development feedback

[davidlallen]

As a concept, I definitely agree. The ruined buildings are great for the initial position, but become less "reasonable" as you rebuild.

I would set it up so that when you achieve "construction" tech, you get half ruined, half rebuilt buildings. Since construction is required for villages anyway, that means the villages will never show up "100% ruined", which is fine. Then maybe engineering, or maybe some later tech, would get rid of the ruined buildings altogether.

As actual images, I don't think the particular buildings you picked out fit quite right. As you said this is just an example. For the "partly ruined" ones, maybe something halfway between the actual ruined ones by woodelf, and the clean, modern ones you have here.

Today the same assortment of buildings appear in the city as the town. If you make any better graphics, I would prefer to keep them in sync. Or, if they continue to use all the same buildings, that would be fine too.

 

[GeoModder]

Again, I can't make graphics. I'm an xml tinkerer, not an artist.

Sorry to burst your bubble there, but that's how it is. If you get the graphics you want from another source, I can put them in the mod, but that's it.

Also, there seems to be a misunderstanding here. What I showed you on the picture is that it's possible to have hamlets, cottages, villages and towns (the improvement that increases commerce output of a plot) graphics from whatever source, and I thought these graphics came closest to what could be a possible post-apocalyptic township improvement. These are NOT the kind of buildings I would put in a city if I had to decide on it.

 

[davidlallen]

Sorry sorry sorry. I missed your two statements that you don't do graphics. I did not miss your statement that these graphics were only an example, I understand that.

I can't do graphics either, but I can modify text files pretty well. Are your changes in the L-system XML only, or also nif? If you can explain how to do it, then later on if I get an artist type to make buildings, I can mix them in.

Would your mixing technique help at all in my other problem, which is a tiling set of ruined city features? I don't know if that is done completely at the nif level or partly at xml. If we had a set of ruined buildings made by some other artist, it would be cool if I could use them for the ruined city feature also.

EDIT: thinking about it more, maybe the L-system could help even more. I don't know anything about how it works really. But one problem I have is that I have a bunch of the improvements are built on top of ruins. If you have the mod installed, look at the bonuses like ruined depot, etc. They are obviously just "stuck on top" of the ruins graphic and they interpenetrate horribly. Similarly, if you put a recycling center on one of the ruins, it also looks pretty bad.

Is it possible to convert the whole ruins thing to use an L-system? Then a ruined plot could re-adjust itself when a recycling center was built. I was trying to avoid having a huge number of different possible tiles (16 for a tiling set x 4 possible improvements) and I kind of ran out of ideas.

 

[GeoModder]

No problem.

On your ruins problem, I was going to look into it. I already did a quick search for the ruined_city xml yesterday but sofar couldn't locate any code dictating how it works. It might be that it's "hidden" somewhere in the SDK, and I don't have a compiler so can't look there.
I will attempt to test in the PlotLSystem file, but this will take a longer time since its working week and such now.

 

[Refar]

The Civ4 Runied city is a improvement, if you mean this... (You can pillage it too... But gives no gold...) Davids runied cites are terrain feature i think - so tiling should work the same as on forests...

I wonder if forest cutting like improvements do it will work on other features...

 

[davidlallen]

Regarding tiled features, here is what I was able to figure out a while back. If you look in a directory like art/terrain/features/treeleafy, you will see 15 nif files. If you look at the nif files in something like nifskope, just viewing them, you will see that they have all 15 combinations of corners: just NE, just NW, just SE, just SW, 6 combinations of two corners, 4 combinations of three corners, and one with all four corners. So something in the SDK or possibly XML will look to see which corners of this plot touch other corners with the same terrain, and pick out the appropriate tile.

I haven't looked further to see where the bits come from, that go into the nif file. I had the idea of copying the 15 treeleafy files and hacking in buildings instead of trees; and then somehow getting the engine to use the tiling algorithm when displaying ruins. But I have no actual idea of how to go about either part.

 

[davidlallen]

However, the influence percentage field appears to be always blank. [...] If you have a chance, could you look into that?

