PowerBar (v2.0.0+) for Civ III v1.29f

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Get a clue.
Power Bar has been around after first few weeks into Civ 3 original came out.
I have PTW.... Civ3 original ... everything...., in fact, (even Pirate! made by Sid Meier a LOOOOOOOOOOOONG time ago...)
But Power Bar's right to exist does not just go away because "Oh! Look, people are playing an expansion, and the trainer from the original version is ruining all the fun!!!"
If the whatever "Sync" problem occurs or anything like that happens.... too bad... Firaxis should be notified, and come up with something and can make these Multiplayer games work. I mean... a player can NOT come up with 99999 gold in one turn, or 5 seconds... or maybe 20 advances in 5 seconds, or all the railroads and upgrades in a snap. If the monitoring of these situations cannot be handled through programming, then I would suggest that Firaxis start hire more better, if not fire the incompetent, programmers.

But please do not JUMP into this thread that has existed long before the press release of PTW, and start blaming or raise your voice... well, "LETTERS" in this case...at Spider....

I do not know programming. I love Civ 3, Civ 2, and Civ 1.... I love all Sid's games... I admire spider's programming skills and appreciate for his enthusiasm in bettering Power Bar...

I can't make a Power Bar, I admit, but I love to have a Power Bar like this around!!

I think you got the point....
 
i tried to use PB with a multiplayer gamer and it didnt work, but then again i dont need to cheat to play my games. Maybe instead of not working on a great program like this those admins should just do their job as admins and bvan the user for cheating. Regardless i can still use the current version to check my scenario anyways and do city counts. :D
 
I think my last post was understandably misunderstood - I'm committed to users of PowerBar AND preventing use in MP. This just means I have to spend the time to make sure PB doesn't work in MP before I release the long overdue next version...which means a longer delay before the next version release. Thanks for those suggestions along those lines and the positive feedback.

As far as status, the next release needed another delay anyway because I finally realized what is causing the overflow problem. At certain times PB scans a memory address array to find the location of map tiles/units/cities etc. and those addresses are 4 bytes in size. There are some 4 byte numbers that exceed (overflow) VB's Long integer (they have to handle negative numbers too). My error trapping during those scans is suffering from a case of catch-22. I'm going back through the code to fix all those instances and PB's overflow days should be done.
 
Just tried out the powerbar (3.0.9b) with PTW 1.14f and noticed that the "currently researching" section of the civ info is off by one. For example, while I was researching mapmaking it said I was researching horseback riding and while the americans and aztecs were researching the wheel, it said they were researching warrior code. In each case, the displayed tech is the one listed right after the actual tech in the index of techs displayed in the selection menu of the Civilization Advances tab of the editor, which is why I assume it's simply an index number one too high.

That was the only problem I saw in limited use. The two times I used the reveal whole map option it worked (although not for the minimap, but that's not a surprise) and the rest of the city info and terrain info seemed reasonable. I haven't tried any of the things which cause changes to cities, civs, etc, because, frankly, I don't want that much power :p One question, though. Is there any way to get the "domination progress" through the info screens like the mapstat program does? Given that it's already calculating population and terrain numbers it seems pretty easy if it's not hidden in there already; and the fact that mapstat sure seems to hate my savefiles would make it real useful, at least to me :D
 
Just a few comments:

1. We Civ3PTW Ladder Admins, do not want to limit the enjoyment of Civ for anyone.

2. We are all volunteers that manage a competitive ladder that has nearly 1000 players and 13000 matches played. The success of this ladder is due solely because we offer a framework that offers a fair environment for competitive multiplayer games.

3. There are many issues/bugs with Civ that have forced us to create many rules that otherwise would not exist. But in doing so we have remained a fair place to engage in MP games for the majority of MP community.

4. The possible existance of a program that may be able to alter even some variables in a MP game with no way of detecting it in game is a nightmare that could easily mean the calapse of our "house of cards". For this reason we have been very proactive since the first report of a possible incident with repect to Powerbar.

5. We remain dedicated to supporting Spider with his efforts to resolve this issue so that both communities will still enjoy playing Civ.

Cheers

CanuckSoldier
 
ghost1994 - see this post for details on latest version:
PowerBar Latest Version Post

Again, thanks everyone for the positive feedback. :D

pdescobar - thanks for the bug report (I had it on my fix list, but I didn't realize it may just be a simple index problem). Also, I'll add the domination status to my task list...

