Cross-Platform Editor for Conquests now available! 1.48

[Oni Ryuu]

Congratulations for getting another section done.

We’re likely to get some fun surprises with players like the Plains Indians, suddenly changing into the fledgling USA.

 

[BTB]

Is there documentation anywhere for all of the features that this editor allows for that the vanilla one does not? I see some mention of the "Rules" tab, but I don't know exactly what all it can allow for.

 

[Varlin Saliptor]

Holy crap Civ III modding has come a long way since I left.

 

[Nathiri]

Holy crap Civ III modding has come a long way since I left.

Just wait till actual scripting appears by or before 2020!

 

[Quintillus]

Is there documentation anywhere for all of the features that this editor allows for that the vanilla one does not? I see some mention of the "Rules" tab, but I don't know exactly what all it can allow for.

I should probably put together a page/post on that, since it's scattered between several places including a few highlights mentioned in the first post, parts of the incomplete Help system available by pressing F1 in the editor, many of the tips-and-tricks that show up when you start the editor (one of my goals for those was to highlight the areas where the editor offers new functionality), and probably a few small ones that are only in changelogs/this thread.

As an overview that I can put together tonight, I've extracted all of the tips and tricks into an HTML file that you can view here. This is a mix of in-game possibilities that are new (such as landmark terrain for any base terrain, deepwater harbours, and not enforcing Firaxis editor limits when not necessary), and improvements to the editing process that make life easier, but don't necessarily add new features in-game (such as being able to filter units and thus easily find them among large lists of units, and being able to import a map from a BMP file of a satellite image).

The RULE tab itself is this editor's equivalent to the General Settings tab in Firaxis's editor, and that tab functions pretty much the same way as the Firaxis one does. But being able to replace those General Settings in-game is new.

Holy crap Civ III modding has come a long way since I left.

Welcome back! Civ3 modders keep coming up with new ideas; faster than I can add tools to the editor to speed up the modding. But I suppose the incremental-improvements over the years process has worked out fairly well.

Just wait till actual scripting appears by or before 2020!

That makes two of us who were thinking of Civ3 scripting earlier this week! And though you may be half-joking, it is the logical extension of the SAV-section-swapping functionality added recently. I can't make any promises about updating without reloading a SAV, though that was what I was thinking about the other night, but if you allow for reloading the SAV, at least basic scripting support is certainly within the realm of possibility in that timeline.

 

[Nathiri]

That makes two of us who were thinking of Civ3 scripting earlier this week! And though you may be half-joking, it is the logical extension of the SAV-section-swapping functionality added recently. I can't make any promises about updating without reloading a SAV, though that was what I was thinking about the other night, but if you allow for reloading the SAV, at least basic scripting support is certainly within the realm of possibility in that timeline.

Yeah either that or someone finishing their work with the exe. Maybe Antal figures something out? I thought 2020 was a good estimate. A lot can happen in a year or 2. I think it would be great if we could do more with the interface and move things about.

 

[Nathiri]

Version 1.20

Version 1.20 is now available! Download it here.

The changes are:

• City defense bonus now shows up on the map
• Fixed bug where if you had a menu open and were on the Map tab, before long the map would draw over your menu
• The DIFF tab now tells you what the start unit types are
• Basic map statistics (terrain type count/percent) can now be displayed
• Add remaining "special actions" to the regular menus to increase their visibility
• Menus are now smarter about disabling things that aren't valid at the current time
• Code clean-up related to startup, which reduces start-up time by about 20%

The city defense bonus shows up after the population, such as:

London - 14 (+60%)

Or, in screenshot form:

Spoiler :

This was inspired by the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire scenario, where I lost a great deal of units attacking cities, only to learn via digging through the .biq that I was attacking cities that were nearly impervious to attack. You can see how if you were expanding along the Spanish coast in that scenario, hitting that 1115% defensive bonus would be an unpleasant surprise!

The menu bug fix is one we've probably all encountered, since in no more than 5 seconds after opening a menu on the map tab, it would be overwritten, and I was finally sufficiently motivated to figure out how to do something about it.

The "special actions" are "Set buildings in many cities at once", "Enable custom rules", and "View memory usage info". The first one in particular is one that can save time, but may have been missed before due to being hidden. "Enable custom rules" also has a new shortcut, Ctrl+R, so if you want to start a new scenario with custom rules, simply hit Ctrl+N immediately followed by Ctrl+R, and it'll be set up for you in no time.

Just wondering is there a way to see city defense bonuses of a current save game, not just a scenario?

 

[Quintillus]

Just wondering is there a way to see city defense bonuses of a current save game, not just a scenario?

Not currently. The "Input from SAV" option only opens the rules of a SAV, and I don't have code for reading the map of a SAV yet (versus the map of a BIQ - the SAV will have differences such as new cities, chopped forests, etc.).

