Future Mod

[Xeovar]

Updating to 1.22 made save a bit weird, some resources disappeared so I restarted.

So far so good, but only entering 600ish score and already had 2 revolutions in other civs.
Also something is wrong with flight and adv flight techs - i was able to discover the adv first.

Also, map generator Solar System just spawned all the aluminium outside earth, making most early/medium air units not buildable.

 

[Tholish]

D'oh, there are so many places for bonuses, and Earth is resource rich, so Aluminum will be displaced by cows and stuff. So, I need to fix that for sure, possibly by putting it on hills--I'll experiment. But I don't know why 1.22 would have messed with resources, I didn't do anything to them. It was mostly leaderhead and civilization changes.

As for flight and advanced flight, I did that accidently way back in the early stages and decided I liked it. Think about it, many of the early experiments with flight involved helecopter or rocket like contraptions. It just so happened that fixed wing propeller driven aircraft were the first to be practical in our history, but it need not have been so. So, I decided to leave it. And should have explained that in the civilopedia. However, I am thinking of making some tech tree adjustments now, and might go for something a little more logical and make the line to basic spacecraft a little less dependent on other techs that only indirectly affect space travel.

As for revolutions, that's just great. I like revolutions. That's why I put it in. I've had several myself. However, if the AI has them disproportionately, that may be bad. I suspect the AI has them a lot because of the happiness penalty for non state civs under about half the civics. They min max civics, collect religions, and don't do enough for happiness. For now I think I'll just increase the AI liking for temples a bit in the next version.

 

[Tholish]

Put patch 1.23 in the first post.

Partially updated Events, added Rabble and Matchlock units, did away with all ancient units completely except for barbs, made aluminum appear, fixed new three planet map to have mountains on Mars and a central ocean on Earth, fixed modpath in rev python and no more Exceptions.

EDIT: the python fix wasn't in the patch, so I've patched the patch. Deleted my own copy, downloaded and patched everything, and it works great.

ANOTHER EDIT: that fix worked the first time. I just completely cut out the definition that was causing the Exceptions. Also had a CTD, probably associated with having messed with UnitArtStyles a little too harshly (turned out it was random events giving promotions to units that they were the wrong unitcombat to have). Worked on city name lists. Also on credits. I think I'll just go with a whole new upload and call it 1.24.

YET ANOTHER EDIT: patched 1.24 twice, playtested in the Distant future repeatedly on a Large Mars map. Kept getting python exceptions for stuff in the Barbarians part of RevDCM, but systematically weeded out problems, had a revolution and ceded power for 48 turns and the half dozen new minor civs all settled in as regular civs and everybody made peace with them and the psychotic barbarian spaceship attacks stopped. Took some flags from various other mods and put them in as flags for my own fictional civs.

There's a pattern developing here. 1.1 was addition of Rev DCM, 1.2 was reform of Civlizations and Leaderheads.
That being said, there are several things I need to do. So the 1.3 upgrade will just be generally perfecting.

EASY AND NEEDED BUT KIND OF NOT VERY INTERESTING: (1.25)
Add some polar terrain at the edges of Earth
Fix the scenarios
Straighten everything out so its organized nice, names track through all incarnations and such.
Perfect the text and civilopedia.

BIG IMPROVEMENTS I CAN DO AND WILL FIND KIND OF FUN, BUT THAT MIGHT TAKE SOME TIME: (1.26)
Finish modernizing Events and maybe add some.
Redo era looks (EarlyArt, MiddleArt, LateArt) for units. And provide at least two sets of unit graphics for Swarthy and Pale skin for all units where it shows.

IFFY BASED ON DLL CHANGES WHICH I'M NOT VERY CONFIDENT AT BUT REALLY PROFOUNDLY NEEDED ULTIMATELY: (1.27)
Redo the terraforming project so it is actually a set of projects, one per terrain type. So you can build the MoonTerraforming Project and all SpaceRock terrain in your borders turns into Aresia (mars like) terrain. Other projects for other kinds of Terrain, so you can turn Aresia or Titania to Tundra, Icemoon to Titania, Tundra to Grass and Ice to Tundra, Cytheria to Desert and Desert to Plains and Plains to Grass. And all those Pond improvements to Coast. And one to turn mountains to hills. Maybe I won't have to fix the AI to build them. I'm trying making these projects give just a huge defense against Nukes and give Tech sharing (if 18 or more civs have the tech) to see if these entice.

