhead you'll need to use an external program for that (I believe Flicster might be the program for that, but I've never attempted to create my own leaderhead so that may not be correct). Some PCXs can be viewed in editor, with a heavy focus on those that show up on the map. Others that don't appear on the map, such as tech icons, city screen graphics, and advisor backgrounds, aren't shown in the editor (although tech icons would be a useful one to have since you can change the icon assigned to a tech; I'll add that to the list of things to improve in the future).

There's no timeline on saving to PTW, since it's a significant addition and the amount of time I spend on this project is highly variable based on what else I have going on at any time. If the key issue is having PTW but not Conquests, I'd be happy to send you a copy via Steam or GOG; there are a few of us here who will occasionally gift an active member a copy of Complete if they can't acquire it for whatever reason. If so, send me a private message with your e-mail and whether you prefer Steam or GOG, and I'll send you a copy within a week (depending on how soon I log on to CFC after you send the message).

 

[chickenx4]

I have one already it's gold

 

[Quintillus]

I believe Gold only has the Play the World expansion, but not the Conquests expansion. Both Complete and Conquests have a "Conquests" option from the main menu, but PTW and (I believe) Gold do not.

 

[chickenx4]

It's complete edition it have all the expansions

 

[Quintillus]

Version 1.09

Version 1.09 is now available! You can download it here. It is focused on the PLYR tab, and in particular its interactions with the map tab.

Changes:

• The player-owner dropdown on the map tab will now indicate which civ a player is assigned to, for quick reference. This will update if the player's assigned civ changes.
• Changing which civs are playable will no longer set all players' civs to "Any"; only a player whose civ is no longer playable will be set to "Any"
• Fix an old (but newly-discovered) bug where if a city's owner was a player whose civ was Any or Random, the map could stop rendering and display only a white screen
• If additional players are added on the PLYR tab, they are now added to the player-owner dropdown on the map tab without needing to restart

Happy civving!

 

[tom2050]

Awesome Quintillus.. I meant to write a reply on Monday, but I checked it out, and is really helpful. I am really glad you still make updates to this, it has become an amazing editor over the years

 

[Vuldacon]

Excellent Work Quintillus! I too am Happy that you still make updates to this Great Editor

 

[nick0515]

Hi Quintillus. I've managed to install Civ 3 on Linux in a Play on Linux/Wine in a virtual drive. If I want to use your editor would I be best to try and install normally for Linux or install it through Play on Linux like a Windows program or does it not matter?

I've never used your editor so unsure how it works with Civ 3 files etc.

 

[Quintillus]

Thanks for the replies! Been away for a little bit, but worked on the editor a bit tonight (tech icons), as well as a few days ago (list improvements). There will definitely be a 1.10 once I get those (and perhaps a few others) polished up!

Hi Quintillus. I've managed to install Civ 3 on Linux in a Play on Linux/Wine in a virtual drive. If I want to use your editor would I be best to try and install normally for Linux or install it through Play on Linux like a Windows program or does it not matter?

I've never used your editor so unsure how it works with Civ 3 files etc.

Good question! And I'm impressed that you got Civ3 working on Linux, especially if it's Conquests. I tried that once years ago; I think I may have got Vanilla installed but not Conquests, and I don't know if I had Vanilla playable. It may be worth posting the details in the Civ3 Linux thread, since the latest instructions in that thread are quite old and very possibly out of date by now.

The editor should work as expected on Linux, with either Civ3 installed via Wine, or the files copied over from a Windows installation (which is what I tested with on Linux). It assumes that the folder structure matches what it is on Windows, which I believe should true in both of those cases. There is a separate file-reader for Linux/Unix, but the only difference from the Windows ones is that it tries the file extension both lower-case and capitalized, since Civ3 is inconsistent in that at times and that matters on Linux/Unix, though it doesn't on Windows.

