Natives Mods?

[Lady Lydia]

I did allot of changes but after i modefied the Unitinfo's.xml to make the natives more usefull the game crashes on me after 30 minutes.
I also need to find out how to make new buildings to create some more native looking buildings.

 

[Androrc the Orc]

I did allot of changes but after i modefied the Unitinfo's.xml to make the natives more usefull the game crashes on me after 30 minutes.
I also need to find out how to make new buildings to create some more native looking buildings.

What changes did you make that resulted in the crash?

 

[orlanth]

Hello Lydia and Androrc

I'm not sure what type of crash you had, but one thing to check after modding units is the Professions access for civs that have that unit. Each unit starts with a <DefaultProfession> in Civ4UnitInfos.xml. A civ obtaining these units must also have access to the corresponding <Professions> in CivilizationInfos.xml.

Here is a big set of building nif files I'd accumulated which could be good for natives, I hope these will help! (Let me know when you've downloaded & I will remove them, I'm now almost at my limit for uploaded attachments on this site )

 

[Lady Lydia]

I got the download and will check them whats usable
The chras im getting is that the screen goos black and then the game just stops.
Added Errorraport

Spoiler :

AppName: colonization.exe AppVer: 1.0.0.1 ModName: cvgamecoredll.dll
ModVer: 0.0.0.0 Offset: 000f51d2

The changes i made :

Spoiler :

<bLbDCanBecomeExpert>1</bLbDCanBecomeExpert>
<bLbDCanGetFree>0</bLbDCanGetFree>
<bLbDCanEscape>0</bLbDCanEscape>
<UnitClassUpgrades/>
<UnitAIs>
and
<iNativeLearnTime>6</iNativeLearnTime>
<iStudentWeight>1000</iStudentWeight>
<iTeacherWeight>0</iTeacherWeight>

 

[drjest2000]

A very interesting read. This discussion answered many questions I had about the native civs in Civ4Col.

I suppose a work around would to create a clone of a playable European settler with some manner of land start and specific ships that are limited to coast-hugging in the same manner that galleys are in Civ. I suppose there would have to be a king, but the native king would have to be (forgive the term) castrated and "native" Europe screen would have to be "trade only". Although on the rare occasion, a European did "go native", so perhaps a basic colonist or a few specialist.

Well, it's a pipe dream. I know I don't have the skills to do all the "under the hood" coding to pull that off.

I suppose unless I spend the rest of my retirement learning how to code, I'll just have to accept that there will never be a real, viable playable native civ in Civ4Col. I guess it beats fishing.

 

[orlanth]

It's not impossible or a pipe dream.. The natives in 2071 actually are fully playable, initially done using just XML; and only later I made some very limited DLL modifications to inactivate a few hardcoded functions in the vanilla game that try to cripple them. See post #17-18 for a brief summary of what can be done; it's quite possible to make playable natives if you're truly interested.

 

[drjest2000]

Thanks for replying Orlanth. I've re-read the posts you mentioned.

I'm refreshing myself on the fine art of crashing modding Colonization. >_<

I am truly interested. I want the outcome to be less certain. And I have about a year to kill before I can buy a tweaked out 64 bit system, so I see a LOT of Civ4Col in my future. I guess it means I'll have to relearn coding again too.

...Somewhere in this head of mine there is a memory of how to write, compile and debug (probably under the mountains of porn and cigarette butts).

 

[orlanth]

Sounds cool, I'm glad to see more interest in playable natives in mods The basic steps I took were:

Edit Civilizationinfos.xml to set <bPlayable>1 , and give them access to a variety of buildings and units. You can use a combination of creating useful native-specific units/buildings/professions and allow them access to some of the standard ones. I also added a "King" for each Native civ to allow access to the Europe screen. But as Androrc mentioned it may be possible to avoid this by editing the DLL.

I think playable natives definitely work best with Kailric's Inventor feature, since you don't want them to access all the standard unit/buildings from the start without effort. With this you can let natives access a limited set of the standard units/buildings gradually with learning & trade with the Europeans. You can also create Native knowledge that's unique to them, this was planned in RaR with unplayable natives but unfortunately not completed.

Later on I tried some limited DLL edits to inactivate a few vanilla functions that try to cripple the natives, though my coding knowledge is limited If you're interested feel free to take a look over the 2071 source code which is included with the mod. I had eventually wanted to try making an update the 2071 mod based on RaR, although I don't know whether some RaR features could cause problems with that and it would require merging in the Tech modcomp as well.

 

[orlanth]

One more tip I forgot to add, whenever you give natives access to a unit, make sure they also have access to that unit's default profession. That caused me crashes that took awhile to figure out but were an easy fix when found

 

[drjest2000]

Thank you for the tip, orlanth! I was trying to figure out what was causing the crashes >_<