CRpSuite : Playing aids and game analysis utils 2.11.0

[Svar]

Originally posted by Dianthus
Svar, is that a long way of saying "Me too, I want the counts of each terrain type like wot superslug said"?

Superslug was asking based on a request from me in th HOF forum but I just wanted to make it clear I didn't want spoiler information only information on known terrain. I think we had a discussion about getting the tile counts at 4000 BC in the MapFinder thread and that information is not allowed at 4000 BC only the first 9 tiles.

 

[Dianthus]

Well, I definitely don't see a problem with only showing stats for visible tiles. I've actually already modified CRpMapStat to show tile stats, just waiting for Aeson to respond before creating the install and uploading. Maybe I'll just change it so the stats are only for visible tiles and just release it! I've got some other little goodies in this next release too, including 1.22 support, SuperMA5TER's CRpViewer multiplayer support, + a feature to help milkers (which I'll explain later )

 

[Svar]

Originally posted by Dianthus
Well, I definitely don't see a problem with only showing stats for visible tiles. I've actually already modified CRpMapStat to show tile stats, just waiting for Aeson to respond before creating the install and uploading. Maybe I'll just change it so the stats are only for visible tiles and just release it! I've got some other little goodies in this next release too, including 1.22 support, SuperMA5TER's CRpViewer multiplayer support, + a feature to help milkers (which I'll explain later )

Thank you. You're the greatest, when do you find time to actually play?

 

[Dianthus]

Originally posted by Svar
Thank you. You're the greatest, when do you find time to actually play?

thanks Svar! I don't get all that much time to play, only enough for GOTM. I like to have enough time to play quite a few turns for GOTM to avoid getting my reload count up. This CIVReplay stuff is one of the things I do when I've got some spare time but not enough to play GOTM!

 

[Dianthus]

I've just released version 2.4.0 on my website

New features in 2.4.0 :

• CRpMapStat : Added 2 new views. The first shows the terrain distribution of the visible tiles. The second shows cities ordered by their turns to cultural expansion. These views only show information that is available in-game, so should be spoiler proof for competions such as CFC's HOF.
• CRpViewer : Can now view the FOW and graph for any Civ, not just Civ 1 (the human player).
• General : Now supports C3C 1.20 and 1.22

The 2nd new view in CRpMapStat is the one I think will be useful for milkers. It helps to identify which cities are due to expand their cultural borders next. It also puts a red circle next the cities which might cause a border expansion. I.e. :

In the above example there is no red circle next to Lund because it is 7 tiles from the closest border, so expanding it's influence from 1 to 2 won't make any difference. DaveMcWorgborg has an Influence >= Border distance, so when it culture expands in 2 turns time it could (depending on the cultural influence of the surrounding opponent cities) cause the borders to move and so trigger a domination win.

 

[EMan]

.....and now for my question for a possible future feature for Milkers Who Ride The Domination Limit:

As you know, when you perform a Milk Run to optimize your score you may "Re-locate" cities to better locations where more food, and thus more happy people, are available.

Because Surplus $$$$, Settlers & Workers may be limited, it might behove the Milker to disband a city by reducing the population to 2 or 1 and then rush-building a settler/worker. On the same turn building a new city to pick up the lost Terrain Count by disbanding the other city NEXT TURN!

The hard part comes in when you try to figure out how many Zone Of Control (Border) tiles will be freed up when you disband or abandon a city........obviously if you abandon it, you'll know right away.

Theoretically you can figure it out.....but it's not much fun.....so I usually just abandon the city....and then sometimes to my chagrin, there's NO Border reduction at all! (Due to another city's Culture Count.)

So it would be useful to look up the number of Zone Of Control tiles that would be freed up if you disband a city......without actually having to do it.

I don't think this would be a Spoiler since it can be figured out manually (Just like Domination Limit!!!)........could be a lot of UNFUN work though!

Whether you can actually modify your program to capture this information is THE BIG QUESTION?

 

[ducki]

Edit: Nevermind. This thread is rather long. I see you added a crp creation util. Thanks a million! I'll leave my original post because I hate when posts disappear, but hopefully I've made it small.

about not allowing people to cheat and reveal the map for any game prior to completing it.

Can't I start a new game, retire, watch the replay and see the whole map, then reload the 4000BC sav file?