BIG, TECHNICALLY EASY CHANGES THAT COULD GO VERY WRONG IF NOT DONE CAREFULLY: (1.28)

And maybe more generic named barb specific units with era graphics like the Raider. Ooh, just had an idea: totally invisible barbs: ghosts that look like aliens in later eras. They could have names like Specter and Wraith that could apply regardless.

And reform the tech tree.

Then playtest and perfect all that perturbation until its nice and slick and call it 1.3, and of course along the way make spot corrections like the combat value of Rabble and making the Ecodome require Plastics and Composites or something instead of making Plasteel an an anachronistic Modern tech so that every city in the Near Future can start with a nice futuristic look. And making the thread a much better presentation.

MUCH LATER EDIT: this scheme never happened because of the crash that developed. However now that that is handled, its a good list of things to do.

 

[Tholish]

Changed the link in Downloads to give you version 1.24. I had lost track of what I had changed and couldn't put a single patch together. The CTD was because of the changes I had made to Events, involving giving units promotions that they couldn't have according to UnitCombat. All the Python excpetions in the first ten turns or so were the result of one little function that was totally superflous, so I made it just return and not try to do anything. Tweaked some units. Did some more work on civs. I've resumed and continued games that crashed under 1.23 in the late Modern era.

edit. Fixed the exceptions when minor civs are created, see patch.
edit. patched patch, added better flags, found more problems with barbarian civs. I think I got them all.

 

[ASCreator]

future mod 1.24 (newest version) crashes while playing. it is allways the same.
ive created a game, play a time, than it crashes. loading from the autosave gives me again a crash. no message, nothing.

i am using vista 32 on my notebook with buildin 4gb ram (just using 3 of them)

i could send you the gamestate. but may be it is a memory problem. but i ve rised the pagefile and i also lowerd the graphics but nothing helped.


----
an question beside that, cant you merge the mod with next war, so i can play from beginning to the moon?

 

[Tholish]

As for crashing, try the latest patch. Between 1.20 and 1.24 there was a crash caused by the fact that events were giving units Promotions that their UnitCombat class wasn't allowed. I thought I had patched it out. In fact that's why 1.24 was an entire upload of the whole mod rather than a patch--I was so frantic to fix the problem that I lost track of what was new and rather than modding by making a patch on my desktop and copying it into my mods directory I was modding a full copy of the mod on my desktop. One of my main goals in this mod is to make sure it is stable at every stage of improvement--I've tried creating supermod all at once before to get a big complicated crashmobile and learned my lesson. So I'm very worried about this and would like to know. Does anyone else have this issue? Maybe I need to upload from my mods file again instead of a patch, because I'm no longer having that problem.

You could send me a savegame and I might be able to diagnose it. You know how to find autosaves? But it probably wouldn't work on my computer, because I've patched up. So would you mind patching up, playing again until it crashes, and sending me a savegame?

I doubt its a memory problem, that would show up as a slowed down game first. You can put pagefile and graphics back. My computer is comparable to yours and it works fine.


As for going from the beginning, my plan is to make FutureMod 2.0 do that, which I am working toward. The subtitle will be Span Of Time. Simply merging it with the regular Civ 4 preindustrial eras won't work because so many things are different. In the current version of Future Mod, for example, you have to research Education to be able to use the Culture slider and Radio to build culture (should be the other way around, since radio programming is made with money and printed literature is made with hammers, but for gameplay purposes its better this way since it provides an early means to quell revolution). If I just grafted on the old Civ these capabilities would come much earlier. So I have to create a whole new ancient era starting with prehistory, plus a dark age. Which I am kind of coming around to. Part of the issue is reforming barbarians. Ancient times must have barbs, but with space terrains on the map there can't be warriors out in space, so for the current version I've restricted barb units to later eras and translated all barb unti types into spaceships. Minor civs and barb cities are as usual. With some programming it might be possible to have different eras of barb units, but I'm looking for an easy way, and I'm thinking having invisible "supernatural" units as early age barbs and the same units in later eras will look like spaceships. So in Ancient times a barb Gremlin will be a unit only visible to Missionary units or something, and in Future times the same unit will look like a crazy alien spaceship and still be called a Gremlin. Or maybe just Describe all barbarian units as "Unit." I've got to work out these issues before extending backwards, which is why I'm still messing with the later eras.

