Merging Features from BUG / BULL / BAT / TAURUS [ACCEPTED]

raystuttgart

Civ4Col Modder
Joined
Jan 24, 2011
Messages
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Location
Stuttgart, Germany
Hi guys,

there are a pretty nice features in BUG / BULL / BAT.
Some of them would also work really great in WTP.

I e.g. really like the "Dot-Map" for city planning or the "Field of Views Slider" for zooming.
(There is e.g. also a "Build-Road-To-Location"-Feature in there if I saw it correctly.)

Would there be a volunteer to take a look and try to merge some of that stuff in WTP? :please:

Edit:
To be clear, I am not talking about merging complete BUG / BULL / BAT.
I am just talking about selectively merging one or the other nice feature it offers.

Screenshot of "Dot-Map":
Spoiler :


 

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@f1rpo

I have to admit that I never really played any Civ4BTS mods.
(I played one game of Vanilla directly after release and then turned to other games.)

Thus, I also do not really know the great features of BUG / BULL / BAT.
Do you have BUG / BULL / BAT included in your mod CivAdvanced?

Could you give us a short list of your favourite features they offer?
Which are the best quality of life improvements they include?

I would not like to merge the complete package due to effort and compatibility
But maybe a few selected features / quality of life improvements may be worth it.

Thanks in advance,
ray
 
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I have to admit that I never really played any Civ4BTS mods.
(I played one game of Vanilla directly after release and then turned to other games.)

Thus, I also do not really know the great features of BUG / BULL / BAT.
Do you have BUG / BULL / BAT included in your mod CivAdvanced?
Playing mods have not taught me which features are provided to modders, meaning I'm at a loss in this regard too. Looks like the modding tutorial link is a dead link to sourceforge and apart from that there is little information to why modders would want to use any of those packages.
 
It worries me a little that I don't even know what you mean by "build road to location." I've launched Col without mods to at least refresh my memory a little bit – a route-to mission obviously exists in Col ...

Dot Map and FoV slider sound good to me. Not sure how you could let players hide the slider. (I don't think most players use the slider much once they've found a value that they're comfortable with.) In BUG, the slider can be toggled on and off on the BUG options screen; maybe a key combination could be used instead. The options screen might be the biggest single contribution of BUG; it's great to have a (easily extensible) place for any non-gameplay options. (But adopting the BUG options screen would veer into attempting a full merge.) Oh, and the slider widget is a bit glitch-y, probably an issue in the EXE; after moving the slider, it'll often slip a little bit to the left or to the right. Platy's UI uses plus/ minus buttons instead, not sure if that's better.

About all components of BUG, there's a question of how tightly they're coupled with the core of the mod. No problem there with the FoV slider probably; I think all the changes are in CvMainInterface.py, tagged "BUG - field of view" comments. The Dot Map has more dependencies; the main file is Contrib\CvStrategyOverlay.py.

The most essential BUG features to me deal with diplomacy and are probably not applicable to Col ("Civ4lerts" about available tech trades and changes in worst-enemy status, un-hidden AI diplo modifiers, customizable scoreboard). Also some hover text added by BULL here and there that accomplishes more for me than some of the overblown Advisor screens. But I suppose that's specific to BtS, and WtP presumably has already made its own improvements to game text.

Don't know what the status of Colopedia is in WtP; but overhauling that (possibly based on Sevopedia, PlatyPedia or the revised Civilopedia in Realism Invictus) sounds like a big project. Given the greater focus on the economy in Col, one would think that the Customizable Domestic Advisor from BUG could be useful, but I suspect that the challenges in managing a network of colonies are too different. City managment in BtS is largely about population growth and the current production item.

Maybe the Reminders component? (Lets the player send a note to him- or herself that'll appear after a set number of turns.) Don't know how easy that would be to adopt. Or Tick Marks on certain progress bars (though the research bar is the one where that matters most in BtS). The Sentry Heal mission (wake up when fully healed or when enemies approach) could be nice to have, but the.BULL implementation isn't multiplayer-compatible, and my own implementation in AdvCiv (change id "advc.004l" in code comments and manual) consists of quite a number of changes scattered across CvSelectionGroup.cpp and other parts of the DLL.

For documentation that lists BUG features, you may want to consult the "Included Mods" section of the help file that comes with BUG. That only covers BUG 3.5. BUG 3.6 to 4.5 and BULL are covered by changelog text files. I'm attaching the BAT 4.1 credits text file because I can't find it (separately) online, but I don't think that'll be very relevant – BAT doesn't add much in terms of usability. (There is some confusion about this because v4.4 and v1.2 are the final "official" releases of BUG and BULL respectively, but BUG 4.5 and BULL 1.3 are included in BAT.)

Here's a short post of mine about UI additions in K-Mod. So K-Mod includes BUG but, for the most part, not BULL. Having started from K-Mod, AdvCiv was in the same place. Over the years, I've added perhaps half of the BULL features, usually with adjustments of my own. I've also added stuff that I came up with, but I don't really think any of that is worth porting.
 

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Actually Taurus Mod of @f1rpo might also have some nice stuff to be merged for WTP. :think:
(It seems as if it contains all the best things from BUG / BULL / BAT.)

But like always it needs somebody motivated to invest time for it and also having the capacity to actually implement. :dunno:
(Currently I have other things much higher up in my priority list, i.e. new features that are actually impacting gameplay.)
 
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With Taurus, the bulk of my work was on save-compatibility with other UI-only mods (working around mod name checks in the EXE) and the smaller resource bubbles (already discussed in the context of Civ4Col here). Apart from that, it's pretty much just a few additional options (as the screenshots show) for camera distance and scroll speed and for hiding some distracting messages (e.g. "press ESC to exit the city screen") that might not even exist in Col.
 
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