Possible Future Direction (personal view)

[masaykh]

Will it be good to store game data in sqllite (or other DB format), i mean civilipedia, terrain, resources, units and other data used ?

many xml files used in civ4 for this cant be efficent, are they?

and one question - i already asked this - but i ask again - is it too hard to make civ4 to use sqllite? using python - it will free some memory that used presently for storage of xml data and make things faster.

 

[AIAndy]

Will it be good to store game data in sqllite (or other DB format), i mean civilipedia, terrain, resources, units and other data used ?

many xml files used in civ4 for this cant be efficent, are they?

and one question - i already asked this - but i ask again - is it too hard to make civ4 to use sqllite? using python - it will free some memory that used presently for storage of xml data and make things faster.

XML files are only used to read the data on startup into ingame data structures.
Using Sqlite ingame in a way that actually reduces the memory footprint which means using a file based sqlite database would be really, really slow and a huge effort to write.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

It is also easier to do XML modding since you can just use notepad or equivalent.

 

[ls612]

@xanhou: Are you still interested in this at all?

 

[ls612]

I have made a blog for this here and intend to promote at least some discussion about AXXXXE and what we think it should look like. Please comment either on the post (which rehashes a bunch of things and lays out my ideas for the engine) or here about what you think about it.

 

[stoferb]

I think starting fresh sounds like a good idea. Afterall it would make it possible to include things that the current civ4 game engine makes impossible or very difficult to program. A change of the resource system for example is very much needed even though C2C does a good job of working around the limitations of the civ4 engine.

 

[pepper2000]

Personally, I find the AXXXXE project very exciting. It seems to me that C2C is currently near the upper limit of what can be done with the Civ 4 engine, and I think it could benefit from an overhaul of how basic game mechanics, such as resources and population growth, function. As for graphics, I'd settle for Civ 1-quality graphics if that means multi-maps will become a reality.

What I've learned (the hard way) from my own game development projects in the past is that in order to get anywhere, one needs to start with an absolute minimum target which represents the essential features of the project, and then flesh it out.

 

[rightfuture]

I'm excited about starting to talk about this!!
Even if people have different ideas of where this should go.
I would like to think we can agree on at least some great ideas!!!!!!!!
Can we agree on getting the best people and ideas together?
Koshling started this movement - so I think we should start with him.
Let's keep people in the game!

I would love to see Koshling, ls612, and xanhou's vision of C2C 2.0 keep evolving and moving in this direction as freely, and collaboratively as possible.
I would also like us to find some way to consider the other ideas, and people, without fragmenting our plans.

The first step is to come up with a vision that you all can agree on,
and is inclusive of a diversity of ideas and people without losing focus or movement.

I think the most important thing that you can do is continue this, and development of C2C 1.0 simultaneously, as you all think of ideas.
This way, you can develop the ideas of both, and have the existing foundation and community of C2C 1.0 to work with.
(It also gives people an alternate focus/ something to shift to when they have obstacles, or burnout periods, or need breaks.)
Keep working on C2C 1.0 and shift back and forth to C2C 2.0 as inspired.

I propose the group priorities of C2C in general fall as:

1. Multi-Maps/Galactic Era - get the Cosmos in!

2. Epic Nomadic Start / Prehistoric rework (alternate team focus) - Start it EPIC!
- Including the FFH Ice Age receding glacier script,
- Stone Age events(my immediate focus, trying to get it convenient to work with.),
- An awesome beginning game introduction to new players, in the Last minor Ice Age maximum. Tutorial + highlighted epic and eventful start (you are forced to move your ancestral home since a Cave Bear or Saber Tooth tiger has threatened your tribe, etc.)
- breakdown of lithic eras- Neo, paleo, etc.
- introduction game scenario possibilities. prehistoric civilization starting locations based on recent and slight scientific evidence, Pre-flood Black Sea, Clovis Culture, DoggerLand, Lemuria & other land bridges / flooded cultures, new versions of ancient mankind - Homo floresiensis (hobbits), & Homo Denisovan.

This way - the Caveman (Epic Start) and the Cosmos, gives a more complete scope to completing the skeleton of C2C 1.0.
Whether that includes all the flesh or skin is debatable.

