ASB central
Chieftain
- Joined
- Jan 14, 2009
- Messages
- 9
hi, I'm a long time civver first time poster.
Anyways I finally got around to getting civ 4 and BTS and have been playing with the ROM 2 mod cuz I like lots of different units/techs and I think that the bigger the map the better, however upon playing on the giant and gigantic map sizes I ran into slowing down and crashing. After reading in here I noticed it's because of a problem with the game code and it is related to our computers not being able to handle such a large 3d environment, and no matter how powerful a computer is you will eventually run into problems. For instance I am running a quad core intel with 3 gigs of ram and an nvidia geforce with about 750 megs of vram, so my machine should have no problem even with a gigantic map, but it does.
Anyways I was wondering, about doing a mod that works around this by in stead of increasing the number of tiles, it in stead would simply make the tiles "bigger" by dividing them into 4 sub tiles. So you would still have a one grassland plot but you could build 4 farms on it or 2 farms and 2 cottages, and it would take 2 moves for units to cross them. In essence you wouldn't be increasing the amount of 3d geometry(I'm guessing the cause of the problem) but simply increasing the number of different kinds of ground textures, and also throwing extra improvement models on them. In short the mod would allow players to play on maps that are effectively 4 times as large while maintaining the same number of tiles as a regular sized map, it would only make tiles look and "behave" like they are 4 tiles,
Now I have divided the mod into several sub sections and grouped them according to how important they are with the first being the most important and the last I could live with not having. So please let me know the gist of what has to be done for these things and the feasability of them also.
1. Allowing cities to be placed 1 tile apart (I'm guessing a relatively simple thing to do by editing a rule in an xml file)
2. being able to put multiple improvements on the same tile, kind of like having road and farm but allowing 4 farms, or 2 farms and 2 cottages, I'm guessing that this is also a relatively simple change involving of editing tile bonuses.
3. visibly making the tiles look like they have been divided into 4 by shrinking improvements/cities/units so that they only occupy one quadrant of a tile and allowing you to see all 4 seperate things on the tile at once. I know that the shrinking thing should be easy, and I believe that some mods already do this, as well as showing 4 seperate improvements on a tile should also be simple by simply getting the game to acknowledge that there are multiple improvements it will visibly show 4 of them or 3 or 2.
4. Getting units to treat tiles like they are actually 4 by getting them to move from one quadrant of a tile to another before moving to the next tile. I know the animation part should be simple, but getting the game to behave accordingly will probably be trickier.
5. As per above, but with combat so that unit A at the southwest corner will not fight unit B on the southeast corner until it is told to move to the southeast corner. Again the animation should be doable, but the actual game mechanics issue is a whole other ball game, although if #4 works then this should be doable as well.
6. Getting roads to work on a quadrant by quadrant basis as opposed to a tile by tile basis.
7. Would it be possible to get a tile to act like it is 4 different tiles? as in a peat bog, a grassland and 2 tundra? And then using that to allow according improvements/penalties? This is probably the most difficult modification in the bunch
now like I said #1 is most important and #7 I wont die if I can't do. So if I couldn't change the movement and combat dynamics but could do pretty much everything else I would take that, I actually have been wanting to speed up unit movement anyways so if infantry can cross 2 spaces in a turn that would be fine with me.
P.S. also as a seperate feature of the same mod I was thinking of making it so that workers can be used to add hammers to city production, so not a one time "hurry" command like with caravans or great people but actually contributing to the cities industrial output. Also I would like to make this directly cost gold or increase the maintenance of the city, this would be cheaper than the "hurry with gold" option but be hard to get 1 turn builds without large numbers of workers. I'd also like to ask you guys advice on this as well.
Thanks in advance.
Anyways I finally got around to getting civ 4 and BTS and have been playing with the ROM 2 mod cuz I like lots of different units/techs and I think that the bigger the map the better, however upon playing on the giant and gigantic map sizes I ran into slowing down and crashing. After reading in here I noticed it's because of a problem with the game code and it is related to our computers not being able to handle such a large 3d environment, and no matter how powerful a computer is you will eventually run into problems. For instance I am running a quad core intel with 3 gigs of ram and an nvidia geforce with about 750 megs of vram, so my machine should have no problem even with a gigantic map, but it does.
Anyways I was wondering, about doing a mod that works around this by in stead of increasing the number of tiles, it in stead would simply make the tiles "bigger" by dividing them into 4 sub tiles. So you would still have a one grassland plot but you could build 4 farms on it or 2 farms and 2 cottages, and it would take 2 moves for units to cross them. In essence you wouldn't be increasing the amount of 3d geometry(I'm guessing the cause of the problem) but simply increasing the number of different kinds of ground textures, and also throwing extra improvement models on them. In short the mod would allow players to play on maps that are effectively 4 times as large while maintaining the same number of tiles as a regular sized map, it would only make tiles look and "behave" like they are 4 tiles,
Now I have divided the mod into several sub sections and grouped them according to how important they are with the first being the most important and the last I could live with not having. So please let me know the gist of what has to be done for these things and the feasability of them also.
1. Allowing cities to be placed 1 tile apart (I'm guessing a relatively simple thing to do by editing a rule in an xml file)
2. being able to put multiple improvements on the same tile, kind of like having road and farm but allowing 4 farms, or 2 farms and 2 cottages, I'm guessing that this is also a relatively simple change involving of editing tile bonuses.
3. visibly making the tiles look like they have been divided into 4 by shrinking improvements/cities/units so that they only occupy one quadrant of a tile and allowing you to see all 4 seperate things on the tile at once. I know that the shrinking thing should be easy, and I believe that some mods already do this, as well as showing 4 seperate improvements on a tile should also be simple by simply getting the game to acknowledge that there are multiple improvements it will visibly show 4 of them or 3 or 2.
4. Getting units to treat tiles like they are actually 4 by getting them to move from one quadrant of a tile to another before moving to the next tile. I know the animation part should be simple, but getting the game to behave accordingly will probably be trickier.
5. As per above, but with combat so that unit A at the southwest corner will not fight unit B on the southeast corner until it is told to move to the southeast corner. Again the animation should be doable, but the actual game mechanics issue is a whole other ball game, although if #4 works then this should be doable as well.
6. Getting roads to work on a quadrant by quadrant basis as opposed to a tile by tile basis.
7. Would it be possible to get a tile to act like it is 4 different tiles? as in a peat bog, a grassland and 2 tundra? And then using that to allow according improvements/penalties? This is probably the most difficult modification in the bunch
now like I said #1 is most important and #7 I wont die if I can't do. So if I couldn't change the movement and combat dynamics but could do pretty much everything else I would take that, I actually have been wanting to speed up unit movement anyways so if infantry can cross 2 spaces in a turn that would be fine with me.
P.S. also as a seperate feature of the same mod I was thinking of making it so that workers can be used to add hammers to city production, so not a one time "hurry" command like with caravans or great people but actually contributing to the cities industrial output. Also I would like to make this directly cost gold or increase the maintenance of the city, this would be cheaper than the "hurry with gold" option but be hard to get 1 turn builds without large numbers of workers. I'd also like to ask you guys advice on this as well.
Thanks in advance.
