Mutiple maps download Beta:

[JosEPh_II]

Hydro,

On your Mars screenie some of the blank could be filled in with the Asteroid belt, helping to connect the different areas. And also making "space islands"/large asteriods that could be used very similarly to the Island map. Same idea, blank space is sea on island map but "space" on Mars map. But I bet you've already thought that out.

JosEPh

 

[Hydromancerx]

Hydro,

On your Mars screenie some of the blank could be filled in with the Asteroid belt, helping to connect the different areas. And also making "space islands"/large asteriods that could be used very similarly to the Island map. Same idea, blank space is sea on island map but "space" on Mars map. But I bet you've already thought that out.

JosEPh

That's the idea if we are going to relative scale. For instance if we are not replicating exact sizes we could split up one map into this ...



Thus you would only need 3 maps; Earth, Solar System and Galactic.

Each could have their own unique terrains and even have the moons be randomized so you don't always get the same type of terrain for the 2 gas giant moons.

 

[Epona222]

I'm so excited about this that I'm practically hyperventilating, then I wonder whether I'm going to need a massive hardware upgrade in order to run it

I am in two minds about filling in blank space with asteroids - in terms of realism there is an awful lot of space in our solar system with very little in it in terms of landmass, great distances between planets and even asteroids. On the other hand there is the gameplay element where I want stuff to explore, so would not be adverse to a less realistic interpretation of where asteroids are.

However much I value realism in games, gameplay wins every time and I'd rather see fictional asteroids (represented like islands on the Earth maps) or reduced scale than have blank spaces, I don't expect a recreation of an accurate scale model of the solar system because most of it would just have nothing in it whatsoever, and however realistic that might be I don't actually want large areas of nothing in a game.

Edit to add: Hydromancerx posted just before me so I didn't see it before typing this reply, and I agree with his post.

 

[code99]

I'm not against the multiple maps at all, its the only way to do the Galactic Era, and a great advance in modding cIV. I am against frivolous uses of it, such as City view maps, which have little if any gameplay value.

The Underground map does sound good though.

Well im not against it either, infact im as interested as everyone else. My only concern is that if this makes the game crash more due to MAFs and this sort of things, it might not be worth it.
Well, at least to my eyes anyway.

 

[DRJ]

Well im not against it either, infact im as interested as everyone else. My only concern is that if this makes the game crash more due to MAFs and this sort of things, it might not be worth it.
Well, at least to my eyes anyway.

That's why I said we should have a multimap test feature so the people playtesting this could report what happens on their machines so we would know what goes and what does not go for majority of players (what does a feature bring if it crashes with 90% of players?). Personally I like the galaxy map, not so much the solar system as pictured above. I dislike to have all of those planets close together...(what would that look like zooming out?) better moon or/and mars only and asteroids but that's only my taste.
Actually I do not think many blanks are bad, as the more blanks the less hardware requirements, right? It's not that I haven't got a good machine (finally I do) but as long as we are stuck with 3 GB...

 

[Hydromancerx]

@DRJ

It might not even work the way I said or even if it did be too much of a bother. If that is the case where its better just to have Earth, Moon, Mars and Galactic Maps all the same size then that's what we will have to do despite them not being the same size in real life.

My hope is eventually the multi-maps modders figure out to make them different sizes and we can then do them the right size but still separate. Basically planing for stuff that has not been invented yet (which is how most of C2C is planned).

 

[ls612]

@DRJ

It might not even work the way I said or even if it did be too much of a bother. If that is the case where its better just to have Earth, Moon, Mars and Galactic Maps all the same size then that's what we will have to do despite them not being the same size in real life.

My hope is eventually the multi-maps modders figure out to make them different sizes and we can then do them the right size but still separate. Basically planing for stuff that has not been invented yet (which is how most of C2C is planned).

I actually think that we should leave it for now like we originally intended, ie to have a seperate map for the moon and for Mars, and add an impassable terrain as a filler.

That impassable terrain could have very similar graphics to the graphic for unrevealed terrain, thus making it visually pretty, in addition to being a good gameplay mechanic.