My focus is stabilizing the code concerning the overflow errors first, then I'll get back to adding features.
 
Just for the record, I like PowerBar so much I'd think long and hard about *not* getting a new patch for Civ3 before I gave up PowerBar. :) Of course I only play locally so I'm not in a huge hurry to patch either.

I love PB. It works, and works well, though I seem to suffer from that error 6 and 9 thingy, but a reboot or unloading of random programs (basically voodoo stuff, nothing consistently helps, I just jigger with it until it stays happy) usually helps eventually.

Maybe you can chat with the people that write Civ and see if you can flip a bit to indicate a 'contaminated' game, akin to a tainted kernel flag for linux. You flip a bit, they decide wether to allow it or not. Maybe a few bits to indicate different modes of limited operation, like jungle-clearing only mode(my fav use so far), etc.

And IMO I can't see how delaying PowerBar until this is resolved could help a lot (unless there's a new patch to PTW maybe) because folks will already be using PB in multiplayer if they choose to... All it will mean is that I keep jiggering with my system to get the errors 6 and 9 to go away for another round of play. :)

Of course, in the final accounting this is *your* program and time here, so *you* decide what to do. :) Maybe hold off on the 6 and 9 fix for PowerBar until Civ gets a tainted bit to allow spotting its use in multiplayer. It'll be an extra thing to tempt folks to use the newer version. :P

And I suppose on the flip side there's that maybe folks *like* having a PowerBar-driven multiplayer game, and breaking support for multiplayer and powerbar would be quite a bummer. Not a cheater kind of game, but a bum-rush kind of game where everyone knows they're all using PB. :)

Though honestly that'd be boring to me in a hurry because it'd be almost a race to see who clicks the fastest, sneaky tactics and such are out the door overall...

In recap, I hope the PB multiplayer question is resolved happily, because I love PowerBar. I appreciate the work that has gone into it, the skill and dedication needed to make it work right (and do so many things without drowning us in options!), and you even showed me that Visual Basic programs don't *have* to be clunky, unwieldy programs of dubious use. :)

Thanks again, SpiderZord! :)
 
I'm working on finding all the memory offsets (the list has grown long over time) for PTW 1.21 AND completing the updates to fix the errors...stay tuned ;)
 
Powerbar is a great tool and I for one greatly appreciate the work the original developer put into it and the efforts that SpiderZord is making. :)

Thanks
 
I look forward to getting the powerbar version that will work with Civ3 1.29 & PTW 1.21. What a great concept. I was so disapointed that they had removed the cheat menu from this game. I just bought the 2 games 2 days ago(CIV3&PTW). I was ready to return it, but I read this forum and I decided to give powerbar a try. It hasn't worked yet, due to the versions of the game I'm running. Keep up the good work.

I have windows xp, will that be a problem?

Also, where do I find the newest version that you will come out with? right here in this forum?


thanks,
Ben E Gas
 
I got powerbar working with Civ3 1.29. It is great!! I can't wait for the version that works with PTW. I don't condone the use of powerbar for online use, but it is great for learning the game or letting your imagination run wild against the computer.


thanks,
Ben E. Gas
 
do u load this powerbar before the game or after?
if u load before civ 3 takes up the whole screen.
how u going to load it then?
 
i double click on the powerbar icon and then I load civ3. Then I load my saved game. Then, Click on the load button in powerbar & it works fine.

--If you want to open powerbar after you open civ3, you can do that also. I have a button on my keyboard that looks like the windows logo (in the bottom left hand corner of the keyboard). After you load civ3, press that windows button and you can get into your start menu to locate where you saved the powerbar .exe. Both methods have worked for me. Just make sure your powerbar is the right version for the version of civ3 you're running.
 
I personally am a big fan of the Powerbar. In fact, I'd probably not play Civ3(&PTW) as often if I didn't have it. Quite simply because we noticed that AI cheats like a mother****** when you try to do it without using the Powerbar.

It also helps to speed the game along since the one thing I am not at all fond of in the game is the number of "years" that pass in just the short movement of say a worker or a settler, or even a sea vessel. But that's just the way I like to play the game.

I recently installed the PTW 1.21f patch before I realized that it rendered the powerbar inoperable (run time errors).

We await anxiously for the newest updated version of the Powerbar. We do not, and have no inention, or playing a MP game online. We, being my wife and I.
 
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