3. The things we want to see in C2C 1.0:
Beyond that I would like to see us keep making progress on great things like
GeoRealism Climate,
Combat Mod,
Traits,
GeoRealism Climate,
Navigable Rivers,
Weather, Plagues, etc,
as it makes sense, or breakthroughs happen.
We have to keep making progress together.
I don't want to see any of these major things forgotten or neglected.

Let's not throw out the baby (the C2C foundation as it exists) with the bathwater(Civ IV's obstacles)!!!

4. C2C NEXT - As spare and down time allows, we could all help round out the ideas for the design for the next evolution of C2C.
This way we can start the long process of building the future, and keep the foundation of C2C, without throwing out the baby.
Room for where everyone wants to be.

Can we break down the challenges and minor goals involved in moving these things forward?
This way we can come up with some constructive discussion to some of these individually focused roadblocks.

A road map can help us figure out where we all want to go next, as a team.
Koshling, ls612, xanhou, anyone?
What do see as your vision for this now?

Can we form a vision that we can all agree on,
so that Koshling, and everyone else will continue to want it to happen?
Let's put the best possible ideas together!!! I'm excited.

 

[Praetyre]

- introduction game scenario possibilities. prehistoric civilization starting locations based on recent and slight scientific evidence, Pre-flood Black Sea, Clovis Culture, DoggerLand, Lemuria & other land bridges / flooded cultures, new versions of ancient mankind - Homo floresiensis (hobbits), & Homo Denisovan.

To the best of my knowledge, there are 5 kinds of human, meaning the species or the various subspecies of Homo sapiens; Homo sapiens (also known as Cro-Magnons), who evolved at some unknown date prior to the next three (they seem like the King Charles Spaniel of biology), Homo sapiens neanderthalensis (evolved at least 600,000 years ago; their being a subspecies rather than a seperate species alltogether has only recently been confirmed by DNA evidence), Homo sapiens sapiens (what all the first settler units are called, and the only surviving hominid today), which came about around 400,000 years ago, Homo sapiens idaltu, which started around 160,000 years ago, and Homo sapiens denisovans, at least 41,000 years old.

Homo floriensis, assuming it was actually Homo sapiens floriensis, only existed in a single part of the world to my knowledge, making it's impact on C2C moot outside of alt history scenarios or different maps.

 

[masaykh]

i found one nice thing - http://www.moddb.com/games/aggressors
game that have close similrity to civ4 - maybe you cn contact author for cooperation with him?

 

[Koshling]

i found one nice thing - http://www.moddb.com/games/aggressors
game that have close similrity to civ4 - maybe you cn contact author for cooperation with him?

This is pretty interesting. It's done on ogre, and seems to essentially be more or less equivalent to the civ 4 engine in capabilities so far as I can see, but with the benefit of a more modern implementation, and possibly access to all the source. If its open source, it looks like it might provide a very nice starting point for the UI side of things we'd need.

 

[ls612]

This is pretty interesting. It's done on ogre, and seems to essentially be more or less equivalent to the civ 4 engine in capabilities so far as I can see, but with the benefit of a more modern implementation, and possibly access to all the source. If its open source, it looks like it might provide a very nice starting point for the UI side of things we'd need.

It looks like it isn't available publicly yet, meaning that there is a high likelyhood that it isn't open sourced. But the setup (mogre + Miyagi) is a good one, and it looks like what I have envisioned Alphas of AXXXXE being.

 

[rightfuture]

bump

 

[masaykh]

As Xanhou dont have time for project (that hosted and accesible from https://gm.trolls4life.com/svn/AXXXXE/ with creds anon \ empty field for password)
Is there anyone who can try to resume working in it????

it is very sad that such project stalled...

 

[RidetheSpiral23]

Not that it matters what I think but I am for moving to civ 5. Now that the expansions have been released it will only be a matter of time before even more in depth modding can begin. There are already some mods that work great. Revolutions, disease, cultural and tech diffusion. Not to mention the graphics are better and I like the hexes. Civ 4 will eventually be slowing down just like civ 3.

