Hello again! I hadn't exactly planned to take a break from CFC, but after an initial burst of energy in late March/early April, isolation started taking its toll, and continuing old habits from the previous world was no longer comforting. So I took refuge in cooking, movies, and hanging with my friend who caught the coronavirus in early March and had since recovered. Add in some instability at work, which had been brewing since mid-2019, but hadn't really manifested itself much until January/February, and CFC fell out of my regular habits. But between resolving the instability at work, and finding a better balance of hermitage/socialization, things are going better for now, and I started dabbling in the editor's code again starting in late July.
There will probably be an update soon, as a few small features have been added, and at least one two bugs fixed. But it looks like I have a few posts to catch up on. Pardon if there's a double/triple post; I'd rather not reply to 15 posts in one, and have a mega post.
Quintillus, I imported an old 180x180 earthmap, done by Kal-EL to the new RARR 1.7 biq. The resources in the biq of the imported map and the biq of the mod had partly different names and different slots. It was enough to adapt the names in the new RARR biq (per example rename cereals1 to wheat in the RARR 1.7 biq) so the placed resources on the map were imported at the correct places. It was not necessairy, to change the pediaicons entries of those renamed resources for that operation. Your editor worked like charm and is a wonderful tool for testing, what kind of map fits best for a mod. It makes tests about fitting maps for existing mods so much easier! I gave you and your editor the
proper credit for it in the rewritten introduction page 1 of this mod.
The imported old 180x180 map had the specialty, that there are a lot of tiles of coastal terrain directly bordering to ocean terrain with no sea terrain between the coastal and the ocean terrain. Your editor handeled that speciality of the map without any problems. Here is a screenshot of the imported map with the RARR 1.7 biq (I did this screenshot with the old Firaxis editor, so everybody, who is not used to your great editor, can understand this screenshot, too). Quintillus, your editor really is a great work!
I just noticed this; one "word" -
Thank you both! Cinvinator, I'm glad that worked well; that is the sort of thing I was hoping would become significantly easier when I was working on that piece of functionality. Having more custom maps using popular scenarios' rule sets always seemed like such an opportunity.
Ozymandias, I am glad you are back, and happy to see that you've been posting quite a few threads in the C&C forum! Looks like I have some things to read!
Is there a way to load a sav and convert it to a BIQ?
The documentation makes it seem like you can but I cannot for the life of me figure it out.
Edit: I see the extract BIQ from Sav function but the option to extract the map and the cities etc are grayed out.
One of the unfinished features is reading enough of the SAV to read where cities/units/etc. based on where they are in the SAV (versus where they were in the original BIQ). Alas, until that is completed (and it isn't an quick step), those options can't be enabled.
I solved the problem by removing a dummy resource I set up in the pediacon.
Interesting. Relatively recently, I started reading the pedia icons for resources and displaying them. If I understand it correctly, the problem was related to a new resource entry in the pedia, not a new resource in the BIQ? It's quite possible that I may need to add more error handling for syntax issues or edge cases in the pedia files.
Quintillus, it would be a very interesting feature, if units with a different nationality compared to the nationality of a civ can be produced, as it is reported, that enslaved units, that can be upgraded to artillery or directly enslaved to artillery are used offensively by the AI.
In the last version of your great editor I found some unknown boxes, marked with a 3, in the units and the civ rules pages. Could this be the setting for the nationality of the units and citizens of a civ and can this be changed?
In the general general settings page of your editor, there is a button 'Update'. What can there be updated?
Those boxes that have "Unknown", ?3, or no label, are fields that are unknown according to the
Apolyton BIX/BIQ Documentation, and for which I have never found their purpose anywhere else, either. For ?3 in particular, the Apolyton documentation lists:
Code:
4 long require support
4 long ???
4 long ???
4 long ???
4 long ???
4 long enslave results
The first question mark is now known to be the useExactCost variable; which controls whether "8" in the unit cost means 8 shields, or 80, for example. A value of 7 means "use the cost literally"; I don't remember what value means "multiply it by 10", but have seen old BIQ (or maybe BIX/BIC) files with that value. The second question mark is telepad range, which is more self-explanatory. The next one is the one labeled ?3, as it was the third question mark in the documentation; there are 8 question marks overall, plus one unknown short, among the Apolyton docs. We've also since learned that question mark 4 is the number of legal unit telepads, and 7 is the number of legal building telepads; the others remain unknown.
So from top down, those fields along the right of the unit tab are unknowns 3, 5, 6, and 8 - the ones we don't know yet. Back in the day, one of my goals was that by allowing those to be modified, it might help us discover the functionality of some of them. I don't know if that has ever happened, but it's there to be experimented with. It may be that none of them have been implemented in Civ3, or perhaps some have. It's also noteworthy that two of the ones we did figure out where a "number of items in a list" variable, and if the value was greater than zero, then additional variables would be in the BIQ. So simply setting them to non-zero would have caused Civ to crash when loading the BIQ... I suppose that means it's a hint that if setting the last one (the only non-zero one) to a non-zero value causes Civ to crash, it may well be a "number of items of some type" variable.
I don't expect that they would correspond to nationality, because that would mean that
all units of that PRTO type would be of a particular nationality. However, there are those four unknowns, plus the unknown short, which isn't visible in the editor (after the initial build-out, I stopped being as enthusiastic about adding every variable that could make it easy to create non-working BIQs). As such I can't rule it out entirely.
Good question about the "Update" button, too. It dates since time immemorial - it is present in the very first code commit I have, from April of 2010 (although actual development started in 2009). In early prototypes, switching between items in a list of e.g. civs or units, would cause the editor to take the values in the text fields, drop-downs, etc., and update its local in-memory copy of the BIQ; this still happens. There was no map tab then. But the rule tab didn't have a list of rules to choose from. So instead, I added an "Update" button that would do the same functionality of updating the local copy of the BIQ. That way, if you saved it to disk, your updates would appear in the saved copy.
For a very long time now, probably since before the first public release, the editor has also updated its local copy upon switching tabs, and then also added a request to the tabs to make sure all their states were saved before writing to disk. So while it still updates the in-memory copy of the BIQ when pressed, that no longer has any real purpose, and it's obsolete. It should probably be removed.[/CODE]