 

[rightfuture]

Can't wait to see this. Awesome gentlemen

 

[Hanny]

Hydro

Do you intend that all maps will be in play at the same time, or that you move from one to another, so that for instance the first 5 civs to make it off planet bemoe the core civs for the new map, and the map they cam from is scrubbed of civs/units terrian etc, so as to again speed up play.

 

[strategyonly]

Basically planing for stuff that has not been invented yet (which is how most of C2C is planned).

true how true, but yeah, it works great. Because of the Great modders and help from the Community.

 

[DRJ]

Yes, so true - and although - as Sartre philosophized - 'existence precedes essence', I am tempted to argue that in the case of C2C the anticipation of its essence of existence is preceding the existence itself... if you fade out the pre-existence of great modders and community, that is, of course.

 

[Hydromancerx]

Hydro

Do you intend that all maps will be in play at the same time, or that you move from one to another, so that for instance the first 5 civs to make it off planet bemoe the core civs for the new map, and the map they cam from is scrubbed of civs/units terrian etc, so as to again speed up play.

All at the same time. You should be starting to explore the moon in modern era.

 

[Koshling]

Iapetus needs an alien statue!

 

[DRJ]

All at the same time. You should be starting to explore the moon in modern era.

Yeah but make sure that it would be very expansive to have units on the moon - so you could limit the early expansion by (maintenance/turn per moonunit=x% of overall commercial on income/turn of player), which to overcome would require to get more economy and better tech than 60's style techs to then expand with industries or steady colonies there (I guess I have to make my homework regarding that era as I actually don't know how many ideas have already been up for this!)

 

[ls612]

That would be nice...

I ran a test using task manager on how much more memory this mod uses, and came up with these results:

• After initially allocating the map objects, the game's memory increased by less than 1K bytes for a map.
• However, after allocating the plots (on a standard size map) for one map, it increased by 1048K.
• The mod running 9 seperate standard size maps used 43,000K more memory than a vanilla BTS game with a standard size map.

Of course this was also at the beginning of the game, so as the game progresses and improvements are built, I would guess the memory difference would increase.

So it does appear to be a substantial increase in memory usage (~301,000K versus ~258,000K with 9 maps), but not an overly large one. I'm guessing most mods won't be running 9 maps at the same time, so there won't be quite this much of an increase.

This was just posted on the Parallel Maps modcomp thread. As you can see, adding 9 maps (!) increased memory usages by about 17%. According to my calculations, this means that if C2C uses 4 maps, with our start memory usage of about 800,000K that adding all these maps would make the startup memory usage about 860,000K. This seems like good news, although who knows what the numbers will look like in a developed game. Thoughts?

 

[Hydromancerx]

@Koshling and/or AIAndy

Have either of you tried it out to see if it works? If so how soon do you think a test map be included into C2C?

 

[Koshling]

@Koshling and/or AIAndy

Have either of you tried it out to see if it works? If so how soon do you think a test map be included into C2C?

I'm swamped with AI stuff. Not until at least v23 launch for me.

 

[AIAndy]

As you might have noticed, I have little time for modding at the moment (swamped in job work, writing papers and deliverables).
Once that lessens again, I'll get to this.

 

[Hydromancerx]

Thanks for the responses guys. And keep up the great work!

 

[Thunderbrd]

wow... this is really awesome to see this eventually coming around into the game! Very exciting!

One thing I'm finding in playing C2C is that the enemy is lucky if they reach modern era before being destroyed (either that or the toughness balance is against ME and I'M lucky to reach the modern era myself!) Perhaps I need to play more with revolutions to allow for some greater political evolutions to counter this effect but nevertheless, my point remains:

At some point down the line, once we start breaking out of our solar system (or perhaps even during the attempt) shouldn't we start seeing alien cultures coming into play as our new adversaries? I doubt even real world Earth will fail to globalize before we start colonizing beyond our solar system at least - and surely we'll be meeting some new adversaries once we do! How could we plan to manage this?