@refar: never mind. There was one line commented out in "your" religion screen, which actually printed the influence percentage on the screen. I uncommented the line and it seems to be working. (Search for "Influence" in the file and see a few lines below that.)

 

[davidlallen]

Not sure if this is better off in the development thread or the playtest thread.

I have completed a couple of games with the new vision setup. Each civ has its own advocate so there are 14 religions; each capitol founds the religion of its civ. Also I have changed the game so that founding a capitol automatically converts the civ to its own religion. Today I added an action button for the advocate to remove "foreign" visions from a city. This gives "active defense" against visions. I have not made the AI use it yet; that will be a challenge, although I know how to approach it.

I don't think anybody will claim a vision victory is too easy anymore!

In one game, I chose a different strategy: no oil! I wanted to go for a fast vision victory. Five player game on "noble" difficulty. I got agriculture for cavalry, then beelined to the capitol, and spammed advocates. Everybody except one guy gave me OB, and I rocketed right up to around 65% vision percentage by around turn 140. I think I may have crept up above 67% briefly, but not for the required ten turns. It may be possible to get a "vision blitz victory" this way, possibly I was just a few turns away, but that was the highest my percentage got.

I went the "south route" on the tech tree to get computers, and used the free tech to get rocketry. This enables building the strongest infantry, even though they are expensive. From my one silo, I had a couple of cruise missiles and one tacnuke.

Peter, the one guy who wouldn't give me open borders was also far away on the map. I had a small army poised on his border when things started to fall apart, around turn 160. One ally, Brian, finished a capitol, and spread vision in his own borders. That cut my vision coverage down to around 55% and dropping.

My army in Peter's territory was not able to make progress. If I could capture one city, I could instantly rebase my cruise missiles there and strike a second city, but I could not get that far. I had to use up the cruise missiles to stop a counterattack in my territory.

Meanwhile Brian had started sending advocates into my territory, so I cut off open borders, which made him annoyed. Then he declared war, so I gave up half my cash to make peace with Peter. Fortunately Brian was kind enough to put two large attack stacks near each other, in his own territory, so I dropped my one tacnuke on him. Then I was able to take one of his smaller cities, but I didn't have enough units to go any further.

So, it's around turn 200, and within two turns the other two players both finished capitols. It hasn't hurt my vision percentage yet, but I can't see how to get it any higher unless I stomp one or two of the other players. I have one depot captured from Brian and I just started another. Even though I don't have oil, I captured five fuel trucks from the one city I captured, so I could at least start an army once the depots start producing.

The game isn't completely stuck, but it doesn't seem like the horse and infantry strategy was quite the right one. So I'll give up on it for now.

 

[GeoModder]

Progress of sorts, but inevitably with problems.

In the attachment you can see city ruins above and on the right of a city. It's a nif file I composed from the ruined cityset.
As you can see, there's a scaling difference. I think I can solve that. As you might not see at first (look carefully to the ground level of the ruins) the subterranean parts of the model below the shades doesn't go below the terrain tile. Essentially, the shadows are hovering above the ground. It's even worse on a hill. The model simply doesn't follow the shape of it. I have no idea how to solve this issue. I guess it should be solvable since trees and jungles follow the shape of the land and have subterranean parts.

The easiest solution would be to let city ruins appear as improvements rather then features on the map, but again, I have no idea if a mapscript can handle something like that. In any case, letting city ruins appear as an improvement has the advantage that they will disappear/move aside when stuff like silos, airbases and such can be seen after the technology for it is discovered.

So, any point I continue on this approach (feature ruins)?

 

[davidlallen]

There are two main goals to make the city ruin a feature. The first is to allow tiling. In your screenshot, I can't quite tell if the two ruins plots tile. If you put two of your ruins tiles east and west of each other, would the border between be filled in like trees? It should be an oval, not two circles.

The second goal is to allow the resources underneath to be hidden until revealed by the right tech. The trick with revealing is that some players may have the tech and some may not. There may be several ways to make this work. I guess if the city ruin is an improvement, and the resource doesn't cause the L-system to readjust, then this would be ok. In python I can probably handle swapping one kind of improvement for another. I do not know how to cover all cases where the improvement is removed, particularly if the user does something unexpected in WB. But I may be able to get it close enough.

