Index of useful resources

[WildWeazel]

This is an index of mostly technical resources that may be useful primarily for developers. I've compiled and categorized all of the links, but I haven't read/watched through all of them yet myself. Still a WIP! If you have any of your own, or find any to be inaccessible, irrelevant, or particularly valuable, please call them out.

Index of resources

OpenCiv3 is an open-source, cross-platform, mod-oriented, modernized remake of Civilization III by the fan community built with the Godot Engine and C#, with capabilities inspired by the best of th...

github.com

 

[WildWeazel]

This is a much anticipated and very thorough (90 pg.) analysis of the AI in Master of Orion 1, supposedly applicable to general 4X. I have not read it yet but @Ozymandias at least will surely be interested.

https://explorminate.co/a-very-detailed-dive-on-master-of-orion-1s-ai/

 

[Vuldacon]

Well, sit back with a cup of coffee and contemplate what is being conveyed as you read it. Then ponder your own creative ideas.

Worth the read and a Very Good analysis that is certainly informative and applicable to 4X.

 

[Ozymandias]

My apologies for my "absence," but Real Life has the annoying habit of, well, being "Real."

@WildWeazel -At first glance, it does look interesting ... Especially as I fondly recall playing both his stunningly "elegant with simple rules" House Divided to his all-but-overwhelming intricate Totaler Krieg.

From the amazingly still around Decision Games site, on, "What Is Wargaming?" he wrote:

Any wargame is going to be a compromise. A designer can not put everything into a game without turning it into an unplayable mess. Many things are abstracted or otherwise subsumed into various game systems. For example, logistics, intelligence operations, and command control may not receive the detail which goes into modeling maneuver forces and resolution of combat. Actually, this is not as unrealistic as it may appear. In reality, a commander will have a staff and subordinates to assist him in running the show, whether it’s a continental level campaign or a small unit action. To paraphrase Frederick the Great, “The wargame which simulates everything simulates nothing”.

So I now get to agree with both Alan Emrich -AND- Frederick the Great

... In the meantime, now you also have me reading up on, "Library Vs Framework Vs Engine," etc. ...

 

[WildWeazel]

Anyone wanting to pick up Godot or just learn about game engines: here's a large index of tutorials, both text and video. Godot is under active development, so beware of dated information. The latest stable version is 3.2.3, and Steam is the easiest way to get it.

 

[WildWeazel]

This probably isn't anything we don't know already, but I came across this utility on Reddit that reads the event history from a SAV and renders it similar to the end-game replay.
https://github.com/lucienmaloney/civ3mapreplay

 

[WildWeazel]

I've found some relevant Discord servers if you're into that. These are all pretty active. I've been pleasantly surprised by the mod community outside of CFC (though Takhisis and I are gradually bringing them into the fold)

(merged into OP)

 

[Puppeteer]

While we're at it, I'll toss https://undiscoveredworlds.blogspot.com/2019/01/what-is-undiscovered-worlds.html here, submitted by Ozy in another thread. No code, but a series of blogs and screenshots of procedurally generated terrain.

 

[Vuldacon]

WildWeaze... That is a Great List of Resource.

Puppeteer... I Think Jonathon is creating some Wonderful Terrain Graphics with the procedures he is using.

 

[WildWeazel]

While we're at it, I'll toss https://undiscoveredworlds.blogspot.com/2019/01/what-is-undiscovered-worlds.html here, submitted by Ozy in another thread. No code, but a series of blogs and screenshots of procedurally generated terrain.

Maybe someday @Plotinus will drop in and show us how to generate realistic world maps with custom terrain types

 

[Lanzelot]

Using Git Like a Pro: Master-Only Workflow, Branching Strategies, and Hacks

I thought, it might be a good idea to read this, but it gives me a 404?!

 

[WildWeazel]

Ugh. These are bookmarks that I've accumulated over a long time, so there may be some broken links. I just copied them all over without checking.