Originally posted by Smirk
The crp file thing is no good. Your app doesn't allow any seemless cheat that didn't already exist so that should not be a reason for choosing a more difficult interface. The simple fact that you don't also have a crp maker program available prevents any real use of this app. That is, we can only use it with the files you distribute.

For the above reason, I agree with Smirk.
I'd love to be able to analyze my games.
I'm not going to play the GotMs because of the sheer amount of extra junk I have to install.

It could be a great app with wide appeal, but that little point that doesn't really hold much water severely hampers its usefullness, IMO.

 

[Moonsinger]

Originally posted by Dianthus
The 2nd new view in CRpMapStat is the one I think will be useful for milkers. It helps to identify which cities are due to expand their cultural borders next. It also puts a red circle next the cities which might cause a border expansion. I.e. :

In the above example there is no red circle next to Lund because it is 7 tiles from the closest border, so expanding it's influence from 1 to 2 won't make any difference. DaveMcWorgborg has an Influence >= Border distance, so when it culture expands in 2 turns time it could (depending on the cultural influence of the surrounding opponent cities) cause the borders to move and so trigger a domination win.

That's definitely a dream come true for most milkers!

 

[SirPleb]

Wow Dianthus, thanks for the new views! The cultural expansion view is a great timesaver, hugely better than the tedious scan of the F5 display I'd been using before.

 

[Dianthus]

Originally posted by ducki
Edit: Nevermind. This thread is rather long. I see you added a crp creation util. Thanks a million! I'll leave my original post because I hate when posts disappear, but hopefully I've made it small.

Hi ducki. You only really need CRpCreator if you want to make a .crp file with multiple .savs in it. If you want to view a single .sav file, just open it in CRpViewer/CRpRings etc. They open .savs directly!

 

[Dianthus]

Originally posted by EMan
So it would be useful to look up the number of Zone Of Control tiles that would be freed up if you disband a city......without actually having to do it.

I don't think this would be a Spoiler since it can be figured out manually (Just like Domination Limit!!!)........could be a lot of UNFUN work though!

Whether you can actually modify your program to capture this information is THE BIG QUESTION?

I don't think this would be all that difficult, but might take some time to do. I agree that it wouldn't be a spoiler, as long as the city to be disbanded is not within range of an AI city's cultural influence, and the util could just not let you disband if that was the case. This can easily be checked using non spoiler info though (I.e. if the city to disband has an influence > the distance to the closest border then it is being pushed back by an AI city).

Originally posted by Moonsinger
That's definitely a dream come true for most milkers!

Originally posted by SirPleb
Wow Dianthus, thanks for the new views! The cultural expansion view is a great timesaver, hugely better than the tedious scan of the F5 display I'd been using before.

Thanks Moonsinger/SirPleb! If you have any ideas for other improvements then feel free to let me know (especially if they're easy to do )!

 

[EMan]

Originally posted by Dianthus
I agree that it wouldn't be a spoiler, as long as the city to be disbanded is not within range of an AI city's cultural influence, and the util could just not let you disband if that was the case. This can easily be checked using non spoiler info though (I.e. if the city to disband has an influence > the distance to the closest border then it is being pushed back by an AI city).

Very good point, Dianthus!
In fact, the Rules in this case are not that clear (to me anyways). When you disband a city that is "pushing" back the AI's border, even though you have ANOTHER city with enough influence to maintain the border, it seems in most cases the AI will expand ITS border, providing it has the necessary influence!

This program in conjunction with MapFinder will be MOST USEFUL to the HOF Milker........Thanks!

 

[Moonsinger]

Originally posted by Dianthus
Thanks Moonsinger/SirPleb! If you have any ideas for other improvements then feel free to let me know (especially if they're easy to do )!

It would be really nice if you would consider adding another tab/view (or just another column to your current list - just make sure we can sort by column) to report pollution tiles - list of cities that have pollution within their city boundary. Although I have workers set for cleanning up all pollutions immediately, I still have to track each of those cities to reassign their laborers. Basically, I will use this utility to check for all pollution at the beginning of the turn before my workers clearing all of them all up, of course. Thanks!

 

[Moonsinger]

This idea is very doable and it doesn't take long to program at all. I will explain by using your example:

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/CRpMapStat.gif

Let's say we are going to click on DaveMcWorgborg or whatever city on the list, you will take us directly there! Now, that's very nice and very doable. Base on my experience with sending keystrokes command to Civ3 program, I'm sure you can easily scroll the map to any location on the map at no time. It would help to locate those pollutions that I just mentioned previously too. Here is what I have in mind.