One additional consideration is that while there's little concern about spoilers when opening BIQs - true, it could spoil some discovery, but the course of the game will change things after it starts anyway - if I were to display the map of a SAV once the code for that is added, it could spoil a good amount of information; the current map view with defensive bonuses would also give away too much ancillary information. That would mean either restricting it to the fog of war, or having something like a table of cities with defensive bonuses. My guess is the latter would be easier initially. But I see the value in it; being able to see defensive bonuses and make informed decisions based on them is one area where I think Civ4 has a clear advantage.

 

[Civinator]

Hi Quintillus,

the Polish hacked editor shows in the scenario properties a box to connect different scenarios to a campaign. May be this could be interesting for you too, so at present I only have your outdated editor 1.10 on my pc and may be this is included in a newer version of your editor.

 

[Quintillus]

Hi Quintillus,

the Polish hacked editor shows in the scenario properties a box to connect different scenarios to a campaign. May be this could be interesting for you too, so at present I only have your outdated editor 1.10 on my pc and may be this is included in a newer version of your editor.

I took a look at this tonight, but it turns out that option in the Polish hacked editor is a red herring. If you create a new BIQ in that editor and set the Campaign, and then re-open it in the same editor later, you'll find it is back to zero. Similarly, opening the Conquests campaigns shows that it is zero instead of the expected value.

On the plus side, before I realized that, I added compatibility to the editor for two Firaxis Conquests that have unusual data structure, which I discovered when searching for the Campaign field. Namely, both 7 Sengoku (though not its MP variant) and Intro3 have an extra 4 bytes for every tile, despite other files with the same ostensible version not having that extra data. It appears to be 0, although I haven't verified that it's 0 for every tile, only the first couple. My best guess is it was used for a feature that didn't make it to the release version of Conquests, although it's in the wrong place to be the possible Campaign field.

 

[Oni Ryuu]

Whilst we’re talking about mystery code; did you get any answers to what some of the unknown inputs are in your editor?

 

[Quintillus]

Whilst we’re talking about mystery code; did you get any answers to what some of the unknown inputs are in your editor?

Not any of them that are still labeled as unknown! When I first saw Civinator's post, I was hopeful that might lead to one of those answers, but alas, it has not, and I have also checked to see if any of the unknowns correspond to an "expected" Campaign value, but they do not.

I think to make headway on them, what we would need is someone to notice a feature in Civ that doesn't appear to be controlled by anything, and would make sense in a section that has unknowns. But the alternative - playing around with values and looking for effects - could also work. I'd be curious how Charm and Teleportation were discovered, as they both seem non-obvious. However, given the distinct possibility that many of these values are leftovers from earlier features and aren't used anymore, I haven't prioritized experimenting in that fashion.

One item that I did figure out years ago was how to fix the "Allow Scientific Leaders" option, which doesn't work with Conquests 1.22 in Firaxis's editor. But that was more fixing something that had formerly worked, than really discovering an unknown.

Speaking of which, it looks like while I did add Charm Barriers to the editor, I never wound up adding Charm itself. And reading up on it just now, it's even more interesting than I had previously realized. Looks like a charming update should be in the works!

 

[Civinator]

Not any of them that are still labeled as unknown! When I first saw Civinator's post, I was hopeful that might lead to one of those answers, but alas, it has not, and I have also checked to see if any of the unknowns correspond to an "expected" Campaign value, but they do not.

Quintillus, one more time thank you very much for all your efforts!

The C3C handbook at page 12 shows, that the conquests are connected by a campaign:



When a player has won all conquests in the campaign, he is awarded by a victory video. So there must be a connection between the single conquests to a campaign in the code. May be the campaign setting is working somewhat different than expected: "0" when not all conquests are won and "1" when all conquests are won, starting the victory video ?

I´m also looking with interest on the charm attack in your upcoming editor. It seems charm attack is a very interesting feature against big stacks of units, but it´s a pitty, that it seems only to work against land units. One scenario that includes charm attack units is Tony Boscia´s great scenario 1989.

Charm attack and teleportation were also be dicovered by the Polish hacked editor.

 

[Quintillus]

Version 1.27

Version 1.27 is now available! Changes:

• Tech and unit filters now support "or" as well as parentheses, enhancing the power of these queries.
• Added the ability to add Charm to units. The "Charm" check box is located under "Special Orders".
• Added an "ignoreMovementCost" filter for units.

The tech and unit filter updates are extensively documented on the new "List Filters" page of the Help, which is under "Editor Functionality" on the main Help page. But in short, it allows you to write more complex queries, such as:

(class=sea or class=air) cost > 79

This allows you to view all units whose cost is at least 80, and whose class is sea or air. Both the "or" operator and the parentheses are new - and this query is different than:

class=sea or class=air cost>79

Which would return all sea units, plus all air units whose cost is at least 80 - the order of operations matters!

----------

In addition, the code for filters was significantly re-written, which will allow future filters, although not future re-ordering capability, to be added more quickly. This means you may see filters appear on new tabs in the not-so-distant future, though not necessarily with the ability to reorder those tabs at the same time.