 

[strategyonly]

Not that it matters what I think but I am for moving to civ 5.

It wont be me, i dont like the way they have it set-up at ALL

Lua and all that newer stuff can just "take this job and sh_ve it!" Besides they dont have BUG/WoC

 

[ls612]

Not that it matters what I think but I am for moving to civ 5. Now that the expansions have been released it will only be a matter of time before even more in depth modding can begin. There are already some mods that work great. Revolutions, disease, cultural and tech diffusion. Not to mention the graphics are better and I like the hexes. Civ 4 will eventually be slowing down just like civ 3.

You are probably correct, but I'll share my experiences with modding Civ V and the C&C atmosphere over there.

Modding civ 5 is a much more simplistic affair nowadays. Most people do not make any changes to the DLL at all, even in major total conversion mods (they prefer to do it with Lua, even when that takes more time/is more complicated), and the few large mods that exist are actually quite small. There is nothing like RoM (although I'm very slowly trying to change that), and only one mod which has made extensive changes to the DLL. There are few if any programmers on the level of Koshling or AIAndy (most of them are about on my level at best, which isn't saying much) who could add major new mechanics to the game and no one has any clue how the AI works (from my looking at the source code it is far more in-depth and complicated than in civ 4).

So my analysis so far is that now with all of the modding tools and support (and assuming BNW is the last expansion) Civ 5 has far more potential than Civ 4 has, but far fewer talented people working to unlock that potential. That is not a good situation, as I think most of the good modders hated vanilla civ 5 and have ignored it since then.

There's my 2cp on the matter.

 

[Lant6]

Hello all, I've been following this thread for a while.

For a long time I've been working on my own Civ4 clone which I'd love to offer to the community.

I doubt that it is as well architectured as some of the plans mentioned in this thread, but a lot of the actual logic is implemented, its just not exposed to the GUI. Everything is written in C# and Python with asset data stored in JSON. Because it uses IronPython it means everything is easily accessible to python scripts (it was so easy I threw in a Python terminal into the GUI).

I found myself in a similar situation to a few posters to this thread - that developing GUIs and the necessary engines are hard. The backend logic of the game is easy in comparison. So instead of doing anything difficult I've opted to just use WPF. I think in the future it may be worth writing some of the GUI using Direct X (via SharpDX), and I have had an experiment with doing so, but at the time being it seems that SharpDX doesn't play nice with WPF.

Source is available at: https://bitbucket.org/MBradbury/empires
I've uploaded the latest revision to: https://bitbucket.org/MBradbury/empires/downloads/Empires.zip
The only requirement is that you have .Net framework 4.5 installed https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=30653 and Iron Python 2.7.4 https://ironpython.codeplex.com/releases/view/90087

Please branch if you want to.

Brief guide:
- First window you see open asks for the path to the Assets folder (this is my terrible version of being able to load mods), you should already be in the assets folder so just press enter
- Next you will need to open the save game included. Click File -> Load Game, then navigate up a directory and load Save.detailed.indented.json (its human readable to have a look)
- Select e0 or e1 as the empire to play as, they are the most interesting
- Make sure you do not zoom out too much or increase the window size too large (my 1080p monitor is fine at initial zoom), WPF simply can't handle that many tiles on the screen and move about

Things to do:
- Remove Fog of War: Dev -> Toggle FoW
- Change empire: Dev -> Change current empire

- Click on a tile to select it
- Use arrow keys to move about the map (it is cylindrical so pressing left or right will have you return to where you started)

- Change to e0 and navigate to AP34
- You can click and shift click units to group them
- Left click on a tile to move selected units

- Change to the Settlements tab
- Change which tiles / specialists are being worked

- Look at other tabs for information

There are a number of bugs I have seen in this version. If you end up with situations where you cannot scroll around the map or units disappear then reloading will fix it (most likely).

Finally, a number of other features have been played with, that are not included in the zip. Such as:
- implementing multiplayer with a server and JSON RPC
- AI client (that does nothing but randomly move units about)
- Pure DirectX GUI

 

[masaykh]

Anyone checked his project?

 

[Mouthwash]

Will this be made with hexes or squares?