HoF Map Finder/Generator Utility 2016-10-05

[Moonsinger]

Update: MapFinder 2005v2.2

Correct two tiny bugs:

1. MapFinder will stop when it reaches the total # of acceptable..

2. Sugar is no longer counted as food bonus (at least not in Despotism).

 

[EMan]

MapFinder 2005 is a Sweeeeeeet program. Thank you Moonsinger & Dianthus!

One question:
Does the program currently distinguish between a "Fresh-Water" Lake & a "Salt-Water" Coastal square?
These can BOTH be important & DIFFERENT requirements for Cultural Victories. (I.e. "non-Aqueduct" v Colossus considerations.)

 

[TimHobbit]

MapFinder 2005 is a Sweeeeeeet program. Thank you Moonsinger & Dianthus!

One question:
Does the program currently distinguish between a "Fresh-Water" Lake & a "Salt-Water" Coastal square?
These can BOTH be important & DIFFERENT requirements for Cultural Victories. (I.e. "non-Aqueduct" v Colossus considerations.)

I second EMan on both counts! Very nice additions. But, now that I can get it to run fast enough, to actually watch it, I have noticed there are many maps that would have met all the prerequisites, except they didn't containing a river, but they do have a lake, which does the same thing. Is there a way to select "Contains Fresh-Water"?

Thanks again for this awesome utility.
Tim

 

[Dianthus]

Is there a way to select "Contains Fresh-Water"?

I would need to update the dll to find this information before Moonsinger could present it in the GUI. I don't currently know where this information is stored in the .sav file, if at all. I believe there is a number of tiles over which a group of coast becomes saltwater. Does anyone know what this threshold is?

 

[EMan]

Is it possible to differentiate Coastal squares by checking the Food Count for the square? (viz. Lake=2, Coast=1)

 

[Dianthus]

Food count isn't stored with the tile. Each tile has an index into the natural resources in the bic section, and each natural resource has a food count. I guess there must be a hard coded modifier for salt/fresh water, which isn't currently taken into account in my code.

 

[Moonsinger]

I have messed around in the editor in the past trying to figure out a formula for fresh water lake but without success. In a real game, some huge body of water could be fresh and some small body of water could be salty. The only way for me to find out in the editor was that it won't allow me to put whale in fresh water ocean. Perhaps, someone can ask their friends at Firaxis. My guess is that they must have a subroutine (during runtime) to determine the body type of water. Anyway, I can't do anything in the GUI until you guys figure out the fresh water formula and until after Dianthus has time to include that in his DLL.

 

[Dianthus]

I have messed around in the editor in the past trying to figure out a formula for fresh water lake but without success. In a real game, some huge body of water could be fresh and some small body of water could be salty.

That's interesting Moonsinger, I'll take a look into it. There are still a (low) number of bytes I don't know about for the tiles, and it's possible that salt/fresh is one of the things contained there.

The only way for me to find out in the editor was that it won't allow me to put whale in fresh water ocean.

I didn't even know that freshwater ocean was possible!

[Edit]
Did you mean freshwater Sea? Whales aren't allowed in Ocean!
[/Edit]

 

[Moonsinger]

Dianthus: I decided to get to the bottom of this issue, may be this save game will help you figure out the fresh water tile. As seen in the screen shot, we can have whale, ocean, and sea in the fresh water lake. Anyway, you are correct that we can't have whale in ocean tile.

 

[Dianthus]

I've been doing some checking too. From the examples I've messed around with 20 tiles seems to be the threshold. <=20 is fresh, >20 is salt. The +1 bonus for fresh applies to sea/ocean, so fresh sea is 2 food and fresh ocean is 1. This is easy for me to recognise, so I'll update savutils.dll.

 

[Moonsinger]

Oh, I forgot to mention in my previous post that the huge body of water on the left of my capital is fresh and it has 1 ocean tile and 1 sea tile with 1 whale. Of course, the body of water surrounding the landmass is salt water. So one fresh and one salt, a perfect setup for further study.

//Edit: I'm too late...you already figure that out.