 

[Tssha]

Alright, I just downloaded your mod today, and I've got a consistent crash here. I'm using the latest version with patch applied.

I've got the save file and the logs, the crash happens after you hit end turn. In fact, it seems like I've run into this crash three times (including this one), all after hitting the end turn button. The first time, I spread Buddhism to Osaka via missionary (which already had Islam) and it crashed after hitting end turn. It took awhile before I managed to work my way around that one. This time, I have no idea what might be causing it. It just always seems to happen on this turn.

This save definitely crashes, and the logs provided were generated after this save game crashed. I can also provide a core dump if necessary (you may be able to generate one yourself), though I'm not sure how helpful that would be.

If you need anything else, feel free to ask. I'm willing to help you debug.

 

[ASCreator]

ive tried the patch, the crash still remains. ive uploaded the savegame. just press next turn and bye bye.

 

[Tholish]

@Tssha. I downloaded everything fresh and tested. Eliminated all other civs and no crash. Eliminated civs one at a time and when its the Envirnomentalists I cut there is no crash. Eliminated Environmentalists cities one at a time and only Udong causes a crash. If I use World Builder and delete the Environmentalist city of Udong, the crash does not occur. Udong is not doing anything special, pop 1 city with ten culture, sitting on Stone, a Theater and one Rifleman, just started building a Rifleman. In fact, if I delete it, it doesn't exist for a turn, and then put it back, exactly like it was the crash does not occur therafter. If I change things about Udong (name, pop, culture, buildngs) still a crash. If I move it to an adjacent square, no crash, even the same turn. If I save the game as a scenario, that plays the next turn. If I cut out all Event triggers, the crash still occurs if Udong is there, but not if Udong is not there. Maybe the event has already been triggered (will check somehow), or maybe a Shrine is spreading a rel to the city and that is doing something unusual. Was this game by any chance started under an earlier version? Anyway, I'll look at the Crash Log and see if that helps.

@ASCreator. I've got yours, checking it now.

 

[ASCreator]

some information abiout my civ installation version. i have an civ4 vanilla installed, then bts. than took the patch 317. maybe i have the unofficial bts317 patch installed to too fix the trade bug. im living in germany and bought everything here. maybe there are different versions. maybe my civ installation is installed as german version if it is possible. but i switched the language after that to english. but maybe not everything switched.

as i remember, i had a long time ago an issue, that if i installed civ4 in german and bts in english the game could not find some files, because they were translated too.

because of that i am not sure if i have installed it in german or english

 

[Tholish]

I gave Udong all 15 rels and no crash. New rels usually go to a small, new city. The Environmentalists might be researching a rel. I can narrow it down now and find out what about that rel being founded causes a crash. Then I'll be able to fix the problem. And if ASCreator has the same problem thats both in one, if not then its a second project.

ASCreator, my installation history is identical to yours, except no unofficial patch and no german version. That is not the problem, if these are not saves from an earlier version of the FutureMod , because I have the crash too. Incidently, do you think it was a bad idea to go with all English? It just makes the text files so much easier to work with, not having to scroll through 5times as many lines.

 

[ASCreator]

to go just to englisch is not that bad idea, because otherwise you have to translate everything into different languages or make them even a copy of english.
to switch to english is not that big thing.

no i have just startet too days before to test your mod. i liked the idea very much, and even i havent a chance to play that a lot, it seems to me to be a good variety to next war.

i had this crash every game at some time. so it should happen quite often.

 

[Tssha]

Nope, there's no possible way I started it under an earlier version, since I'd never downloaded another version before or since. Just main install, then patch, then new game, that's it.

I should note, however, that I eventually managed to get Buddhism in Osaka (as you might've noticed), but only by converting it on an earlier turn than the one it crashed on.

I DO have my faith's shrine, if that's a contributing factor. Still, likely not the cause of the crash in itself, if I understand you correctly.

