Eunomiac's Strategy Layer

[Dresden]

Sweet. Without seeing it in action, I think having it drawn in the placing color sounds fine.

Regarding keeping the layers visible, does it play nicely with selected settlers, selected blockading ships, and selected air units? Those are the three things I can think of offhand that use overlay layers during normal gameplay; playing nicely with settlers would obviously be the highest priority and blockades would probably be lowest.

Also, will we now separate the hotkeys for the two modes? If we go with alt/ctrl X (or even if it stays at f10) I'd choose the ctrl one for visibility since most of the other visibility toggles (resource flags, yields, gridlines) are ctrl-keys.

 

[EmperorFool]

Regarding keeping the layers visible, does it play nicely with selected settlers, selected blockading ships, and selected air units?

So far, it seems to. I need to do more thorough testing for a definitive yes, but I used different layers for these. Unlike the dot layers, CyEngine accepts area layer indexes past the ones with named constants. Why? I dunno, but they work.

If we go with alt/ctrl X (or even if it stays at f10) I'd choose the ctrl one for visibility since most of the other visibility toggles (resource flags, yields, gridlines) are ctrl-keys.

Get out of my head! Yes, this is exactly what I was thinking. Now we just need some buttons.

 

[EmperorFool]

The next layer I'll be adding is the icon layer, allowing you to put icons such as rally points and blockade targets onto the map. I suspect we'll want multiple layers (not sure), but what I really need are ideas for the icons.

We have space for about 20 icons. I'll be replacing the 16 numpad icons (8 normal and 8 diagonal), and there are a few more we can replace as they're not used in the game at all AFAICT. Please post your ideas for icons that you'd like to be able to place on the map.

 

[vanatteveldt]

I think this mod looks absolutely fantastic and it's what I've been wanting all along. Kudos to the people who spent their time developing this!

Question - Will it be included in a BUG version shortly, or should I try to install it as is?

 

[Dresden]

We're planning on including it in BUG 3.6; the most recent version posted here is already in the current SVN.

 

[vanatteveldt]

@Dresden: Thanks for the quick reply!

Final question then: any ETA for 3.6 (ie this year / january / ...?)

 

[NikNaks]

I think we're hoping for a pre-Christmas release, but if not, it'll almost certainly be out before the end of January.

 

[vanatteveldt]

Cool thanks for all the answers, looking forward to some time off after christmas!

(I'm "forced" to spend xmas in Paris without a decent computer, o poor me!)

 

[Del69]

Thanks for pickin up the ball on this one EF, I swear your a mindreader almost all those things were on my todo list Great work on the improvements, sounds like you got the clunkiness of using it all worked out.

I should have a bit of time over the holidays to maybe fiddle around with this again. I'm assuming your current wip is on the svn so i'll go with that for a tinkering base.

 

[EmperorFool]

I should have a bit of time over the holidays to maybe fiddle around with this again. I'm assuming your current wip is on the svn so i'll go with that for a tinkering base.

Actually, it isn't in SVN yet. I did the dotmapper, but I didn't have time yet to do the sign part. The first step was to make the sign manager so that EventSigns can use it. I'll see if I can clean it up and commit what I have Saturday.

If I can't complete the sign piece, I may commit just the updated dotmapper. While I don't want to lose features, I think the improved ease-of-use is worth it to start. Would you be okay with that for now?

 

[Del69]

If I can't complete the sign piece, I may commit just the updated dotmapper. While I don't want to lose features, I think the improved ease-of-use is worth it to start. Would you be okay with that for now?

I would say just go ahead and commit the dot-mapper so it doesn't stay in a state of "working on features" and get what's working commited already. I'm sure there is plenty of people playing SG's that are drooling waiting to get this

 

[·Imhotep·]

Guys, I just wanted to assure you once more how AWESOME this all is! I used the new strategic layer features in a SP game yesterday - Diplomatic win in 1844 AD with a score of 71k, vassalizing all but two opponents. Thanks to better city placement with the dotmapper I guess . Keep it up, this is totally great! A nice gift for all of us SG players. No more fiddling with Photoshop to draw these dotmaps...

Imhotep

 

[DMOC]

Just wondering, but has BUG 3.6 been released yet? Great work here, guys.

 

[alerum68]

No, but the Strat Layer is contained in the SVN Daily Build file, which you can find on our download page on SF.

 

[cripp7]

No, but the Strat Layer is contained in the SVN Daily Build file, which you can find on our download page on SF.

I tried the latest SVF build and couldn't get the strategy overlay to work using Alt(or)ctrl-f10.

 

[EmperorFool]

I tried the latest SVF build and couldn't get the strategy overlay to work using Alt(or)ctrl-f10.

I changed it locally to CTRL + X to hide/show the layer and ALT + X to add/remove cities. Perhaps I committed one or both of those accidentally, so try them both plus ALT + CTRL + X. I don't think so, though.

Can you check you Logs/PythonErr.log file to see if it is non-empty and post it if so?

 

[EmperorFool]

I've completed the reworking of the Strategy Layer into a Dot-Map-only layer that has separate View and Edit modes so you can see the dotmap while playing normally. To make it easier to code, I had to redo how it stores the data in the saved game. I can make it so that it will load old games and fine and update the data to the new format, but I cannot make old versions of BUG work with the new data format.

I suspect this isn't such a huge deal. It will mean that if playing in an SG, all players must upgrade to the new SVN version. If a game is loaded that has both old and new data, the old data will be tossed out.

Does anyone have any huge problem with this? The whole idea is that running the SVN version entails some small risk, and this is it. At least you'll be able to keep your existing saved games, and only those that share their games with others might be affected.

In any case, I'll commit this weekend I hope as it's really nice to be able to play with the dotmap visible.

• CTRL + X: Show/hide dotmap
• ALT + X: Toggle dotmap edit mode

 

[EmperorFool]

Wow, I just realized that I need to make this data player-specific to handle hotseat games. Multiplayer LAN/net games should work fine as-is since they don't share the saved game, but hotseat will not. Perhaps that'll wait until the next version as none of the other features handle hotseat games (Reminders and Random Personalities come to mind).

 

[EmperorFool]

I've made an executive decision and committed what I have. The Strategy Layer no longer has a sign layer (for now) and has the separate view/edit layers described above.

If you load an old save, all the data will be assigned to the first living, human player. This means that multiplayer and hotseat games will now (hopefully) work. Please alert me to any problems.

I've added options for the layer and dot map as well. Check out the General options tab and feel free to change the shortcut keys (CTRL/ALT + X) in [Custom]Assets/Config/StrategyOverlay.xml.

 

[ruff_hi]

without looking at what you have committed ... is it possible to adjust the transparency of the city dot-mapper? I like it but it might be a bit 'strong' to play with on.