MapView 2.0 - Civilization 4 Editor

[Gr3yHound]

To zoom, hold BOTH the left and right mouse buttons and the spacebar down. It's a little much, but it works.

What? .. I didn't write that! Right and space, should do the job. I might add some other ways soon since this doesn't seem to be very common for a lot of you guys. I'm so used to this kind of navigation due to 3d software etc.

 

[Thorn]

Oops, nevermind! I think my mouse settings were messed up. It does work they way you describe.
I'm still playing around with this editor but here's my own wishlist so far:

1) The ability to select one of the standard game map sizes (duel, standard, huge, etc.) when creating a new map
2) The ability to add individual technologies to a Civ (also 'by era')
3) Zooming by mouse wheel
4) Visually be able to tell who owns units, cities on the screen. Maybe by color? Name? Don't know if it's even possible.

 

[Gr3yHound]

don't have much time soon but i will see what i can do whenever i find time.

1) yay, easily possible
2) what do you mean exactly? Giving all techs needed for a special era? i also thought about using the tech tree info anyway sometime.
3) yay
4) yeah, i already thought about making cities and units easier to recognize by team.

 

[illram]

Hi Gr3yhound,

I am still having problems opening map files that I have saved with the map editor. They take up 0KB as a file and cannot be loaded by civ4 BTS. Opening them with notepad and re-saving makes them makes them appear as a normal file (i.e. with 200KB or so) but they still are not readable by BTS. It says "failed to load xxxx".

Is there something I am doing wrong when saving them? I have tried to save as both vanilla WBS and BTS WBS.

 

[Gr3yHound]

hm ... basicly it doesn't matter what u chose when u save a file, it's really just the extension that makes the difference.

I never managed to have 0 kb whenever i saved a file, really don't know what's wrong.

try to scan the part until the first beginplot for obvious errors and inform me pls if you find. Mayb it's just an easy line that's missing or somethign that should usually be "NONE" is "" or so. Could you mayb attach such a file? Mayb a real pro with the wbs files can tell the error easily? ;D

edit: could it be the missing TeamID=
line in the team infos that make it crash?

 

[kevinman4404]

Greyhound, congratulations on releasing it... it works great! Admittedly, progress on my map was impossible, as I can only successfully run civ4 once after my computer restarts before it won't run, and a lot of the time it will crash during loading (because it's a big map), making it a lot of wasted effort. This will make things so much easier, and the program is really powerful. I've already made artwork for half of the 80 resources and it seems fantastic!

 

[Gr3yHound]

Nice to hear that. I hope you can save yourself some time using MapView ;D

edit: i started doing some work on better support for bts like maps that require TeamId and might have things like espionage and vasell things.

 

[Gr3yHound]

To keep you updated:
Fid some further work on Bts/Warlords support stuff and teached MapView to know about "UnitCombatType" and Promotions.

So one of the next things introduced to mapview will be the opportunity to promote units according to the mod rules.
Also created buttons for all Civ4 native units.

Also planned:
Make Pic2Map more adjustable
Make the team/player/map settings more "correct". (currently it only show "half of the truth ;P ")
Obey the TechTree when placing Techs.
Easier recognition of city/unit ownership.

Nothing else really bad happening out there? Did anyone already make some floodplains for the render engine yet? =) We could really use some

Any problems elsewhere?


And also: How is the performance? My old mapview version reaaalllllllly sucked when it came to big maps, either it crashed or it lagged like hell. How is the workflow now?

I also have a hint for you: The more you come to the right-upper corner of a map, the better the performance will be. That's how my renderign works atm. So if you really experience bad bad performance copy paste your crucial part into a smaller map, edit it and repaste it again.

 

[strategyonly]

I keep getting a plug-in error, when i try to load a map directly from the right scrooling option of the mouse?

 

[Gr3yHound]

Download and extract into your MapView directory

Problems?

