Final Frontier Mod planning

[Mylon]

Progress report:

I almost have the base groundwork done for minerals, mineral upkeep, and gold upkeep. Gold upkeep is already a part of units in the extra gold cost value. For buildings, I'm enabling the ability for buildings to have negative commerce rates and negative yield rates. Negative yields do not get multiplied by modifiers. So a city producing 2 base minerals and using a facility that costs 2 base minerals to operate, but has a +50% modifier, will actually generate 1 mineral per turn.

The value for mineral upkeep for units is in and can be read from XML, but needs the code to actually deduct the value from the player's minerals.

Also, a lot of work will need to be done redesigning units and buildings to work with the new code.

 

[Mylon]

By doing a little dev blog here I'm feeling somewhat productive about things. I'm making meaningful progress, as I'm detailing here.

Anyway I fudged up on the XML schema files and it stumped me for a while, but now the minerals/upkeep and stuff is in the data and gets read. I still need to put the functions in so the game deducts minerals and gold to build stuff, but that should be pretty easy. The tricky part is getting the UI to work, since I know it can be temperamental.

Right now I've decided to distract myself with COMBAT. I'm putting in the call to redirect to the python because as a whole the code should be very straightforward in python.

Of course, I still need to put in the ship designing code, which mainly consists of putting the unit's EXP off to the side, giving it a fixed amount of exp to grant 10 promotions, and then restoring it's exp from the city and disabling component promotions. Oh, and put in the promotions themselves, which themselves won't actually do anything.

As for future stuff, I'm having a bit of design crisis with population. In SE5, population acts as a flat modifier to productivity, which sounds fair enough, but I want to reintroduce specialists. Will buildings require population to operate? Or will the game arbitrarily allow a limited percentage of population to become specialists (like, say, 1 in 4)? Hey, that second idea doesn't sound all too bad.

 

[Zuul]

Im sorry I have not done much yet. So much in the university. Anyway I will make some icons for the ship parts this weekend. I'm thinking on a new look (will make them in 3d then convert to sprite). If this new look is nice I will also remake the promotion icons.

I can also do the xml promotions (placeholders).
Have you come up with any more ship component than those I listed?

 

[Mylon]

A few, but they'll be difficult to code. Make sure the icons are immediately easy to tell apart. These icons are small, so the simple high-contrast icons that Civ4 uses work really well. Trying to fit a sprite of a 3d model into there with 32 bit color might come out confusing!

 

[Zuul]

Yes I know I have made alot of these icons already in my old Promotion mod . I will use gray-yellow, red-yellow, blue-yellow very like like the old ones but with better quality and some 3d feel. Also I think it will be faster to make them this way with 3d-splines instead of pixel by pixel.

Will show some tests before I start on the grand scale .

 

[Mylon]

Sounds good to me. I'll look forward to it.

 

[Mylon]

I keep getting hung up on the little things. First the game was crashing because I had forgotten to initialize one of the variables (And the compiler let me get away with this). I got that problem resolved. Now I'm having some trouble finding out where to place the hook to do the python code. Or if such a hook is even possible (the game might be crashing because the callbacks are hardcoded).

I would prefer to use Python for this as it would be trivial to make all sorts of different lists and manipulate them. This way the combat procedure could keep track of, say, combat and non-combat ships so only combat ships get fired upon as long as there are combat ships to shoot at (and when a ship looses it's bridge, it will move to the non-combat pool so more shots aren't wasted on it). I'm not sure how to easily do this in C++, aside from using fixed arrays or, even worse, linked lists.

 

[Andrew_Jay]

Any ideas what you will do with the "roads" from FF? I always found them a little strange. Would be to see the asteroid resources just treated like fish in the epic game - no network required. Could probably just speed up ships to make up for the loss of the bonus, too.

 

[Mylon]

I think the roads mechanic will stay. It allows an empire to move it's newly built ships from the fringes to the forefront fairly quickly relative to an enemy's advancement.

Resources are something I may need to update in a later version of the mod. Either a quantized resource or something much more important to play than +3 health or +3 happiness. I'll be honest, I haven't thought a whole lot about this problem. For now, I need to work on that combat model! I've written a routine that makes the attacker kill everything in the defender's plot, so at least that's a go. I just need to make it so targets can be picked semi-randomly from this list (and later, components picked semi-randomly from the ship hit), but I'm not sure of any easy way to do that, except maybe roll 1d(number of units) and just start from the head of the list and work down to that number as a way of picking it. The animation is going to make it look like the attacker vs the best defender, but I guess graphics will come later.

Anyway, I actually need to do some work tomorrow, unlike what I did today.

 

[Zuul]

Sorry no progress here. Blender only crashes on my new comp (with vista 64) . Doesn not look there is a blender64 for vista.

 

[PsiCorps]

How is your mod going? I'm in the unfortunate position of having lots of ideas for my mod but no understanding of XML or Python to enable me to experiment with ideas. Any suggestions?

 

[Zuul]

Do some tutorials

 

[Mylon]

Sorry, no progress to report. I've been updating and fixing a few bugs in my larger city radius mod.

 

[lamppost4]

Do you have a timeframe in which you plan on getting this done? And are you going to wait until you have everything up and running or will you release an alpha or preliminary version?

 

[Mylon]

I'll release an alpha once the combat model is done. It won't be very different from the base game. Today I just got my old Mylon Mega Mod updated to work with 3.13, so no work on this mod to report, unfortunately.

 

[lamppost4]

So how are things going along? Not to be pushy or anything but is nice to just get an idea of how far you are.

 

[Mylon]

I've decided that I'm going to release a stack-based combat mod component first. It's going to slow things down a bit because it'll be designed for Vanilla Civ4's combat system, meaning the artillery, the archers, the melee, and so on. But then I'll modify it for the Frontier Awaits mod.

 

[Mylon]

It looks like there's a function in the SDK, attackForDamage() that does most of the work. So first I need to figure out how to determine who is attacking (hopefully I can use the stack selected instead of everything in the attacking tile), then keep calling this function (or something like it) to resolve the battle.

 

[lamppost4]

Have you ever considered looking into Dales Combat Mod? He has a stack combat thing and his changes might help you decide what you need to change in order to get your ideas going.

 

[Mylon]

Yes, I've looked at his mod. Unfortunately it's merely a "archers attack when units get close" mod, not a true stack attack. He claimed he couldn't get the graphics to work, so didn't want to do a true stack attack.

I doubt I'd be able to get the full 10 swordsguys and 10 archers and 10 cavalry all on the field at once duking it out, but at least I could have them taking turns fighting as units, 1 on 1.