I've been a lurker on this forum for ages and C2C is actually more or less the only game that I play on my oversized gaming-rig (since it is better than any new game being released). I've been playing C2C since I stumbled across it back in V13, and I couldn't imagining going back to vanilla Civ again (especially not the newer abominations).
I've seen you around before. Thanks for being such a die-hard fan and for the kind words of encouragement!
On the good side though I actually often enjoy menial work (call me weird but at work I can spend days creating, sorting and filtering customer lists in excel without being bored). So I'd love to take some of that menial labour off your shoulders if you have some. Anyone of you guys who could benefit from having someone else do the "basic" crap while you focus on the advanced parts instead?
Hell yeah! I'm a little strange in that I enjoy that part as much or more than the deeper stuff, which can make my head spin. Of course, more often than not I'm spending my time on the deeper stuff because that's where the work is really needed most. Still, I have a few existing basic tasks that need to be accomplished soon so I can complete my trait designs and to help setup looking into some other problem areas in the mod.
Here's the main one:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1blJHi8tOxd51JomARwPWBo3PyfOEOyeI0xDjvv-J75c/edit#gid=0
That's the start of the building review document. What I'm needing to first accomplish here is to:
1) Make sure that ALL buildings in our xml are shown here. Looks like some of Pepper's modmod stuff is included as well which is fine because he'll be including those soon after release into the core anyhow. I'm very happy he's helping there too when he can. But as I was going through our xml, I was finding a number of buildings aren't included so that would be one part of the task goal.
2) All the building <type> tags need to be connected to their Descriptions. This is the part I'm immediately most concerned with fleshing out.
From there we can talk about additional steps to creating a truly useful breakdown of buildings so we can show progressions and era advances and so on, which is what is going to lead to being able to use this data for finalizing my trait designs and to help in rebalancing some of the values on those buildings, as well as finding where we have gaps in our progressions. We need to chart out our building upgrade trees and see where we have surges of particular values being given to cities at particular points on the tech tree. Some xml tags are particularly problematic but I want to set this up for evaluation for any and all of the building tags eventually.
So the way I was going about this was to start by opening up the Regular_CIV4BuildingInfos.xml document in Assets/XML/Buildings in Notepad++ (a MUST HAVE free program if you're going to assist here) and search for all <Type> instances then go through each one and match it up to its <Description> tag reference. To do that, I take what's inside the Description tag, such as: TXT_KEY_BUILDING_3D_BODY_ATLAS and put that into a grepWin (another MUST HAVE free program) search of the Assets/XML/Text folder (well... if I already have a text document open, I'll usually search for it in all open folders in Notepad++ first but if I don't find it or I'm just starting then I do the grepWin search) and once the TXT_KEY is found in one of those documents I just right-click on the document in grepWin and open in Notepad++. THEN I search for the text key in that document and I find there what the description actually is.
Now, mind you that going through this list, I don't ALWAYS search for the text key because the connection between the <Type> and a description that's already listed on that Google Document is obvious that it's the same thing. BUT, now and then you'll find you aren't 100% sure or you've found that, oddly, you can't seem to find the match - on many occasions this may mean that you've found a building we have in the mod that wasn't in the mod when the original list was made and you've got to now add a line to add this building.
By physically checking each and every building tag we'll be absolutely sure that this list is accurate.
Other buildings exist in the other BuildingInfos files in Assets/XML/Buildings but they are generally in other categories and I'm more than happy to have those go in other pages in that document. Eventually, they'll need to be given the same treatment but they aren't as high a priority as the standard buildings in this case. And there are also more standard buildings to be found in the Assets/Modules folders, so once we've got the main buildings file completed, those will have to be added in next.
Once all buildings in the mod are on that list, we can talk about next steps to take.
So this is totally mind-numbing menial stuff here but it's also a good platform to grow some deeper mod familiarity on. Does this fit the bill you were looking for? It's something I was going to be doing soon and have done a lot of already as you can see. I'm deeply thankful for those who went before me to help get this started too.