Cross-Platform Editor for Conquests now available! 1.51

[AlanH]

The biq I attached *should be* a simple copy of the original. I was not aware of having modified it. But you are right, it doesn't open in your editor. Here is the original one of which it is a copy. This one definitely opens in both Firaxis' and your editors, and is unmodified.

 

[Quintillus]

Cool, I'll look at the new one and see what I can figure out with it. The post-mortem on the first one is that somehow it got cut off partway through the Scenario Search Folders and everything after the first 1569 characters of that was gone.

update: Pretty sure I've squashed that bug. Turns out that what was causing a problem was a combination of the limited playable civilizations and the custom player data. However, I'm still working on improving the PLYR tab's player list. In a minority of cases, the civilization selected for a player is changing when it shouldn't, and I want to figure out why this occurs only part of the time and then change it so it doesn't happen before the next update.

 

[bluebox]

Hi, I'm still alive!

Version 0.76 is now here. Changes:

.l..

bluebox, glad to here it mostly works on Ubuntu. I've run it occasionally in my Linux VM but mostly on Windows as that's where I develop it. I haven't decided about whether to release some or all of the code as open source. What quirks in particular did you notice? I've trimmed the whitespace slightly unusually on purpose, so for example you can see on the GOVT tab that Marauder and Firebrand were originally going to be titles for Anarchy (in a standard BIQ), but were eliminated by replacing the first character with a null.

Well, there are a several glitches with the gui - texts too long, bad character encoding ... such sorts of stuff. And as you have written it in Java, I thought it would be fun to test possible solutions.

 

[Quintillus]

Version 0.77 is now available. Changes:

• Fixed player selection bug on PLYR tab if the playable civilizations were not contiguous.
• Added the ability to scroll horizontally with the mouse wheel on the map. This is disabled by default; see details below.
• Added a file-finding method for Unix that works on case-sensitive filesystems. This could affect you if you copied Windows Civ3 files to a Unix/Linux system, particularly if the map were enabled.

The first fix should get AlanH's BIQ file working properly, as well as any others with non-contiguous playable civilizations.

The second item fixes a deficiency that had long somewhat annoyed me. In Firaxis's editor, you can hold down Shift, move the mouse wheel, and scroll horizontally. There wasn't a straightforward way to do this in Java, but I've now implemented it in a way that's a bit of a hack. Basically, it still scrolls vertically, but I then undo that and scroll it horizontally instead. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how reliably it works cross-platform, and don't have access to any lab Macs anymore for testing. So I've left it as an option that is disabled by default. If it works well, I'll make it enabled by default in the future, if not, I might have to get a machine that I can test it with.

The third item was detected while testing on Solaris (the only virtual machine that the second item worked as expected on), and was an issue because of the difference between PCX and pcx. If you are using Mac or Windows, you won't see any difference.

 

[Lee_Dailey]

howdy Quintillus,

thanks, dude! [*grin*] glad to see you are still interested and that you have the time to work on this. i use your editor & steph's editor once or twice a month.

take care,
lee

 

[Quintillus]

I'm glad to hear you're still using it! It's always good to hear that, and there's more reason to keep improving it if it's already being used. I've been looking at the Flavor tab most recently, as it could use some TLC. I don't think I've updated it a single time since the initial release, so it's overdue for some attention.

 

[Lee_Dailey]

I'm glad to hear you're still using it! It's always good to hear that, and there's more reason to keep improving it if it's already being used. I've been looking at the Flavor tab most recently, as it could use some TLC. I don't think I've updated it a single time since the initial release, so it's overdue for some attention.

/lee rubs his hands in greedy antici............pation. [*grin*]

 

[Quintillus]

/lee rubs his hands in greedy antici............pation. [*grin*]

Did you know that Firaxis's editor actually supports more than 7 flavors on the TECH and BLDG tabs perfectly well, and even on the FLAV tab, minus the fact that you can't add or remove flavors? It's only the Civilization tab that the Firaxis editor is strictly limited to 7 civilizations.

Neither did I, until tonight.

More shockingly, it doesn't actually crash if you have more than 32 flavors. Neither does Civ3. There are, of course, limitations. BLDG, TECH, and RACE all are limited to 32 bits for storing flavors. So they treat the 33rd flavor as identical to the 1st, and likely similarly as you go on. But you do get the full treatment of the 33rd flavor when it comes to the FLAV tab, and thus, flavor-to-flavor relations. I've successfully loaded up a 33-flavor BIQ in game without a crash, as well, though I didn't do much with the 33rd flavor other than mark a couple buildings as having it and changing its relation with flavor 1.

Now, whether this means the game will take into consideration all 33 flavors - or even all 8 flavors, if you try that more realistic number - when it is deciding what the AI should build, is another story. Flavor response testing, from what I've read, is notoriously difficult to do with any certainty, so I'll leave that for the experts.