 

[Mistfit]

I thought that the deciding factor of weather it was fresh or not was related to the number of tiles it covered... It seems like 20 or 28 (or another arbirtary number) or less

 

[Moonsinger]

Btw, what is the yellow diamond at the center of each tile on my screen shot? I have never seen that before. Is that a new feature in version C3C 1.22? Sorry, I have been away for so long.

 

[Moonsinger]

I've been doing some checking too. From the examples I've messed around with 20 tiles seems to be the threshold. <=20 is fresh, >20 is salt.

Is this number the same for all map size?

 

[HellboundHeathcliff]

The yellow diamond indicates landmark terrain. The 20 tile threshhold should be for all C3C maps. Vanilla & PTW might be different.

 

[Dianthus]

I'm pretty sure the 20 tile threshold will be the same for Vanilla/PTW, but I'll check and make sure.

BTW, Moonsinger, you've got mail .

[Edit]
I just checked, and the threshold is still 20 for a huge Vanilla map.
[/Edit]

 

[Moonsinger]

I intent to implement the GUI for fresh water as follows:

1. Change the option to set minimum # of river to minimum # of fresh water source (the total amount of fresh water = total number of rivers + total number of lakes)

2. I will leave the option for maximum # of river alone. Therefore, if you just want lake and no river, you can just set the maximum # of river to zero and the minimum # of fresh water to one.

Of course, I also add an additional feature stop automatically whenever MapFinder see C3C causing a critical system error. I don't know what is going on there with C3C, but if MapFinder see that error, it will stop itself to avoid overloading the keyboard buffer. This problem appears to happen only in C3C (once in a blue moon); Vanila Civ3 and PTW could run forever without any problem.

 

[Dianthus]

I've been using MapFinder recently. The latest version runs for much longer than last years one . I've had the following error twice though:

This occured after around 700 iterations the first time, and around 400 the second. Civ is currently showing a map that matches the criteria, and there is a .sav file in my c:\Civ3Map dir, but no .jpg file. I wanted to keep that map, so I did a printscreen and went to paste into paintbrush, and got a clipboard error. After closing mapfinder I could then do the printscreen then paste. I'm wondering if maybe you're not tidying up the clipboard resources? Just a hunch...

 

[Dianthus]

Tzar Sasha
The only other thing I can think of right now is that I can now see Ivory and all the other stuff on the final report. Could a small change be made to the report view? I'd like to see ( and for people with not so large resolutions) the iteration# at both ends and at least once in the middle of the colums. I found a map that had Ivory but when I scrolled back to the left I lost my place and could not figure out which map it was.

Not a problem! I could add another column on the far right. Anyway, I was thinking of adding another special display column using graphic icons. For example, if the map has three cows, 1 ivory, and 2 wheat, three icons of cows + 1 icon of ivory + 2 icons of wheats will be displayed. It would make it easier to spot that one special map, I think. What do you think?

I've had a similar but slightly different idea about how the columns can be narrowed. The columns are much wider than they really need to be, mainly due to the width of the text in the header row. How about replacing the text with icons that have the names as their alternative text. I've produced an example as follows :

You'll just have to imagine the cursor hovering over the sugar icon.

 

[Moonsinger]

I've been using MapFinder recently. The latest version runs for much longer than last years one . I've had the following error twice though:

This occured after around 700 iterations the first time, and around 400 the second. Civ is currently showing a map that matches the criteria, and there is a .sav file in my c:\Civ3Map dir, but no .jpg file. I wanted to keep that map, so I did a printscreen and went to paste into paintbrush, and got a clipboard error. After closing mapfinder I could then do the printscreen then paste. I'm wondering if maybe you're not tidying up the clipboard resources? Just a hunch...

Now, that's strange! Since I use only static variables (no pointer, link list, or dynamic array of any type), I don't really see how it could possibly running out of storage memory. Of course, God know what may be going on in the JPEG compression module...I will have to study this problem further. In the mean time, would you try to increase the Time Delay in the Extra setup option to see if it solves the problem.