Development Thread

[alerum68]

Dresden, since you made a Wide Screen CDA version, I took Cams CDA page, and widened the columns a bit, mainly to help with late game play. Would you mind hooking up the options so when Wide Screen CDA is loaded, it will use this new CDA page instead of the original one? Nothing added or taken away from it, just a bit cleaner.

 

[Dresden]

I can take a look. The problem is that the widescreen CDA isn't really optional so determining when to use wider columns could be a bit tricky. I suppose I could check the width of the panel and if it's > 1024 (or some other appropriate value) reload the pages from the WS config file. But how do we reconcile that with user-modified configurations?

 

[EmperorFool]

We really need the ability to display a list of text file names so the user can load different page sets. That would be ideal.

 

[alerum68]

Yes, that's been talked about many times before, but it hasn't happened yet for some reason. Oh well, would be nice to have soon though.

 

[EmperorFool]

I've added extra buttons to the [commerce] sliders that set the rates to 100% and 0%.

Either I missed this or it slipped my mind, but I saw the binary research thread and found my way to the patch. In any case, it's now in the SVN as "Min/Max Commerce Buttons" on the General options tab (on by default ftw).

 

[The Doc]

Either I missed this or it slipped my mind, but I saw the binary research thread and found my way to the patch. In any case, it's now in the SVN as "Min/Max Commerce Buttons" on the General options tab (on by default ftw).

Apropos "on by default": What about turning Field of View off by default? In my eyes it's more of an expert setting and it's the only thing I immediately turn off after a new install because I hardly ever use it.

 

[EmperorFool]

For the most part I've been leaving things on by default so users are aware that the feature is there. You can keep your INI files across installs, btw. If I add or remove any setting, ones from the old INIs will simply be ignored.

 

[Dresden]

CDA now takes the extra commerce buttons into account when sizing itself.

It might be useful to have a different color +/- button for the max & min rather than both grey as right now it looks kinda confusing to me. Or perhaps I just need to get used to it.

 

[EmperorFool]

It might be useful to have a different color +/- button for the max & min rather than both grey as right now it looks kinda confusing to me. Or perhaps I just need to get used to it.

It's definitely confusing. NikNaks is going to make us some new buttons. As these buttons are done using styles, it looks like we'll be making the move to style buttons in many areas. So far, all my tests have been successful. The last piece is to add the ability to have BUG alter the theme files directly instead of during install (for SVN and ZIP users).

 

[ruff_hi]

The last piece is to add the ability to have BUG alter the theme files directly instead of during install (for SVN and ZIP users).

If we can do that - it would be awesome. What would stop us having different themes for different eras?

 

[EmperorFool]

What would stop us having different themes for different eras?

That's totally doable. It would require a) creating all the themes, resources and graphics and b) modifying the Python code to swap them when the era changes. This second part isn't difficult, but it would be a lot of grunt work to make it work on all screens.

I do think this would be a very cool effect!

 

[ruff_hi]

Are we talking about the files that change on screen colors (dialog boxes and the like) and the font? If so, I would be happy to set up a bunch of examples that we can use for the different eras. The guys on modcast said that this wasn't possible to mod - lets hope we can prove them wrong.

 

[EmperorFool]

I doubt the font is modifiable without restarting, and that may be true of the colors as well. What I'm talking about are the graphics themselves. All of the panels that make up the main interface and the background of the various screens are assigned using setStyle().

We would create multiple styles and then call setStyle() to choose new ones when the era changes. So we're not changing the style, we're picking a new one to use. Like XML, the styles are read when Civ starts up and never again.

Where are the colors and font chosen? Maybe we can get lucky with the colors. It's possible we could do the same trick with the font by defining new font types with a custom DLL (ANCIENT_FONT, etc), but that's a ton more grunt work changing everywhere a text label is drawn, including all the screens we haven't yet modded.

Hmm, I have no idea how we could handle the event log. That screen isn't in Python or the DLL at all. We can likely change its style, but we wouldn't be able to make it change at runtime.

 

[Cybah]

With your new civ4lerts you can see the founding of new cities of unknown civilizations at the first rounds. You should NOT be able to see this notes when you did not recover the civilization/the leader yet. Else, the surprise of the leaders is completely gone.

 

[ruff_hi]

Where are the colors and font chosen?

In the 'Civ4Theme_Common.thm' file under the 'C:\Program Files\Firaxis Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4\Beyond the Sword\Resource\Themes\Civ4' folder.

Colors and fonts.

 

[EmperorFool]

With your new civ4lerts you can see the founding of new cities of unknown civilizations at the first rounds.

Doh! I left that check out so I could test the alert but forgot to put it in later. Fixed.

 

[NikNaks]

Possible modern era theme here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=7873

I've PMed dutchking about some old ones for WoL. It's a cool idea, but if someone does the Python, I'm happy to do the graphics.

 

[EmperorFool]

Does anyone know what's up with the fonts. When you place a text label on-screen, you specify a font type (e.g. FontTypes.GAME_FONT). There are five types:

• Title
• Game
• Small
• Menu
• Menu Highlight

The last two are never used in any of the base Python files.

Then, inside any text object you place, you are free to add "<font=X>...</font>" tags. I assume this must be size as there are five sizes specified in the theme files. I had thought they were the same thing, but now it looks like that's not the case.

The thing is, I don't see any place where the other fonts are defined. The theme defines a single font with 5 sizes. And the sizes don't match up with the order of the constants (list above), so they appear to be different things. Bah!

 

[ruff_hi]

The thing is, I don't see any place where the other fonts are defined. The theme defines a single font with 5 sizes. And the sizes don't match up with the order of the constants (list above), so they appear to be different things. Bah!

Really? Not saying that you are wrong (shock horror). I thought they did line up - never tested it. You could set those 5 fonts to the same size and see what happens. Maybe it uses some sort of interpolation between those 5 font sizes to get the other sizes.

 

[EmperorFool]

The only reason I say they don't seem to line up is that the sizes in the theme go from small to large whereas the constants go from large to small to large. TITLE font is the smallest and SMALL font is medium size. That seems wrong to me.