Is there a primer for map editing?

[RobinDude]

Hi there. I've been playing Civ on my Amiga emulator for a bit now, and realize I'd like to fiddle around with maps at this point. Is there a description somewhere of how Civ 1 stored the map data so I can alter it? I tried using Cheat Engine on the emulator to see what changed when I altered a specific square back and forth between irrigated and not, and it led me to find a value for that square. But when I changed it around a lot and looked at that square, all that seemed to happen is that the specific square was either irrigated or not. Kinda confused.
As I write this, it occurs to me that perhaps it is an array of bits that controls whether a specific square is irrigated or not, which says nothing about what the square under it actually is (terrain type). Which would be... weird, but explicable I suppose.

 

[divec]

Are you aware of jcived? It's an open-source civ1 map editor. https://sourceforge.net/projects/jcived

Edit: I see from another thread you already know about jcived, so ignore me!

 

[RobinDude]

I am aware of it, now. Wasn't when I wrote this.
The reason I ask is that I tend to like doing things myself. Also, if I can figure out how it's stored in memory, I can use Cheat Engine to change it on the first turn. Or change it on the fly.

 

[tupi]

.map files are compressed, at least in dos version. So it's not so easy to edit them without some decompression tool. You can learn about how they are compressed from JCivED source code, I guess...

There's a very small chance that data is stored in Amiga version the exactly same way as in dos version. So, if it is .sve and .map files, I think you should try to open it with JCivED. At least out of curiosity.

And about RAM editing... You can still use JCivED for better understanding. For example, on improvements map 0x1 is a city, 0x2 is irrigation, 0x4 is a mine and 0x8 is road. Probably Amiga has same values.