I definitely think it's worth pursuing as long as these two goals can be achieved eventually. What do you think?

 

[GeoModder]

Erm, as far as I know, features don't allow tiling. Improvements do like you can see with the cottages in the normal game. Or do you have another meaning on 'tiling'?
As you said yourself, the jungle/forest features aren't tiled, but an assembly of tree graphics put together in a single nif in the right quadrant of a tile to look proper. I've done the same with the ruin feature you see on the screenshot.

As on the double improvement thing, that can be solved by adding some buildings from the ruined cityset to the improvement itself. Essentially the same as what the farms do.

Having city ruins as an improvement solves my scaling -and tile alignment problem in one go, and there's no need to create 15 niffiles to cover all compass directions of a tile.

As far as I can tell, featuring forest/jungles works as follows: the engine looks on the neighbouring tiles, and chooses the .nif file most appropriate to fill it. So if a tile is for example surrounded by forests, it will use the Evergreen15_01.nif. If all neighbouring tiles except the NW is covered by forest, it will use the Evergreen14_01.nif, and so on...
So, there's no tiling as I understand it involved.

Btw, in which file did you put the code for where silos, airbases and such appear? I can't find a Civ4PlotLSystem.xml file anywhere in the mod...

 

[GeoModder]

Look, here's a screenshot of what happens if I replace the Evergreen01_01.nif with my ruined .nif file. Note that this is exactly the same building layout as on the previous screenshot. The engine simply decided that that's a spot where this niffile is appropriate for the lay of the forest.

That's what feature 'tiling' is about.

 

[davidlallen]

Or do you have another meaning on 'tiling'? [...] As far as I can tell, featuring forest/jungles works as follows: the engine looks on the neighbouring tiles, and chooses the .nif file most appropriate to fill it.

That is what I meant by tiling. I want the city to look like the forest in this type of screenshot:



From the mapscript standpoint, those two are identical: two adjacent forest features, and two adjacent city ruin features. If only I had 15 correctly constructed city ruin features, and knew how to tell the engine to use them, then I could get that effect.

Btw, in which file did you put the code for where silos, airbases and such appear? I can't find a Civ4PlotLSystem.xml file anywhere in the mod...

I have never worked with the L-system. The most advanced thing I did is to copy the "wall" L-system twice so that I can have barbed wire barricades or rusty metal walls. There are three resources/bonuses, "ruined depot", "ruined airbase" and "ruined silo". There are three improvements, "depot", "airbase" and "silo". Just like any other resource + improvement pair, the resource graphic is drawn when it is revealed, and the improvement graphic is drawn on top of it when built.

 

[GeoModder]

So, in short, you want a single .nif file that fills the complete plot with citybuildings.
That's relatively easy.

While I'm at it, do you want the farm building graphics to look more modern or as they are now (now they use the graphics from the first screenshot)?
See screenshots below...

 

[davidlallen]

So, in short, you want a single .nif file that fills the complete plot with citybuildings.
That's relatively easy.

What I'd like is to have the city ruins show up as oval, not a big rectangle. I have added a line for emphasis. As you have said, the forest is not just a single nif file that fills the complete plot. The corners are rounded. This is done by selecting from among the 15 forest nif files.

While I'm at it, do you want the farm building graphics to look more modern or as they are now (now they use the graphics from the first screenshot)?

There is something going on here which I have never figured out. In my ArtDefines_Improvement, I am only calling out the modern farm. For some reason, in the early game, the ancient farm is drawn anyway, which is wrong. But by the late game, the modern farm is drawn correctly. In general I don't want any ancient buildings. I am not sure what is wrong with my files, to cause the ancient farm to appear sometimes.

 

[GeoModder]

What I'd like is to have the city ruins show up as oval, not a big rectangle. I have added a line for emphasis. As you have said, the forest is not just a single nif file that fills the complete plot. The corners are rounded. This is done by selecting from among the 15 forest nif files.

Wow, you're asking much, and there's no guarantee it will work...