-----------

As a note, this is a general cross-platform build, which will work with Java 8, but not Java 11. I recently learned that Java 11 is not yet being pushed as the default version, so this will most likely work for you. But if you already have Java 11, you can either use the XP Build to XP-ize this version for Windows, or use the 1.26 build in the interim until a Mac update is available (I haven't yet completed the process of create a way to make Mac builds from Windows, although I think I have a lead on how to do that now. But new features tend to be more exciting).

 

[Vuldacon]

Great Editions Quintillus
YOU do make a difference and Happy to see you are continuing to Help... MUCH Appreciated!

 

[Quintillus]

Version 1.28

Version 1.28 is now available! Changes:

• Add filters to the BLDG tab, for all the properties.
• Filters now allow filtering by the != property, in addition to = and (for some properties) > and <

The != property searches for the opposite of what the = property searches for, and is read "not equal to". It is especially handy when searching for units/buildings that have a property set, such as "reqGovt!=None" to find all buildings that require a specific government (without manually writing out all the government choices).

 

[Oni Ryuu]

Hi Quintillus

Am I correct in thinking that if I gave an artillery unit or a cruise missile unit the Charm Attack, all units on the targeted tile have a reduction in their defence for one turn?
I think it also has a collateral damage feature that only works if you have a building that defends against charm attacks.

 

[Civinator]

As far as I know, charm attack only works for landunits. Here a random number of the landunits in the bombarded tile has a reduced defense value for one turn - but not all units. Unfortunately it doesn´t seem to work with air- and seaunits, what spoiled my concept of electronic warfare in CCM. May be a good use of the 'charm attack' in Civ 3 could be chemical attacks.

 

[Oni Ryuu]

Civinator

May be a good use of the 'charm attack' in Civ 3 could be chemical attacks.

We must have been hit by the same apple yesterday. My chemical warfare units aren’t being used so I need to remove them or make them more useful.

I also want to use it for flash grenades in a Zombie RPG.

Spoiler Rough Notes :

Description
You are one of many teams trying to limit the damage caused by the zombie outbreak. You’re expected to complete a series of small missions that increase in difficulty.

Typical Missions
· Rescue survivors
· Assassinate a unit
· Help an ally defend their camp.
· Take and hold a location.
· Evacuate survivors to a new location.
· Protect a supply convoy.
· Recover an item/s

Each Special Forces group (Civ) contains four units.
The units need to be on the list of custom player data (Starting Location). These units upgrade to unique units variants for each civilisation.
Unit 1 => Unit 1 SAS => Unit 1 Delta Force => Unit 1 Spetsnaz
This allows you to choose your preferred four man team.

Playable Teams
· Survivors
· Marauders
· SAS
· Delta Force
· Spetsnaz

Other Teams
· Civilians
· Allies
· Background objects
· Zombies

Classes
· Sniper rifle - 6 HP, 2 Moves + all terrain as road, High Bombard, 7 Range, 5 ROF, Medium Defence, Low Attack (close quarters), 7 Recon, 2 capacity
· Assault rifle – 7 HP, 5 Moves, Medium Bombard, 4 Range, 3 ROF, Medium Defence, High Attack, 4 Recon, 3 capacity
· Sub machinegun – 6 HP, 6 Moves, Low Bombard, 3 Range, 3 ROF, High Defence, High Attack, 4 capacity
· Shotgun – 8 HP, 5 Moves, Low Bombard, 2 Range, 4 ROF, High Defence, Medium Attack, 3 capacity
· LMG – 7 HP, 4 Moves, Medium Bombard, 3 Range, 5 ROF, Low Defence, Low Attack, 2 capacity
· Pistol - 6 HP, 6 Moves, Low Bombard, 3 Range, 2 ROF, High Defence, Low Attack, 4 capacity
· Machete - 7 HP, 6 Moves, High Defence, High Attack, 4 capacity


Preplaced player units won’t automatically upgrade so must be suitable for all teams.

Each of the 4 units has 6-8 HP and can bombard 2-4 times up to 2-8 tiles distance.
Most enemy infantry have 3-5 HP and can bombard 2-3 times up to 2-6 tiles distance.

Equipment
· Flash Grenades (Immobile, Cruise Missile, Tactical Missile, Charm, 2 Range)
· Grenades (Immobile, Tactical Nuke, Nuclear Weapon, 2 range)
· Under Barrel Grenades (Immobile, Tactical Nuke, Nuclear Weapon, 5 range)
· Remote Explosives (Immobile, Tactical Nuke, Nuclear Weapon, 0 range)

Rename Commands
· Defend > Take Cover
· Sentry > Keep Watch
· Sentry (enemy only) > Stand Guard
· Recon > Recon

Quintillus

Your latest Editor 1.28 won’t let me save my game. It says that something in the BLDG menu isn’t compatible. I lowered the safety level (with resistance) and It still didn’t work. I don’t think that there have been any changes to that menu for a while. It also rejects older .biqs.

 

[Dewion_86]

@Oni Ryuu

I have experienced same error, usually it helps when you select BLDG menu and then try to save, or go through the buildings and then save.

@Quintillus

How to add new buildings in your editor? I can add other stuff easily with rightclicking.