incremental patch discussion

[davidlallen]

Cool! When I release a patch there are already seven places I have to update:

* main thread in this forum (add new post since first one is owned by keldath)
* incremental release thread in this forum (detailed release notes)
* external web page
* new download database entry
* download database entry for 1.5 release
* first post in modpacks thread
* "announce your new civ4 files" thread

Is there any way to point the moddb forum at any of these, or does it mean another 1-2 places to update for any patch?

We have about 970 downloads on 1.5, and adding the 45/2=22 new downloads from moddb, that puts us really close to 1000.

 

[Deliverator]

Is there any way to point the moddb forum at any of these, or does it mean another 1-2 places to update for any patch?

I think it probably means another thing to update, but it seems worth it. Moddb seems to be the highest ranked general game modding site with Google. If you look at their homepage, you see two sections Latest Articles and Latest Downloads. Yesterday, when the downloads were approved Dune Wars was appearing under Latest Downloads. I'm not sure how you submit to the Latest Articles section. I've submitted a news item for the 1.5.4 patch, but it didn't appear on the homepage. I read something when I was registering about not being able to do certain things until you've been a member for a week, so perhaps that's it. Anyway, it should be possible (eventually) to get our patch release updates in the Latest Articles section.

 

[Deliverator]

Should we default the Mastery victory to off if it causing bugs?

 

[davidlallen]

The right solution is to dig through the victory condition python and find out why mastery is preventing other conditions from being checked. I do not think there is any way to enable/disable victory conditions, unlike game options which can be defaulted or made invisible. I am afraid if we just remove the xml for this without understanding and fixing the python, then it will still be active and prevent other conditions from being checked.

Without digging into the python, the best we can do is list it in a "known bugs" section.

 

[Deliverator]

A lot of people won't know to start a game through Custom Game and switch it off, but I guess all we can do is communicate that clearly for now.

 

[davidlallen]

I spent a few minutes to remind myself why I think mastery is screwing things up. Actually, I don't see how people can be using it at all. Do you see this behavior? Start a duel game with mastery enabled and autoplay up to turn 120. Bring up the victory conditions screen. It says "The world is too young to judge". (A game is 500 turns and this should appear any turn before maxturns/4 = 125 turns). Now autoplay 10 more turns and bring up the victory conditions screen again. Do you get an alert, TVLand is not defined at line 990 of CvVictoryScreen.py?

So I am not sure how people are even playing with the mastery condition turned on. This behavior has been present since at least DW 1.0, before I got involved.

 

[Deliverator]

Yes, I autoplay 100 get "The world is too young to judge", and then play on another 30 turns to turn 130 and I get the TVLand exception. Not the best...

 

[Deliverator]

BTW I looked at the Oracle of Hajra / huge Force shield issue.

I don't think it is specific to the Oracle of Hajra. My best guess is it is to do with us having too many LSYSTEM_3x3 buildings which take up a lot of space in cities. In other mods, LSYSTEM_3x3 is generally reserved for Wonders, but since I did the Buildings blitz a lot of our ordinary buildings use Wonder graphics and LSYSTEM 3x3. This means that Lsystem tiles are taken up in cities much more quickly and easily. If you only have the occasional 3x3 building you are less likely to see the massive Arcology graphic - which I'm guessing happens when you hit some kind of threshold in LSYSTEM tiles taken up. My recommendation for a quick fix would be to replace every instance of LSYSTEM_3x3 in ArtDefines_Building.xml with LSYSTEM_2x2. The only impact of this will be that buildings will appear overly close to each other. That can be fixed by reducing the fScale by a third for each one you change, but that is not essential to the quick fix.

 

[davidlallen]

BTW I looked at the Oracle of Hajra / huge Force shield issue. I don't think it is specific to the Oracle of Hajra.

The problem does not happen with other 3x3 buildings. For example, in a starting city, turn on force shield. Turn on oracle => huge shield. Now turn that off and turn on Landsraad Embassy, or some other 3x3 building. No huge shield. The oracle is from Gods Of Old. Is it possible that the NIF file for this has a huge bounding box, or something?

 

[Deliverator]

Well, if it happens for that one and not for the other Gods of Old shrines then I guess it must be something inside the NIF that's different.

 

[davidlallen]

Well, if it happens for that one and not for the other Gods of Old shrines then I guess it must be something inside the NIF that's different.

