Help! changing words' lenght in Rules.txt crashes civ2!

[Matteo]

Hello,

I'm an Italian Civfanatic and this is my first post in this wonderful forum.

I fear I'm doing a silly question, however I hope you can help me anyway:

I'm trying to create my first scenario in CIV2 (Italian version; I haven't Fantasy Worlds or other expansions), and so I have modified the RULES.TXT file; by now, I've only modified the length of names (I haven't touched other parameters, yet), but this is enough to crash the game!

The strange thing is that there are tech names that can be modified, and others that cannot! For example: "computer": if I change this word with another word composed by 12+ characters the game doesn't start:
I receive a white window that says:

error "-3" in module "2" data 7 5
file open failed: MODULES.DB
most recent DOS error: 2

And there are similar problems modifying the names and titles of leaders, troops, wonders, and so on

I read a lot of material about scenario creation, but I didn't find nothing about this problem.
Perhaps it's caused by my version of CIV2 (it's the Italian version of CIV2).

Ok, I hope my exposition of the problem is clear: now, can you help me? Is there any patch to solve this bug?

Thanks Again

Matteo

 

[Morten Blaabjerg]

When you get this kind of error, it is mostly due to missing a crucial comma or something similar. I've never had the game crash on me for changing the length of tech names etc, but I've seen this error, when proofreading revealed a missing comma somewhere or misspelling of variables. All commas and semi-colons are extremely important. Also, capital and lower case letters respectively, in the tech variables (Afl, Ind, E2 etc) must be respected throughout. This can also cause a crash.

 

[Prometeus]

Temo che per la versione italiana non sia disponibile alcunchè... Io stesso per avere qualcosina di decente ho preso Civ2 MGE versione inglese... Per la creazione di scenari si comincia da Conflitti di Civilization, il patch immediatamente successivo.

Comunque non disperare, ho visto che Civ2 MGe praticamenete te lo tiravano in faccia per le feste di Natale ( sarà perchè è uscito Civ3 ? Bah... ).

Stando al codice che hai messo in mostra, credo si tratti di un carattere o di uno spazio fuori posto, probabilmente una virgola. Ti consiglio di ricontrollare le ultime modifiche fatte al file, magari il problema lo risolvi in quattro e quattr'otto.

Addendum

Per quanto riguarda i patch... Cedric Greene ha ideato un patch per elevare la versione a Civ2 MGE. Non so però se funziona anche con la versione italiana; ti consiglio di leggere bene le istruzioni prima di fare fesserie. Il patch è disponibile su questo sito nella sezione downloads.

A presto,

Prometeus

 

[Plumbean]

Matteo if you want to start building scenarios its a lot easyer if you can get a copy of Civ II MGE it will make things much easier for you.

 

[Matteo]

Thank you very much for help!

I'm now almost sure that the problem is caused by the Italian version of CIV2: infact, I took an English RULES.TXT from a scenario, I put there my tech names (a simple copy from the original file) and now CIV2 works!!

Now, I ask: can anybody send me the English version of these files: LABELS.TXT, MAPMENU.TXT, MAINMENU.TXT (I'm supposing this is a lawful request: if it isn't, please ignore this message).

Greetings

Matteo