Let me know if it does indeed work as expected in that setup, since I haven't had exactly that setup for testing. If it does not, you likely can still edit the rules for now by going to Options --> Editor Settings, and unchecking "Map enabled", which actually disables all graphics and reads only the BIQ file; and we can discuss any errors encountered. But I believe it most likely will work as expected.

 

[Quintillus]

Quoting from another thread to avoid derailing that one too much.

It did, but it didn't pique my interest enough to want to mod it. So I never really learned.

Looks very promising. Thank you for looking into this again. When you get into 2000+ units it can be a real pain making changes to unit lines especially when they're in long upgrade chains. I was just hoping to be able to move unit entries around in the list in order to keep the upgrade chains tidy. But having filters like units available with a certain tech, or available to a certain civ, or by certain flags like Hidden Nationality, or requiring certain resources could be very beneficial, too, if possible.

Some very good ideas. Most likely the enhancements will be released in steps over several releases of the editor, as there are a lot of potential ways to filter and reorder the list (I'm thinking perhaps it would make sense to allow sorting, and then after sorting also having an option to apply that sort as the new order; this could also be enhanced by multiple levels of sorting, but this would of course take longer to implement).

The prototype so far allows filtering by name on the TECH tab (selected due to having a long list, and also not having the Unit Abilities below it blocking showing the list along the whole left side, although I'm thinking I should probably just move that to the right and make Telepads hidden by default; the UNIT tab has the least free space of any of them). Once I get that working as well as the old version (including things such as adding/deleting/renaming), I'll likely include it across all the tabs with lots of items (which is most likely the point at which 1.10 would be released), and after that start looking at per-tab improvements for 1.11 and later. I also want to spend a bit more time on the prototype to try to make sure it's generalizeable, and thus as easy to filter (on many attributes) as reasonably possible.

The 1.10 release may well only include filtering by name

I could see this becoming a theme of the 1.1 releases, slowing enhancing that area along with perhaps one or two others. It's been awhile since there was a strong theme (0.7 was maps, for example), but it's an area with a lot of possibilities and not much done yet.

 

[nick0515]

Thanks Quintillus, I'll let you know how I go with your editor on GNU/Linux. I posted a separate thread with my method of installing Civ 3 on GNU/Linux in the technical support forum. Will post a link to it in the main Linux thread too which I think is out of date. Certainly the method in the initial post is out of date because the software it mentions is no longer available last time I checked.

 

[chickenx4]

Can you tell me the difference between stephs and your editor

 

[Quintillus]

Can you tell me the difference between stephs and your editor

There are too many to describe them all, and by now I'm much more familiar with my editor, but some of the biggest ones are:

- This editor runs on Mac OS and Linux as well as on Windows
- Steph's editor has powerful tools for filtering buildings, techs, etc.
- This editor has support for editing the map; Steph's has a few map tools but does not allow general map editing
- Steph's editor has experimental support for scenarios with more than 4 eras
- This editor has experimental support for settings that Firaxis's and Steph's do not, such as negative-maintenance buildings
- Steph's editor has support for Civilopedia icon editing, and creating a sub-scenario from an existing set of rules

There are many other small differences, which may lead to various CFC members preferring one or the other, or preferring one for some tasks and the other for other tasks. For a long time my policy was:

1. Try to match any functionality Firaxis has but this editor does not, doing it as well or better than Firaxis's.
2. Implement new functionality that no editor currently provides, or that is cumbersome in existing editors.
3. Do not try to match advanced features of Steph's editor which are not present in Firaxis's, as we already have a solution for those.

I'm starting to move away from (3) slowly, an example being that I've started work on filtering capabilities, in large part due to requests for some of those features (though I don't plan to add all of them).

(2) is responsible for some of the niche, but advanced features of this editor, such as importing a map from a .bmp file (such as a satellite image of a region), or advanced civ color editing.

I'd encourage trying both and seeing which works better for your needs. For basic editing, either editor (or Firaxis's) will work just fine, but there are certain tasks that one or the other makes easier (and I should probably update the main Help page and make them more discoverable in general).

 

[chickenx4]

Is there a tech tree editor