Queries - Hex, True 3D, and Height-maps

[Mountain-God]

Toward those in the community who have some programming skills, and familiarity with the SDK...

The queries essentially revolve around modifying the game at something like, perhaps, it's fundament.

1. Re: Hex
While the square is currently fixed as the unit of space in Civ4, I'm wondering at the possibility changing this to hex. Certainly it's possible - but how realistic is that possibility?

2. Re: True 3D and Height-maps
Currently 3D in Civ4 is essentially a gimic - however that word is spelt.

But what of the possibility of overlaying the movement and placement regime - in the form of squares or hex - onto a 3d terrain - perhaps formed via height-map.

NOTES
Certainly, all of these are possibilities. Remember that Firaxis has utilised the Gamebryo engine - essentially only designing the game, then AI and a few art assets. All these are possible, but do we have access to that level of the game programming? Is the AI, for instance, designed in such a way as to depend on the current structure of the movement and placement regime? Would shifting to hex or height-map generated terrain break the ai's ability to reason movement?

 

[Dale]

There is no access to the GameBryo engine. So none of those is possible.

 

[Gerikes]

Toward those in the community who have some programming skills, and familiarity with the SDK...

The queries essentially revolve around modifying the game at something like, perhaps, it's fundament.

1. Re: Hex
While the square is currently fixed as the unit of space in Civ4, I'm wondering at the possibility changing this to hex. Certainly it's possible - but how realistic is that possibility?

Not very realistic.

2. Re: True 3D and Height-maps
Currently 3D in Civ4 is essentially a gimic - however that word is spelt.

But what of the possibility of overlaying the movement and placement regime - in the form of squares or hex - onto a 3d terrain - perhaps formed via height-map.

...

Would shifting to hex or height-map generated terrain break the ai's ability to reason movement?

Note: This is from vanilla perspective, but this is probably true of WL:

The "height maps" are controlled by the plot's type, of which there are only four (water, land, hill, peak). These four are hard-coded and adding more is impossible. The height of the plot is determined by the height maps of these four lands located in the art directory. Now, there are a bunch of height-maps for each one, but I don't think you can manipulate them to give different heights like you'd want.

Now, that doesn't mean that you can't have a bunch of different "heights" programmed into the plots that affect gameplay. It's just that there's no way to easily show these heights graphically unless you would settle for four different heights (basically, you'd be getting two different types of "elevation". The best you could probably do is show the height on mouse-over. Your cross-world height-map would probably just be a fractal generated during the map generation script, but the best it could do is say that it's part of one of four plot types graphically.

And of course, if you make heights programmed into the plots, how those heights affect gameplay would have to be programmed into the ai for the ai to take advantage (disadvantage?) of it. This probably wouldn't be so hard, as you'd probably would just be changing things like defensive bonus, sight bonus and movement penalties, which are already mostly taken into account by the AI. More advanced gameplay changes (every walk into a high-level altitude makes your units lose health) would require actual AI programming

 

[Mountain-God]

thanks for the input