No problem at all man, I recognize the amount of work that must have been involved to accomplish such a task and respect it very much. I also struggle with depression, having been diagnosed a few years back. I take a very low dose antidepressant and it was literally life changing; I had tried almost everything prior to succumbing to taking meds, and nothing worked anywhere near as well. Consider it if your quality of life is being impacted, seriously my man. Remember that modding is an art, as is game development itself.
Issues like that, with no clear solution, are very frustrating indeed and often require a bit of soul searching to push past. With motivation in the air, I can totally understand your position. However, considering such high quality of work, it would be an absolute shame to leave it at that; I know that myself, and I'm sure there are others, would be more than happy to oblige in getting it fixed and working perfectly again
I genuinely believe that this mod, in combination with a select few others, creates a Civilization experience superior in enjoyment to any others currently in existence, including civ 6 and the aforementioned VP. There's some individual mods like it, which can be hodge podged together to get close, but it's nowhere near the level of polish and there is no interaction between the individual elements.
All I really did was pulled everything related to the new happiness system out of VP and dropped it into its own independent mod, such that, if loaded after EA, it replaces the vanilla happiness system with VPs. All the UI work and functional aspects are completely done, but the system can't calculate the new city needs without the required methods in the CBP dll, so you just end up with what visually *appears* to be the VP happiness system, in full working order, but it's actually still just operating off of the vanilla happiness calculations. If those methods were there to be called, it would function. Alternatively, I could write some new methods to calculate the city needs entirely in Lua, but I feel like there's a reason the cbp developers wrote those functions into the dll. I do believe, however, that with just those couple of methods added to the EA dll, it would work well enough as a foundation to fully incorporate/merge with the EA subsystems. During the process of extracting the happiness system out of VP, I became quite familiar with how it calculates and modifies the new empire needs variables, and everything aside from the base number is done on the Lua side. All policy/building/pantheon effects etc. So, when you load my stripped version over EA, the only thing it throws error for are the base calculations, but the modifiers all still work.
EA Lite, imo has all the features needed to still topple the throne of VP, and it's what I decided on using as a base. While the currency feature of full EA is very neat, the significantly better performance and compatibility of Lite made it the winner in my eyes. JFDs Tribes is also weirdly unstable IME and, while another very neat feature I'd rather have than not, it isn't worth the current instability (though it could just have been caching issues, I still don't know lmao). VP is great as a razor-balanced 'competitive' Civilization experience, and the AI improvements are nothing to be scoffed at, but it's still shackled by their refusal to actually expand upon mechanics, instead of perpetually polishing them with infinitely finer grit. It makes decisions a bit more impactful, but they're still the same decisions, just adds more thought required prior. There is much more room for emergent and diverse gameplay in EA. In short, I feel like EA was overshadowed by VP and hasn't gotten anywhere near the praise or attention it deserves!
If you're willing to share the source, I'd be happy to at least get it compiling again and squash any bugs that pop up. I will say, however, that EA Lite in its current state seems very stable after a few minor Lua fixes, I've played a few Quick speed games to completion with less than a handful of crashes (and I think those were actually due to me accidentally running out of storage space and not realizing, lol). I have everything needed for real time debugging etc, just let me know
I'd do it myself, but obviously I don't have access to the EA source etc. Many thanks for your time spent developing this mod, imo it's better than both VP and Civ VI, and would be *perfect* with the localized happiness system from CBP.