Spoiler :

\[MapView Directory]\pluginData\Editor\Gui

That's where all the "Unit_*.jpg" pics should be located after extraction.

 

[Chiyochan]

if visibility cant be removed the editor will be nearly useless for cleaning maps, erasing visibility is the most time consuming task you can do in the regular World builder and it crashes it fairly easy

Bugs found: trying to delete a unit with the tile inspector crashes

 

[Gr3yHound]

if visibility cant be removed the editor will be nearly useless for cleaning maps, erasing visibility is the most time consuming task you can do in the regular World builder and it crashes it fairly easy

Bugs found: trying to delete a unit with the tile inspector crashes

Thanks a lot for your response,
response is EVERYTHING i have ;D

Okay, by Visibility you probably mean the value TeamReveal?! I also judged that as important and have some work going on there, it's just a little tricky since the user has to "jump into someone's eyes". If you mean that, i'll be cleary encuraged to get something going as soon as possible.

But what would be the most important factor?
a) Make everyone see nothing? (somethinbg like "reset map visibility to 0") (or vice versa: "everyone can see everything")
b) Make a certain team "blind"?
c) be totally free in defining fields revealed to teams
(sure you want c, but since i want to please you as fast as possible, what is the thing you prefer the most?)


And yep, i made some misstakes with the tile inspector. I'm not 100% sure what caused it but i think i'm on the trace. Would be great if you could post ways "to crash the tile inspector" so i really get it fixed if needed. (just attach files if you need to)

 

[Chiyochan]

It shouldn't be that hard to just check the plot to see if it has a reveal on it, with a view for each team, but I would be content with a kill everything button like every other feature has.

 

[Gr3yHound]

It shouldn't be that hard to just check the plot to see if it has a reveal on it, with a view for each team, but I would be content with a kill everything button like every other feature has.

I don't 100'% understand what this means.

But it looks a lot like we would talk the same language so i'll just explain what my current idea is:

You can take every teams position and look throught the teams eyes. Everything black will be unrevealed, everything normal will be revealed. Then you can paint the visible/invisble areas with your mouse.

That's how i'd do it now.

 

[Chiyochan]

I guess i explained it as a programmer would, but yes you essentialy said the same thing, if you want to make it that detailed it would be great, but like i said, I would be content with a button that just removed all teamreveals

 

[Gr3yHound]

I keep getting a plug-in error, when i try to load a map directly from the right scrooling option of the mouse?

I'm always having a hard time understanding your posts. Could you please give more detail about your problem?

I guess i explained it as a programmer would, but yes you essentialy said the same thing, if you want to make it that detailed it would be great, but like i said, I would be content with a button that just removed all teamreveals

Lost in translation, i just didn't understood what the sentence meant.

 

[strategyonly]

OK, when you right click on the mouse, there is an option there for MapView, under Open With .... then i am on a map and try it and it comes up Plug-in error. Then Microsoft send or dont send message for errors also. Then the mapview itself shows up but nothing is there with it, thats about as plain as i can get it.

 

[Gr3yHound]

OK, when you right click on the mouse, there is an option there for MapView, under Open With .... then i am on a map and try it and it comes up Plug-in error. Then Microsoft send or dont send message for errors also. Then the mapview itself shows up but nothing is there with it, thats about as plain as i can get it.

Ahh, that's what you mean. You can't use MapView to open *.wbs files like that yet. At the moment you need to load them inside the application.

 

[Gr3yHound]

The TeamReveal Plugin is almost ready. Atm you can clear the whole map from teamreveal info and also view and paint team specific team reveal.

It doesn't interfer the with the RevealMap boolean from the team settings.

 

[Faille]

Is there a guide somewhere to making a map from scratch using mapview? Took me a bit of fiddling with the save in notepad to get it to actually run.

Also, mapview seems to hitch a lot and drop update when laying tiles or moving / zooming. I usually have to click on the default tab and back to the map tab to try and fix it. Is there a solution to it? Is it due to using Vista64?