GOTM Installers and icons

[msosa01]

Greetings,

I tried installing the GOTM installers up to 25 and now my resource icons are messed up! I understand there is supposed to be some alternative art but it looks quite ugly to me, not only that but I have the whale icon showing as oil, and probably other errors. How do I go back to my old standard icons without having to reinstall Civ III again? I suspected these mods were a bad idea!

Also I have version 1.29b2 but also a text read me file for version 1.29f. Is there an actual version 1.29f somewhere that I'm missing?

 

[AlanH]

I run two separare installations - one for GOTM and one for standard games. If you insist on using the same one for both thwn you just need to swap a couple of files each time you change between the two game versions. The files to swap are the resources.pcx and resources_shadows.pcx files in the /Art/ folder in the Civ3 main folder. You should have the original files stashed away in a folder called resources storage, and there's a copy of the gotm modded ones in a GOTM21 subfolder. You may also need to revert to the original pediaIcons.txt file, which should be in a 'Before GOTMxx' folder as well.

I believe Tao produced an Applescript that will do the file swapping for you, though the last I heard he was having problems with it in Panther, and I haven't seen any indication that he fixed it.

1.29b2 is the beta release for 1.29f, which still hasn't seen the light of day, over a year on. I guess they called the readme 1.29f to save having to change it later.

 

[msosa01]

Thanks. I deleted the GOTM files and replaced them with the old graphics and text files. Everything seems to work like before. Do the GOTM games really use those crappy looking resource images? Unless I did something wrong during the installation of the GOTM installers, the images were unintuitive and unattractive.

 

[AlanH]

Can you post a screenshot showing what you mean? I'm so used to the GOTM resources that I found going back to the old ones a bit of a pain. In particular, I researched Steam and went looking for coal and couldn't see it anywhere, it was so small and blended into the terrain.

If you deleted the gotm files you'll have to reinstall fresh copies of them if you want to play an old gotm again. However, Ainwood is aiming to stick to the standard resources in future as far as I can tell, so you may be OK for new games.

 

[msosa01]

I should have taken a picture of that whale fin sticking out of a plain! Unfortunately I deleted all the files already. The images were strange, some of them had little numbers attached to them. I did not like them.

Now I'm trying to install the DYP mod and Civ III is crashing during world creation due to not finding units/worker/worker.ini file. I tried placing the original worker folder in the art folder and the game crashes at the beginning of your first turn screen. It seems these mods are just a lot more work than its worth. (and that's just from the user perspective, I can only imagine the amount of work for the creator).

 

[AlanH]

Whale tails sticking out of the ground mean you were using the GOTM resources files to play a non-GOTM game.

I think you are making life hard for yourself buy reusing the same installation for different purposes. Here's a sequence that works for me. You need a couple of GBytes of disk space, but what else were you using it for anyway?

0. Stash your existing saves somewhere safe and trash your existing Civ3 installation. You've clearly got it in a mess and can't now be sure of restoring it to a fully working state.

1. Install version 1.16 fresh from the CD (if you have a later one all well and good). Update it to version 1.29b2.

2. Duplicate the entire Civilization III folder and rename the copy Civilization DyP.

3. Duplicate the entire Civilization III folder and rename the copy Civilization GOTM.

4. Install the DyP mods into the Civilization DyP folder.

5. Install the GOTM mods into the Civilization GOTM folder.

6. Create an alias of the Civilization III application file in each of the three folders and rename the aliases Civ_Std, Civ_GOTM and Civ_DyP so that you know which launches which. Drop these aliases onto the dock or the desktop, depending how you find your applications.

Now you can launch any of the versions, with no more installations or file swapping.

 

[msosa01]

Thank you for replying to my posts. For purposes of DYP, it may not be necessary to duplicate the entire Civ III folder, just the art and text folders. I don't think I'm interested in GOTM, but I certanly want to try DYP. My files may be corrupted because of the previous GOTM installation, so I may have to do as you suggest and reinstall everything.

Thanks for your help.

 

[AlanH]

The only two folders of any size are Art and Sounds. You save under 200 KBytes by only duplicating Art and Text.