Help by joining forces :)

[Kailric]

hi Kailric,
i read your pm and i send you a reply via pm too . also i post here an image of a civ4 unit that i edited to make it compatible with a civ5 unit texture. i think the result looks pretty good

Yeah, that looks good. So that is a Civ5 unit texture placed over a Civ4 unit? That would give us lots more skins options if we can do that.

 

[Nightinggale]

It seems like I'm finally able to make time to work on this project. I just need a base to start on and I found three candidates.

1. Vanilla
2. Better BTS AI
3. Unofficial Patch 3.19

I'm just not sure which one to pick. I think it would be best to use one with optimization, bugfixes, AI improvements and nothing else. No gameplay changes and preferably no xml changes, which rules out K-mod. However I can't figure out if the two mods I located fits the description or change too much.

Do anybody know which dll source fits the description best?

 

[heroicfort]

actually, i would like you to start with the vanilla bts sdk patched ofcource with the official bts 3.19 . call me a control freak but i dont want to have smth in my dll that i don't know what it does or if it actually improves the gameplay or makes it worse

EDIT: the most important thing is that i don't want to put pressure on you. you can always ask me if smth troubles you and if it's smth beyond my field of knowledge i will try and ask/search for information. remember i'm here to help you too

 

[keldath]

Man, nightinggale, you should get a reward or something, for helping everyone here.

Realy, im very happy to see you kind attitude and help.
I salute you.

P. S. Kmod is the best in my opinion for a mod basis, with multiplayer stability.
I have added a lot of stuff to my kmod code, nothing complicated though, if you want guys, i can upload it.

 

[Nightinggale]

I added the needed files to git (the same url as previously posted) and started modding them.

Airport icon:
It turned out to be a bit tricky to detect the airport itself. Instead the icon is displayed if the city is able to airlift, which at least in vanilla is the same thing. I copy pasted the plane icon and added a star to one of them. Now the airport is displayed with plane with a star. If the city runs out of airlifts for the current turn, the star goes away.

Extra speciallists:
Looks like all you have to do is to fill out GameInfo\CIV4SpecialistInfos.xml. It looks like there is absolutely no dll work involved in adding more.

 

[heroicfort]

thank you Nightinggale for all your efforts so far . i haven't installed smartgit yet but i'm planning to do it real soon .
meanwhile, as i was searching the forum for units that might be good for your mod, i stumbled upon this longbowman who looks a lot better than the one whose image i posted in the units thread. the link is

http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=21906

and from what i can see from the images posted there, the unit has everything: a leather outfit, real looking arrows plus a mallet!!

 

[<Nexus>]

I know how to compile the dll and I have nothing else to do.... oh wait, I'm actually overburdened because I know how to do magic in the DLL. It would seem that the DLL is the hardest part to get modders for. Ironically it's the only modding part that I'm actually good at

At those times when "you have nothing else to do" maybe you could take a look at Parallel Maps
mod comp. I wonder how many players would be happy to see (e.g.) RAND2 merged with Planetfall

I know you were speaking about moving a few stones and I'm mentioning the Himalaya

 

[Nightinggale]

At those times when "you have nothing else to do" maybe you could take a look at Parallel Maps mod comp.

Ok, I looked. Job's done

I know you were speaking about moving a few stones and I'm mentioning the Himalaya

The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.

I did take a look at the code. I assume it does what it is says it's doing (allocating multiple maps in memory) and went strait for potential problems instead of understanding how it works. Looking at CvUnit, it contains two ints called X and Y to tell where it is. The problem is: (X,Y) on which map? It doesn't tell. Cities appear to suffer from the same issue.

The tricky part is to bind "objects" to a specific map, which mean they will vanish when the player views a different map. From what I can tell this issue is completely ignored. If this is to work correctly, the AI should be able to take actions on all maps, not just the one the player has chosen to look at.

Don't get me wrong. I move the concept in Master of Magic with towers working as portals between two maps. However that setup isn't easily obtainable with that modcomp.

If anything, that modcomp could allow combat maps like in MoM. If the rest of the game is frozen while in combat, it will avoid the issues with what is on which map. As much as I would like to code that (it sounds cool), it's not something I feel like starting right now.

There are lots of stuff, which can be done if we have two or more maps though. Think layers of maps on a planet. Ocean surface and bottom for instance. Dwarven caves/mines underneath a fantasy world. Satellite layer where you can move orbital bombardment units into position over the enemy cities, or "just" providing a field of vision meaning you can see his defense riskfree. There are plenty of reasons to want this to work. The question is how to code it and how long it would take.

 

[<Nexus>]

The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.

He he... I just had that in mind when writing about Himalaya


Maybe there are other "tricky ways" to have quasi-parallel maps.
I'm rather inspired by Zlatko's Reconstruction mod where he has TwoPlanets maps.

Spoiler :

It's cool but the problem is that you cannot circumnavigate the globe anymore.
So I tried switching the X and Y axis:

Spoiler :

But this comes with an other problem: Latitude. The two new poles appear in the equator. While I know that it is possible to change map generation to place ice and tundra and so on on the equator, some buildings have latitude restrictions (Space Elevator in BTS, and even more in AND).

So a solution would be to use Viewports with a fixed center to show always only one half of the map. Than...
a) Divide the map horizontally and make it somehow teleport units from one edge of the "half-map" to the other, and also for the other "half-map", so both "planets" could be circumnavigated.
or
b) Divide the map vertically and rewrite the latitude thing to scale not just 0°-180°-0° but 0°-180°-0°-180°-0°.

What do you think? Is either of those possible?

 

[Nightinggale]

b) Divide the map vertically and rewrite the latitude thing to scale not just 0°-180°-0° but 0°-180°-0°-180°-0°.

This would by far be the easiest solution. Mod CvPlot::getLatitude() and you might have the 0° center line like you want with no extra modding.

int CvPlot::getLatitude() const
{
	// get map height for each planet
	int iMax = GC.getMapINLINE().getGridHeightINLINE()) / 2;
	int iLatitude = getY_INLINE();

	// move the plot to the upper map
	// This allows latitude calculations to be the same for both planets
	if (iLatitude > iMax)
	{
		iLatitude -= iMax;
	}

	// convert into a percentage of the map height
	iLatitude *= 100;
	iLatitude /= iMax;

	// vanilla code to convert percentage into latitude
	iLatitude = ((iLatitude * (GC.getMapINLINE().getTopLatitude() - GC.getMapINLINE().getBottomLatitude())) / 100);

	return abs(iLatitude + GC.getMapINLINE().getBottomLatitude());
}

This might do it and with a bit of luck you don't have to touch anything else. It's untested, but looking through the math it should do what you ask for. The code is specialized for your needs and any reference to flipping latitude 90° is gone. It makes the code more simple and faster. I'm not convinced performance really matters for this function though.

 

[<Nexus>]

Python is still all Greek to me...
Which file is it to edit?
Is it applied to mapscripts or something else?

 

[Nightinggale]

The code is written in C++, which mean it would be the dll code. Furthermore the class is called CvPlot, which mean CvPlot.cpp would be a very good place to start looking. You would have to compile the dll though and failing to even detect C++ code doesn't look like a promising start

 

[<Nexus>]

No, I'm not good with anything more than the xml's