HoF Map Finder/Generator Utility 2016-10-05

[Gyathaar]

There are two other tile combination that give 5 food.. game and fish on marsh.. thou it isnt exactly tiles I would search for

 

[boogaboo]

Great, Moosinger!

 

[Moonsinger]

There are two other tile combination that give 5 food.. game and fish on marsh.. thou it isnt exactly tiles I would search for

I believe that the "5food" item would also count fish on marsh or whatever that could possibly give 5 food when irrigated. You can thank Dianthus for that; he gave me that formula via PM.

 

[Denniz]

To refresh my memory, the only problem you have at the moment is that it doesn't generate the report, right?

Correct.

Btw, I'm really curious on what the problem really is...so I don't mind to make a debug version for you...it won't be pretty to run (becuase you have to click ok to a lot of popup messages), but at least it will tell us why it won't work. Just let me know what you want to do next.

I don't mind running the debug. I'm a little curious too. Just tell me what to do.


Edit:

what language and keyboard style are you using?

Language=English (United States) Keyboard=US

 

[Moonsinger]

I don't mind running the debug. I'm a little curious too. Just tell me what to do.

I have made this little File Test program just for you. Basically, run it, select a directory where you have some *.SAV game files, then click on button 1 to 5. Please tell me which button would give you the list of files and which one don't. That's it!

Btw, I'm in the US too (no keyboard or language problem there)...Anyway, have you installed the latest and greatest Microsoft Application frame work or Java whatever "greatest" from Microsoft? If your answer is yes, that may explain the odd behavior of your system.

Here is the file test program that would help me figure out why the standard Win API won't return anything on your system.

 

[Daghdha]

Are you volunteering for that job?

R U
Maybe some sort of post on the forum that sums it up then? I search for bits n pieces but some are old and they are scattered all around so...

 

[Tzar Sasha]

Moonsinger:
I just tried 6.2 It's the first I've ran mapfinder in awhile.
I set it up last night. Thought I gave everything plenty of time.
None of my programs locked up or crashed but it stopped at the restart civ portion of the program.
My settings were:
Stop after 20
Restart C3C after 50
Time delay before restart 20000
Time delay for loading 15000
Time delay for saving 15000
Time delay between keystrokes 500
Time delay between dialogs 5000

Autosave dir is correct.

When I looked at my computer this moring, mapfinder had stopped with a report of 2 maps. Only 58 maps checked. Bottom bar on the left hand side said "waiting for civ to relaunch." Conquest was stopped at a dialog box with the first directory in my C: drive highlighted. It appeared that it had not tried to locate my game in a non-default location.

Shall I first try again with a higher time delay on the restart? If so, what do you suggest. Intel Celeron 800Mhz, 512mb, Win98SE....

EDIT: I really cranked up the numbers and it worked. I used a restart delay of 40000 and had it restart after 25 maps. Guess I should have tried again before wondering what the fruit happend... Still 40000 is a long time to wait. Got any ideas on a quicker setting for my specs?

 

[LulThyme]

Cattle on Plain!!!
Finally!
You're my here Moonsinger...

 

[Smirk]

Looks great Moon.

I have a couple comments. Please, please remove that popup that explains the and/or, or make it a show once sort of thing. That is very annoying.

Couple things that were overlooked, wheres furs? Also, can I get a finer grain for the forest bonuses, I'd like to know the difference between forested grasslands, and forested plains. (The only other important luxury would be wines, but I seldom care about that but it does add food so more special than the others.)


Also, perhaps I never noticed this before but its saving every map for me now before the verification check, I thought before it only saved maps after they were approved.
Since you are already looking in the civ directory for your temp map, I couldn't imagine it would be much harder to look in Auto for the only file there. But I don't know what sort of functions you have in Delphi for system related work. But getting a directory list, even with conditonal arguments (like *) is trivia in C and C++.

 

[Moonsinger]

Restart C3C after 50

I would recommend setting it to restart at 32. 50 is a little too much for C3C to work stable. Note: the longer C3C run, the more unstable it becomes and when it becomes really unstable, it may refuse to restart.

Shall I first try again with a higher time delay on the restart? If so, what do you suggest. Intel Celeron 800Mhz, 512mb, Win98SE....

Since your system is ancient, you may have to increase the

Time delay before restart to 40000
Time delay for loading to 20000
Time delay for saving to 25000

EDIT: I really cranked up the numbers and it worked. I used a restart delay of 40000 and had it restart after 25 maps. Guess I should have tried again before wondering what the fruit happend... Still 40000 is a long time to wait. Got any ideas on a quicker setting for my specs?

