Current state (v82)

Rhye

's and Fall creator
Joined
May 23, 2001
Messages
9,895
Location
Japan / Italy / Germany
I'm sorry again for the long absence. I have been kidnapped by my work.
However, as you know me, you also know that I will never give up!

So here I am, and here is what happened since the beginning of the year.

-> I fought against the crashes. I realise it's a potential deal breaker for a player, and the fact that crashes on side (clean install) kept increasing without any apparent reason was very concerning.
So I managed to install the SDK and recompile it. Despite being able to link the DLL to the EXE and debug it, at the moment of the crash there is no source code shown. Just a pile of Assembler instructions, and memory addresses couldn't be more useless.
I managed to find an almost-reproducible one in a savegame, which could have helped in isolating the cause of the crash and analysing it. By deleting a few civs and minor civs from the map, I sometimes avoided crashes happening for a long period of turns. The problem is that this analysis by exclusion was not conclusive, as I was not able to find the culprit and link it to something broken in the tech tree or whatever.
In addition, since the crashes happen mostly in late game (after 1800AD) this analysis consisted in loading/saving/autoplaying game in late stage, which takes Biblical times.

-> I came to a drastic solution. I drew a new map.
Given that a possible cause may be memory management, and that the overall complexity makes any potential cause a mess difficult to track, I employed some tracking of the number of cities, units, etc in the world. Thanks to the tweaks introduced in v80/81, the number of units usually does not go beyond 500. Cities on map may reach 100.
So let's solve the problem at the root: by making a 108x64 map (which does not sound so different apparently from 134x74), we can obtain a world with 7000 plots: 30% less of the original map, which was about 10000. Estimated cities on the map is 80, and estimated units is 350.
For a limited loss of detail, the lightness can be felt (loads much faster) and the distances feel quite closer. Each civ basically has 1 city less in the core area compared to the larger map. Italy, for instance, can still host 3 cities instead of 4. On the other hand, for crossing the Sahara it takes 5 movements instead of 7. There will be less empty spaces on the map. I think that it's a good deal, don't you think?
Regarding the crash, it is not immune: I have experienced some crashes after turn 640 out of 700. In the bigger map, they would happen a lot after hitting Industrial era around turn 500.
I am running a few runs to see how the map behaves and if it's worth to invest time in this one. I am still adjusting the shapes. I may also need your help to readapt the city names map: stay tuned.
I realise this is a change that may take a lot of time to reupdate and rebalance everything, and makes little sense given the stage of development the mod reached, but at the same time i feel that there it worth trying to get out of this cul-de-sac.
Maybe, if the specific causes of the crashes exist, this smaller map may help identifying them, and at that point it's not impossible to switch back to the larger map, or to even keep both. But we have to try.

Screenshots coming soon.
I apologies for lack of response to private messages (one by one, they are too many). But no worries, as soon as a new version is ready, it will be available to all those who requested.
 
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Great to hear from you again! Now on my terrible computer I should be able to play the industrial era now without crashes. Can't wait to see the new map!
 
134x74_108x64.jpg
Here is a projection of the smaller map. You can compare for example Japan to have an idea of the size
 
Have you placed a freeze on giving out access? I'm interested in giving status updates as I playtest Mediterranean civs.
 
Actually the biggest lands loose the most in this change.
The US will not have all their territory anyway, there might be some colonies left and the Aztecs/Mexico very close. They are also limited by mountains and deserts in the west.
 
That seems soooo amazing. I can't wait to play the new map!!!!!!!
 
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