 

[Quintillus]

Pretty sure I found it. Turns out it's a presentation rather than an article.

Video of that presentation:

Transcript: https://academy.realm.io/posts/360andev-savvas-dalkitsis-using-git-like-a-pro/

DuckDuckGo to the rescue - especially since the Internet Archive didn't have a copy.

So far I've been waiting for the filtered list as I'm more of a discover-things-as-I-go-through-experimentation-and-reading-official-docs-when-needed person than a read-a-bunch-about-something-first person, unless it's exceptionally good material.

Nonetheless, I did tend to bookmark a lot of links for a few years... enough that my bookmarks are kind of useless due to their number and fairly disorganized state. But I never ran out of them so I kept bookmarking! So I can commiserate with having tons of at-one-point-or-another-useful links and organizing them being the difficult part. My Civilization resource folder on my hard drive is also somewhat disorganized, although in somewhat better shape than my bookmarks.

 

[Plotinus]

Maybe someday @Plotinus will drop in and show us how to generate realistic world maps with custom terrain types

Ha, maybe if you wish hard enough!

I’m thinking I might just bung all the code up onto GitHub for anyone to tinker with, once I’m done, though much of it is not edifying.

I’ve also thought it would be interesting to try to make a Civ-style game using my terrain generation as an engine. It would be a challenge to adapt the gameplay from the traditional tile-based map to something more detailed and unpredictable, but maybe that would be half the fun.

 

[Vuldacon]

Plotinus!... Great to "see" you... and Yes, your idea would be Fun indeed and I love what you have done with Terrains

 

[Ozymandias]

@WildWeazel – Many wondrous resource links! Might I ask you to group them into categories reflecting whichever part(s) of game design / game play they reflect?

 

[Puppeteer]

https://thebookofshaders.com/

I just stumbled across this and am really liking it so far. You can edit the shader code in the book/site and get immediate feedback.

Edit: This site is so promising then so frustrating I'm starting to wonder if it's a troll. It is unfinished. What is present is great, but what it promises isn't there.

I just went through a frustrating journey of trying to build from the source because the hosted version just stops giving links or content after page 13 and there seems to be more info in the source code. But I think it is just unfinished, and all the parts that are unfinished are things I really really really want to read after experiencing what is finished, but I'm Googling around about this, and it's apparently been in this state for years now.

It's a great intro, but it basically just completely hits a brick wall when it gets to the parts I want to use.

And trying to build the site was frustrating as hell. I tend to want to build in isolation so as not to get a bunch of dependency-helled libraries on my systems. But it needs glslViewer which I couldn't make work headless in a Docker container. I finally went ahead and tried building on the Mac because I had most of what I needed, anyway, but what the project doesn't tell you that tripped me up hard for a bit is that it also expects ImageMagick and Pandoc to be present, and the error messages for that are near impossible to figure that out. I happened to know that the missing "convert" command belongs to ImageMagick from context and experience, and I had to dive into the build script to find that the other file it was missing was pandoc, and I knew from experience how that's used, too. And then I still wound up with the same result as the published website.

 

[WildWeazel]

@WildWeazel – Many wondrous resource links! Might I ask you to group them into categories reflecting whichever part(s) of game design / game play they reflect?

I am, gradually. I've also just realized that most of the ones I copied from Pocket are redirect URLs that only I can follow

 

[Ozymandias]

I've also just realized that most of the ones I copied from Pocket are redirect URLs that only I can follow

Been to Hogwarts of late, have we?

 

[WildWeazel]

Ok, I have finally checked and organized all of these links into the first post for easier browsing. There are around 150 specific resources not including all of the other open source projects and communities (ie, the last 2 sections) that I included just for reference. A good number of them are probably not all that useful for us, and I still haven't read/watched through all of them yet. Please point out any that should be added, removed, or highlighted. For the non-programmers, I recommend the sections "Game case studies & postmortems", "Civilization miscellanea", and "Game design" under "Gamedev skills & resources"