Yes, for an 800 MHz machine, it could easily to take more than a minute to restart the game (you can try it yourself and time it with a stop-watch). Note: 40000 ms is really equal to 40 seconds which isn't much. IMO, you should set it at least 50000.

 

[Denniz]

I have made this little File Test program just for you. Basically, run it, select a directory where you have some *.SAV game files, then click on button 1 to 5. Please tell me which button would give you the list of files and which one don't. That's it!

Btw, I'm in the US too (no keyboard or language problem there)...Anyway, have you installed the latest and greatest Microsoft Application frame work or Java whatever "greatest" from Microsoft? If your answer is yes, that may explain the odd behavior of your system.

Here is the file test program that would help me figure out why the standard Win API won't return anything on your system.

I probably do have the latest framework. I think I remember downloading it. But I don't think that is it.

I ran the test and none of the options worked. I asked myself what was different. I noticed that the names were blue, which means, if you are not familar with the option, that the compress contents property was On. (I have nearly 30GB free and I still compress folders in "my documents". Of course, that was where I orginally had MapFinder.)

So, on a hunch, I created a new folder in C:\ and copied the maps over there. (Everything uncompressed.) Now options 1 & 5 retrieve the list of files. When I pointed MapFinder to that folder it was able to list the files but didn't copy the images. So, final check, I turn off the compress contents property of whole MapFinder directory structure and ran it against the orginal "NewMaps" folder. It worked normally.

All I can say is that I have been using the compression property since NT4.0 and I have never seen anything ever affected by it. You would think if was transparent to anything, it would be to MS's own APIs, of all things.

I don't think you need to do anything, since MapFinder works fine as long as I don't use that property.

Thanks for all your help.

Windows Explorer with the MapFinder Folders and the the properties dialogs:

 

[Moonsinger]

I have a couple comments. Please, please remove that popup that explains the and/or, or make it a show once sort of thing. That is very annoying.

It's annoying, but it will help you to remember! I have been developing software for a living over a decade now and I can tell you this...people often forget. Not everyone has good memory as you do! May be I should just have it pop up only one a day; how does that sound? Of course, if you like, I will add an option for you to turn that message off for good.

Couple things that were overlooked, wheres furs? Also, can I get a finer grain for the forest bonuses, I'd like to know the difference between forested grasslands, and forested plains. (The only other important luxury would be wines, but I seldom care about that but it does add food so more special than the others.)

Ok, I will add furs, wines, forested grassland, and forested plains. Not sure if I can detect them without chopping down all their trees first, but I will try.

Also, perhaps I never noticed this before but its saving every map for me now before the verification check, I thought before it only saved maps after they were approved.

It does that only when it couldn't find the auto save file. Try to increase your "time delay for loading" to give Civ3 enough time to create the auto save.

Since you are already looking in the civ directory for your temp map, I couldn't imagine it would be much harder to look in Auto for the only file there. But I don't know what sort of functions you have in Delphi for system related work. But getting a directory list, even with conditonal arguments (like *) is trivia in C and C++.

You should give Civ3 enough delay time to flush its buffer to disk (give it enough time to finish writting the AUTO SAVE file). Those time delay settings are very important! Please try to relax those timming a little bit!

Btw, have you ever overlocked your system? For example, you can overlook your 2.8 GHz CPU to actually run at 3.4 GHz or more. Configuring the correct delay timing for MapFinder to work in perfect harmony with Civ3 is kind of like that. If you shorten the time delay, things won't work right! If you give it way too much time delay, you will be wasting valuable CPU time. In any, if you give me the speed of your system, I will give you appropriate delay timing.

Please don't ask me why I don't automatically test for the overall system speed and automatically adjust MapFinder timing accordingly...beacuase I don't have time to code all that.

 

[Moonsinger]

I ran the test and none of the options worked.

That would explain why the report didn't work on your system.

I asked myself what was different. I noticed that the names were blue, which means, if you are not familar with the option, that the compress contents property was On. (I have nearly 30GB free and I still compress folders in "my documents". Of course, that was where I orginally had MapFinder.)

Are you using disk compression or something like that on the MapFinder output directory?

So, on a hunch, I created a new folder in C:\ and copied the maps over there. (Everything uncompressed.) Now options 1 & 5 retrieve the list of files. When I pointed MapFinder to that folder it was able to list the files but didn't copy the images. So, final check, I turn off the compress contents property of whole MapFinder directory structure and ran it against the orginal "NewMaps" folder. It worked normally.

Bingo! I'm glad we have finally gotten to the bottom of this.

All I can say is that I have been using the compression property since NT4.0 and I have never seen anything ever affected by it. You would think if was transparent to anything, it would be to MS's own APIs, of all things.