At any rate, the flavor tab has been redone. I'm going to look over things tomorrow or Saturday and see what else might be ripe for a 0.78 update, as I haven't touched any other tab, but it shouldn't be too long before flavor madness is unlocked to the world.

 

[Quintillus]

Version 0.78 is now available. Changes include:

• A redone flavor tab. You can now add, delete, and rename flavors, including going over the traditional limit of 7. Whether the AI takes advantage of more than 7 is uncertain, and I'm not the best one to determine that, but having more than 7 does not appear to cause problems.
• The map now supports resolutions of up to infinity by 1200. Very large resolutions may cause it to redraw more slowly.
• A minor fix for a crash when you open certain corrupt BIQs has been added.

I expect the flavor addition to be the most interesting. Looking forward to seeing what y'all find out about different numbers of flavors.

 

[Quintillus]

Interest survey bump. I'm curious what the demand is for continued development, as the number of responses to recent updates seems to be declining. Perhaps it's simply due to the updates not being as exciting now that most of "the basics" are in place, if not always the smoothest around the edges, but I wanted to check.

I'd also like to hear if anyone has tried the horizontal mousewheel scrolling on a Mac, and if anyone has experimented with more than 7 flavors. Maybe I should start a regular thread about the latter since the parties who might be interested might not be the ones who check this thread.

Regardless of the outcome, there will be at least one more update, as tonight I've figured out how to get rid of those slightly annoying white bars that you've probably noticed while scrolling the map. There might be a few after that, too, but if there isn't much interest there probably won't be many.

This also would be a good time to voice specific requests for updates, as that's more likely to be worked on. Fixing a bug or adding a feature that someone cares about is better than fixing one that no one cares about either way.

 

[Kyriakos]

I am very interested in this, although i am silently following the thread

 

[Lee_Dailey]

howdy Quintillus,

i'm interested in a few things ...

[1] fix the scientific leaders bug
right now i hafta reopen the file in steph's editor to re-enable scientific leaders after i use your editor. i use your negative maintenance stuff and that crashes his editor if forget and touch an item with negative maintenance. kinda icky, that. [*grin*]

[2] add a way to edit the player starting items [preferably in a batch]
i often play a map that a friend also plays. we set the players to have a certain number of starting units and some gold. that is ungodly boring in the standard editor. steph's editor does not handle that, either. [*sigh ...*]

selecting each player, selecting each unit, setting each unit count ... boring and error prone. i want to select the players, then select the units and then enter the numbers ONCE for all the ones that get that set of units.

[3] a flavor thread is likely to be a good idea.
the concept is still rather weird to me and i can't seem to find a good use for it. others _have_ done so and you are likely to get some good input from them with a new, specific thread.

[4] group unit/building/item editing
steph's editor allows one to select several items [a set of units or buildings, for instance] and apply changes to them in a batch. this is a concept i mentioned in item [2] and it _greatly_ helps with diddling a set of items _as_a_set_.

for instance, i once tried making _all_ the harbor facilities produce food, commerce and shields. that is far more easily done when one can select the targets and then apply the settings. it also makes it easier to undo when needed. [*grin*]

it also would help with applying negative maintenance to several buildings of the same type.

**********
i can certainly understand the fun being less than it was. as you pointed out, it aint new any more and the basics are well covered.

if you are looking for a new challenge, how about making a replacement for the civassist util? the folks who were trying to do that are ... annoyingly secretive, so you would likely have to start from scratch. "proprietary" stuff that they won't show - annoys me somewhat when the "proprietary" is mostly stuff that they got thru the game forums.

anyway, a civassist that runs on win7 would be spiffy. you already have most of the code ... [*grin*]

/lee attempts to wheedle ...

take care,
lee

 

[general-jcl]

The same for me. I like your editor

 

[Quintillus]

Thanks for the replies. Glad to see them, especially since that's already +2 to the interest level based on posts in the past year (thanks, Kyriakos, general-jcl for letting me know you are interested/still interested).

Some good suggestions, Lee_Dailey. I know the scientific leaders one has been brought up before but it's good that it is again - now it's fresh in my mind (and a comment in the code) to fix it, whereas before it was buried somewhere in the thread. The multi-select item one also sounds like a good idea. Tentatively, I think I'll make the PLYR one the first of those, since that does sound really boring to set up, and that one can't be done in Steph's editor. I might then expand it to [4], but expect [2] to come first, since (most of) [4] can be done in Steph's editor already.

I also came across Blue Monkey's map suggestions at the end of page 4 (post 80), and will be seeing how I can add some of all of them.