There is something going on here which I have never figured out. In my ArtDefines_Improvement, I am only calling out the modern farm. For some reason, in the early game, the ancient farm is drawn anyway, which is wrong. But by the late game, the modern farm is drawn correctly. In general I don't want any ancient buildings. I am not sure what is wrong with my files, to cause the ancient farm to appear sometimes.

That's because you omitted to put the correct era tag in the Civ4TechInfos file.
If you switch the <Era>ERA_ANCIENT</Era> tag with <Era>ERA_MODERN</Era> you won't have this problem. You don't even need to specifically call modern era improvements then.

 

[davidlallen]

Any leads/tips/code you can give me on how to get the oval shaped cities will be helpful. It bothers me that my ruined mega-city on 10-12 plots shows up as 10-12 little circles instead of one nice shape.

When I first picked up modding, I tried using ERA_MODERN, but I could not get everything to work consistently. Maybe I did not / do not understand how all the tags fit together. But what I have tried to do is make everything use ERA_ANCIENT and the "early" artdefines.

Is there something I have missed to modify, which is causing the modern farm to not show up at the beginning of the game?

 

[GeoModder]

Well, it of course hinders that you don't include a Civ4PlotLSystem.xml file in your mod. In that file, you can let your techs be on ERA_ANCIENT and let your modern farms appear in the ancient era.

Btw, if you put all your techs on modern era, your city graphics will disappear. Unless you change the era_ancient to era_modern in the Civ4CityLSystem.xml file too and remove all the other era cityart.

Perhaps it's best pick up the city and cottage xml and make it foolproof?

Now the bad news: I did a little test, and the game engine consistently only uses the first nif file from the 15 I include when I link forest -or jungle art to the ruins feature.
It's starting to look like the forests and jungles have extra code refered in the SDK, which does not extends to other features using the same nif files.

So, at this point, there's no point in creating 15 nif files with ruined buildings. The best I can do is create a nif file completely stacked with ruined buildings like in the Jungle15_01.nif file or the forest equivalents.

 

[davidlallen]

I don't understand Civ4PlotLSystem.xml. I looked through the farm part, and the only thing it seems to reference is the farm improvement. In ArtDefines_Improvement, I have given the graphic as the modern farm. Of course I can trivially copy the BTS file into my mod, but you must have meant something more than that. What should I modify in it to always get the modern farm? Since ERA_ANCIENT is used in many files, I would prefer to keep that rather than trying to change everything to ERA_MODERN.

Refar has remixed the bombed building nif file so that it has the same contents as the real structures/cities/an_eu.nif, and now it is working. It also seems to be working for villages. When you suggest I should pick up the city and cottage xml to make it foolproof, I do not understand what that means. Can you help me to understand better?

I appreciate your effort to make oval-shaped ruins; if it is not possible without digging into the SDK, then let us give up on that. If you can make a completely stacked nif for the ruins feature, that is still better than what I have now.

 

[GeoModder]

Refar has remixed the bombed building nif file so that it has the same contents as the real structures/cities/an_eu.nif, and now it is working. It also seems to be working for villages. When you suggest I should pick up the city and cottage xml to make it foolproof, I do not understand what that means. Can you help me to understand better?

Ah, Refar did this? It's a commendable job, but a few times he linked buildings to too small a leafnode, increasing the chances city buildings are connecting.
With making foolproof I meant that I simply delete all code from the Civ4PlotLSystem file which isn't necessary. Since you don't plan to use different era's in the mod, classical to future cityart references are not needed. And your whole techtree is situated in the ancient era too (I checked).
On the modern farm issue, I'll try to let it appear all the time and reference it properly so you can see for yourself.

I appreciate your effort to make oval-shaped ruins; if it is not possible without digging into the SDK, then let us give up on that. If you can make a completely stacked nif for the ruins feature, that is still better than what I have now.

I'll compose a completely stacked city ruins nif then. If you want graphics from other sources in it (for instance flat buildings from the modern era cityset, properly retextured to look ruined, but someone else should do the retexture then), somewhere coming week is the time to tell...