Since diskspace is so cheap these days, rarely anyone compress their file system, but since you are on laptop...I can see why you try to reserve diskspace.

 

[Moonsinger]

R U
Maybe some sort of post on the forum that sums it up then? I search for bits n pieces but some are old and they are scattered all around so...

If you like to help me out, you could start and mantain a thread like what planetfall did here for Dianthus:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=111001&page=1

Other than the delay timing issue that most people often run into, MapFinder isn't hard to use (I think).

 

[Denniz]

Are you using disk compression or something like that on the MapFinder output directory?

Something like that. It is a feasure of NTFS. It is called "File Compression", if you want to check your windows help.

You need to be NTFS instead of FAT files system and it is only available on NT, Win2K and WinXP Professional and Server editions. Basically, the File System is compressing and uncompressing automatically between disk and memory. It is totally transparent to programs. (Or at least I have always thought it was. )

I generally get back (save) about 35-40% of the space used due to all the image and other highly compressable files that come with most software. Not as good as winzip but I don't have to do anything to access things. Try doing it to your Microsoft Office folder sometime. You save some disk space and you'll never notice it on a fast machine.

Converting from FAT to NTFS is easy. There is a convert command (ms-dos) that does it and makes sure there is enough space free before it will do it. (Works sort like defrag, moving things around as it reformats to NTFS.) Just converting alone has gotten me hundreds of MBs space on a 3GB drive. NTFS has a smaller sector size or something. FAT File system lives up to it acronym. Lots of little files waste huge amount of space.

[Note: I haven't looked at a comparison vs. FAT32 or if FAT32 incorporated the FIle Compression feature.]

 

[Moonsinger]

You need to be NTFS instead of FAT files system and it is only available on NT, Win2K and WinXP Professional and Server editions. Basically, the File System is compressing and uncompressing automatically between disk and memory. It is totally transparent to programs. (Or at least I have always thought it was. )

Yes, I'm aware of that feature. However, I have never seen it in action. It's actually transparent to programs that is aware of. Basically, if you know the name of the file you want to work with - no problem! If you use the wild card to search for the list of files within a compress directory, well, that isnt transparent. Exactly why you get the tablesort.js script copy over but not the rest of the image files (wild card such as *.sav or *.png or *.whatever aren't transparent in a compress directory).

Converting from FAT to NTFS is easy. There is a convert command (ms-dos) that does it and makes sure there is enough space free before it will do it. (Works sort like defrag, moving things around as it reformats to NTFS.) Just converting alone has gotten me hundreds of MBs space on a 3GB drive. NTFS has a smaller sector size or something. FAT File system lives up to it acronym. Lots of little files waste huge amount of space.

[Note: I haven't looked at a comparison vs. FAT32 or if FAT32 incorporated the FIle Compression feature.]

I have been using NTFS file system since like forever. However, I have never care to test out the compression feature.

 

[Denniz]

Yes, I'm aware of that feature. However, I have never seen it in action.

Now that you have, you know, as I know, that it is blue.

I have been using NTFS file system since like forever. However, I have never care to test out the compression feature.

I probably wouldn't have either, except my first laptop had only 1.2 GB. I am sure you can imagine...

 

[Smirk]

It's annoying, but it will help you to remember! I have been developing software for a living over a decade now and I can tell you this...people often forget.

I develop software also, although it seems we have a different philosophy in this regard. I assume my average user knows either what they are doing, or how to use help features. In the case when the user does neither of those no amount of pop up boxes are going to help them. In their case, at the expensive of a help service's time I would rather that user ask for help than to become frustrated with the software and never again buy my software again.

But having an option to turn this off is more than enough to make me happy. Once a day, or even once a run would be an improvement.

Ok, I will add furs, wines, forested grassland, and forested plains. Not sure if I can detect them without chopping down all their trees first, but I will try.

You should be able to detect the base tile since they can use different art and the clean map features can also show the base terrain. This wouldn't show a shieldland, but will show a grassland and a plain.

It does that only when it couldn't find the auto save file. Try to increase your "time delay for loading" to give Civ3 enough time to create the auto save.

Ahh, makes perfect sense. Thanks.

 

[Methos]

I often see people mentioning a domination limit but am unsure exactly what this is? Are they talking about the number of land tiles available?

 

[superslug]

I often see people mentioning a domination limit but am unsure exactly what this is? Are they talking about the number of land tiles available?

Domination limit refers to the Domination victory condition in Civ. If you achieve 2/3 of tiles and population of the world, you win by Domination. By staying under the Domination limit, you can avoid triggering that win.