1. The user click on one of the city/item on the list.
2. Since your program already know the location of the capital, you it can calculate the location of any city in relative distance from the capital. For example, let's say that DaveMcWorgborg is 12 tiles to the right and 5 tiles to the North of the capitals. In this case, you can just simply send a "H" key to Civ ("H" hotkey will locate the capital), then, "Arrow Right" key 12 times and "Arrow Up" key 5 times and DaveMcWorgborg will be centered in Civ3/PTW/C3C. Can't wait for such a feature!

 

[Dianthus]

Thanks for the ideas Moonsinger. The 1st one (pollution list) sounds pretty easy. I'm not so sure about the 2nd one (jumping to a city in Civ), any idea how to send Keystrokes to Civ using C++?

Anyway, while I have every intention of implementing these at some point, I'm a bit busy right now. Just realised I'm only going to have 15-20 hours of free time between now and the 30th (GOTM submission day), and I'm only at 290BC!

 

[Moonsinger]

Originally posted by Dianthus
Thanks for the ideas Moonsinger. The 1st one (pollution list) sounds pretty easy. I'm not so sure about the 2nd one (jumping to a city in Civ), any idea how to send Keystrokes to Civ using C++?

It's very easy to send keystrokes to another apps in C/C++.

1. Use the "FindWindow" api to get the handle of Civ3/Ptw/C3C apps.
2. After you got a valid Window/application handle of Civ3, you can just simply "SendMessage". For example: To simulate a 'H' key press:

SendMessage(hwndCiv3, WM_KEYDOWN, VkKeyScan('H'), 0);
SendMessage(hwndCiv3, WM_CHAR, VkKeyScan('H'), 0);
SendMessage(hwndCiv3, WM_KEYUP, VkKeyScan('H'), 0);

 

[ainwood]

Originally posted by Dianthus
Thanks for the ideas Moonsinger. The 1st one (pollution list) sounds pretty easy. I'm not so sure about the 2nd one (jumping to a city in Civ), any idea how to send Keystrokes to Civ using C++?

I'm pretty sure that the first long after the GAME tag is the screen coordinates. Don't know what changing them in protected memory would do..... Sendkeys might be the better approach.

Actually the pollution thing is an idea I might steal for trade assist.

 

[Dianthus]

Originally posted by Moonsinger
It's very easy to send keystrokes to another apps in C/C++.

You're right, it is. I've been so spoilt by Borland wrapper classes that I had forgotten about "real" windows interfaces!

Originally posted by ainwood
I'm pretty sure that the first long after the GAME tag is the screen coordinates. Don't know what changing them in protected memory would do..... Sendkeys might be the better approach.

Thanks ainwood, but I think I prefer Moonsingers method. I've done enough playing around in memory for work projects that I don't fancy doing it at home too!

Originally posted by ainwood
Actually the pollution thing is an idea I might steal for trade assist.

That's fine by me. The city culture thing might be more appropriate for trade assist too, complete with a notification popup. I hope you've finished your QSC utility before even thinking about this though? (See, I can do too!)

 

[ainwood]

Originally posted by Dianthus
I hope you've finished your QSC utility before even thinking about this though? (See, I can do too!)

It is in its death throes...

I rewrote quite a bit of the base classes to simplify how data is retrieved -> should be much less buggy now, and much easier to build on.

 

[Dianthus]

I've just released version 2.4.1 on my website

New features in 2.4.1 :

• CRpMapStat : Added a new "Pollution" view showing a list of cities with pollution near them.
• CRpMapStat : Added the ability to make Civ jump to a city in the "Cities by Expansion" and "Pollution" view.
• CRpMapStat : Fixed the "Tiles per Terrain Type" view for C3C.

The new "Pollution" view looks like this :

The above shows the popup-menu complete with the new "Jump to City" item. This will only become enabled when Civ is running. Just make sure Civ is at the normal map view and select "Jump to City" in CRpMapStat. For and you may need to change the "Map Scroll Speed" to match your Civ preferences. This affects how far the map moves when pressing the arrow keys. CRpMapStat remembers this setting, so just set it to whatever you normally use in Civ and forget about it .