 

[Tholish]

OK, rule out that possibility. Fresh starts. Haven't been able to reproduce the result of giving Udong all 15 rels staving off crash. It just happened that once. Back to the drawing board. Started with 123.5 and no crash. Put 124.5 in Mods folder and replaced entire Python folder with 123.5 one and no crash. Put in increasing amounts of the the Python from 124.3 with no crashes. Only had Barbarians and Revultions left to transfer, put in the Revolutions file and got a crash. Did a comparison with Win Merge and only one line was different, so I put back 124.3 with that line changed. Crash. Then I put back 123.5 and another crash. WTH. Can't reproduce it. Will keep trying. Now taking 124.3 and putting in the different python from 123.5

 

[ASCreator]

by the way, did you balanced the units? seemed so that the conquer ship (?) is much to strong because it taket at one of my cities only one turn has 100 strength and can fly around the world in just one turn, while a big ship (dont know the name yet) needs 4 turns has strength of 80 and can fly only 1 (maybe 2) fields.

i recognized that many ships can fly as fast as 18 or even higher. that has one big disadvantage, they can attack all over the world, every field in your land. and capture worker, as the barbarian do, as soon as they got one of these ships. therefore they have to be much less strong, so you can defense with normal units. or not as fast as they are. and so on...

 

[Tholish]

The crash is my main concern right now, but yes others have mentioned the Conqueror. My reasoning on spaceships is that they have this huge movement so they can fly from the Space on one side of the world to the Space on the other side of the world, or anywhere in the world, in one turn, but it takes them several turns to cross the space betwen planets (move cost 6). Also Orbit which runs between space and the planets has a move cost of Zero. A real spaceship can go anywhere on a planet instantly. The big Hover Dreadnoughts you are talking about are slow as mollasses because they are a different kind of unit that is easier to build. The Conqueror is powerfull because that is its funciton: to Conquer. There are ways to counter it, but maybe I should beef them up.

There are quite a few powerfull units comparable with the Conqueror. It just has a huge city attack bonus. Spaceships of various kinds, transhumans, and especially the Sentinel are competitive with it. Warbots and hover units like the Hover Tank and Hover dreadnought and even armor like the Dreadnought and Modern Armor can fight back. However, like I say, I'll come up with something that gets the Conqueror.

But first this pesky crash...
I can't debug it. I'm going to go back to the last stable version I have (1.235) and build it back up to 1.245, testing at each stage. I'll make the barbs have natural phenomena as replacements for early units and give them toned down later units (jalopy equivalents of government spacecraft) while also having the Conqueror have a steeper upgrade path--early ones weaker, later ones about the same) with a specific promotion against them. And also a unit balance chart.

 

[ASCreator]

yes the bug is much importender to e solved. by my few experiance by modding civ, i recognized, that civ seems not very modder friendly. because it reacts very hard to wrong or misunderstanded modifications. it just crashes without any hint where or why the crash happens.

even the balancing thing can be made by myself, so ive allready changed the conquer drone, because i completely dislike it. (because of the worker problem.)

 

[Tholish]

I took version 123.5 and fixed UnitArtStyleInfos issues and it works for Tssha's saved game but not yours. On later versions I fixed crashes by cutting out the new flags, but there's more. I'm going to switch the version in downloads to 123.6. include a warning, and continue to work.

Civ is very helpful in many ways, but some things are sneaky. This mod has never been this unstable, but as of now my earlier claims that it is "playable" are exaggerations. I may create versions with and without Revolutions (for multiplayer if nothing else).


PS. The crashes are because of Rev DCM. I tried to start over by just making a mod with Rev DCM with minimal units and buildings and it crashed shortly after turn 100. Its picky and I'll have to start over from 1.18 without it. Which will take a little while. Sorry.

 

[Tholish]

I removed all traces of Rev DCM from version 1.245 and called it 1.25. Should now be stable and also multiplayer functional. Sorry folks, if you still want this mod, you'll have to download the whole thing again. One can only patch IN, not OUT.

Now I'll be able to concentrate on improving the mod rather than finding the bug.

 

[Tssha]

I hate to do this to you Tholish, but I swear this build is less stable than the previous one.

I've not even managed to make it out of the 10 turn Universal Peace period (advanced start). Hell, my first autosave was a crash-on-end-turn. I somehow managed to bypass it though...don't ask me why, but it crashes when I end the turn looking at the Work Boat off my east coast, but not when I end the turn looking at my capital. The work boat is the only unit that asked for orders that turn.

I have included the core dump this time, but even without it this is a bigger zip than last time.