A CivAssist equivalent would be a challenge. Let's see, CivAssist uses the save files to display its information, right? If that's the case, it would be a fairly logical jump to consider. However, there's a few points to consider:

• Looking at the last couple pages of that thread, it's clear that people are having issues on Windows 7, but vxma says in this post that he has CAII working fine on Windows 7. Maybe it's simply an issue of the documentation in the first post in the CAII thread needing an update with info about Windows 7 compatibility.
• ainwood writes in this post that, it appears, he's already made the changes needed to support Windows 7. It sounds like there are other things that he wanted to do that he hasn't, but as long as it is basically working, he might be willing to release what he has now. Although he also said a couple months later that by then he'd broken more stuff than he fixed, so it may depend on if he has an intermediary version that's working. Couldn't hurt to ask, though.
• If I were to do this, it would probably have to go through a review process from the HoF staff before you could use it on HoF games, Gauntlets, etc. Might send it to the HoF staff to look over before releasing it in general, so they could spot any items that were revealed but shouldn't be by HoF rules.

And a few more less related to in-general but more related to how I've been developing...

• I don't actually use CAII myself. I've installed it and played with it a few times, but I'm a bit of a purist when it comes to Civ. So I'm not intimately familiar with it.
• I run XP, rather than Vista or 7. Although that shouldn't really matter in terms of getting the basics working. But the key word is shouldn't, as it probably shouldn't have mattered for CAII to begin with, but did for whatever reason.
• You're right in a way that I have a decent chunk of the code. The front-end would have to be redesigned, but I could re-use my code for opening .SAV files (though I'd have to add to it to get better functionality - I'm not sure how much functionality I could get with what I have now).

It would have some advantages, though. It would run equally well on Mac as Windows, and if CAII isn't planning to support Vista/7 soon, it would be able to do that. But it also would be less functional initially, and probably wouldn't have the swordsman icon in-game (you'd probably have to alt-tab). I don't expect it would add much functionality, either, as CAII probably already has about as much as is allowable without it being too much. So I'd say, ask if ainwood has a version that works on 7 that he could release - even if it's not quite as perfect as he'd prefer - and if he has no such plans, or if they won't materialize for a long time, I might do this. Otherwise, I think an updated CAII makes more sense.

 

[Lee_Dailey]

howdy Quintillus,

thanks for the response. [*grin*]

as i mentioned, the ability to edit player starting conditions is what i most desire at the moment. so your general sequence of releases works well for me.

the primary problem with ca2 is the dependence on a specific version of dot-net. i can't get it to work reliably on win7 and finally gave up. it seemed that every update to _any_ version of the dot-net framework would break things. plus, it doesn't work on _anything_ other than windows ...

so, if you get the yen to do some new coding, a replacement for ca2 is _highly_ desired. [*grin*]

my primary use of ca2 was to let me know when certain things were happening without being forced to manually go thru the ai players one by one. things like ...
- workers for sale
- new tech
- government changes

plus, i like to know when i am getting really close to finishing a tech so i can avoid wasting stuff on SCI when i could switch it to gold. ca2 has that nifty list of alerts that you could enable - showing only those items you happen to be interested in at the time.

it is a nifty util that doesn't actually allow cheating - it only allows you to avoid needing to do manual drudge work. like remembering out if one of your squares has already been harvested for forest shields. tho i confess that one is not used by me very often.

in any case, i appreciate you taking the time to look it over! [*grin*]

take care,
lee

 

[Quintillus]

I'll see what I can do about the player starting conditions. Scientific leaders are now fixed. I have a couple of other things in the works too, but they need some polishing.

After I get a few of these things working better (and probably a version 0.79 or 0.80), I'll take a look at CA2, what it would take in terms of the SAV file, and think about that a bit.

 

[Lee_Dailey]

howdy Quintillus,

kool, dude. [*grin*]

i've friends who do programming on a pro basis, so i have a small understanding of how one can get to the point that working on something can become a chore. i certainly understand wanting to do something else ... at least for a while.

take care,
lee

 

[Blue Monkey]

Interest survey bump. I'm curious what the demand is for continued development, as the number of responses to recent updates seems to be declining.

Definitely want to see this as complete and polished as possible. sorry that I haven't been posting - or thoroughly tested the current version. Been holding off on using it because the majority of my involvement in specific modding projects has been on the map end. Other than simple mapping - and beyond the standard editor functions - I'm mainly interested in the teleporting & charm flags and - most importantly - access to the terrain types that currently require hex-editing.

I also came across Blue Monkey's map suggestions at the end of page 4 (post 80), and will be seeing how I can add some of all of them.

What he said.

 

[7ronin]

Please continue working on this exceptionally valuable tool.

 

[Ogedei_the_Mad]

Ditto to all of the above.