Here is a nifskope screenshot of the current graphic. Is that big long white triangle showing something about the origin offset? The other GoO shrines do not have this offset. Enlil and Ianna may have this offset intentionally, to show the building far outside the city. If you watch carefully when you turn on and off the Oracle of Hajra, you can see this.

I switched the graphic from "shrine of enlil" to "shrine of ki" and the problem seems to have gone away, so I will include that in 1.5.5.

 

[davidlallen]

OK, I'm doing some final autoplays of 1.5.5. It has all the religion stuff which I can figure out how to do, a small amount of economy tuning, and deliverator's art. This includes koma13's recent experimental homeworld screen.

I am going to assume that deliverator's problem of a python alert in the homeworld screen with base 1.5.4 and with koma13's recent changes are local install problems. I am a little nervous about that, but it doesn't happen for me.

I should probably add a section about known bugs, since most people will not read the issue spreadsheet. I think the following are the key ones:
* Mastery victory condition must be turned off
* AI initial city placement and colony placement is not very good
* Slavery civic does not allow whipping: with whipping enabled, the AI whips way too much
* Tleilaxu plague seems to spread too much

Any other obvious candidates?

 

[Deliverator]

Any other obvious candidates?

Nothing springs to mind right now.

The Dune Wars Team on Moddb has been approved. If you register on the site, you should be able to use the Join this group link on the right to join and then I can approve it.

http://www.moddb.com/groups/dune-wars-team

 

[Deliverator]

@David: I have made you a Leader in the Moddb team which is the highest permission level.

@Ahriman: I have made you a Member. If there is any permission you want to have we can grant it.

You should both be able to view the stats page I hope:
http://www.moddb.com/mods/dune-wars/stats

We are now at 113 downloads total, 65 for Dune Wars 1.5 and 48 for patch 1.5.4. I think adding screenshots on a regular basis is an easy way to keep the stats up.

Edit: By the way, if you ever take a good screenshot it is good if you can add it to the mod on Moddb using the Add Media link (sometimes a hard-to-locate + sign). Give it an appropriate Title and Caption. This bumps Dune Wars in the list of mods. Right now we are number two since I just added another two screenshots. I'm going to try and add 1 or 2 new screenshots per day for a while - it would be great if others can help out.

 

[Deliverator]

I've noticed and it has been reported that the shortcuts created by the auto-installer don't work. I think this is because of a erroneous additional space.

 

[WarKirby]

* main thread in this forum (add new post since first one is owned by keldath)

I think you should make a new main thread, and ask a moderator to sticky it in place of the existing one. I'm sure they'd be quite happy to do so.

 

[davidlallen]

Version 1.5.5 released, announcements sprinkled in all the usual places. I added a new Welcome thread (including the release note) which will be stickied after moderator action. To reduce the number of places to update, I removed the references to my external website. I'll leave it there for a while in case of any stale links.

@ Deliverator, sorry, but can you be in charge of updating moddb this time? There are so many places on civfan to update even though I dropped my external website.

At this time there are 1170 downloads of 1.5 and 470 downloads of 1.5.4. Over at mod-db, there are 310 downloads of "something" which we assume is 50/50 downloads of the main release and the patch.

I have hosted the patch on mediafire instead of my own server to reduce the number of failed downloads; still wish I knew why that was happening.

In terms of short term future plans, I need to kick around the Mentat promo definition and implementation. I'd also like to add a new type of victory condition so we can experiment with the "3% solution". I have never added a new victory type, and I am not quite sure how. (The current terraforming victory is not a new type, just a modification of an existing type.) There have been a number of comments about the Tleilaxu plague and how to cure it, so that is on the list also.

Attached the updated issue spreadsheet. There are feedbacks from a few other people scattered around; I have made some effort to capture all of these into the sheet, but there are probably some missing now.

 

[Deliverator]

Looks like a good release. I can take care of the mod-db stuff.

 

[Slvynn]

i didnt sayed it before , but you all guys made magnificent job, and made awesome distinct game already

 

[Slvynn]

Started new game with new patch, Playing as Ordos, And founded Landsraad religion. Seems very fun and interesting.

2 side notes:
AIs started DoWing each other prettly late, and i am playing with Aggressive AI on. But seems they do build good stacks of various units, which shows pretty good AI lvl.
Landsraad icon is missing. I getting white circle with number 102 on it.